The Ironies of Progress

“What ideas individuals attach to the word “Millennium” I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little if any misery and with intelligence and happiness improved an hundredfold; and no obstacle intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society becoming universal.”

Robert Owen, ‘Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark‘, New Year’s day, 1816.

There is a sense in which this might have been spoken yesterday by one of the politicians currently vying for air-time in the British general election campaign, where the Conservatives have promised to fund the Health Service with ‘whatever it takes’ (isn’t that just a promise begging to be broken). In fact it was spoken two hundred years ago by a forward thinking man whose social experiment now properly merits the badge of a World Heritage Site.

He was the Executive Partner at New Lanark Mills, yet the conditions he created for his workers would hardly compare favourably with the sweatshops of Asia. What, one is forced to think, were the conditions existing at the time, that twelve hour days for 10 year-olds was considered an improvement.

But within the context of his time he was a radical and extraordinary man. He established a crèche for children as soon as they could walk, thus enabling their mothers to return to work. One might be cynical about the motives of such a move, but one cannot be cynical about the establishment of the world’s first infant school, where all children attended for free for the duration of the working day. At the time, only affluent men were properly educated, their sisters’ education consisting of languages and domestic arts if they were lucky. So to spend mill profits on the education of the female children of the working classes would have appeared absurd and profligate in the extreme.

He also provided free health care for his workers and a shop where cheap goods could be purchased. The experiment drew a constant stream of visitors then as it does now, but his ideas were way ahead of their time, and like all such innovators, society in general does not approve their boldness.

The mill produced cotton, the must-have fabric of the time, which had elbowed linen and silk out of the way and thrust itself boldly into the marketplace. Originally cotton had come from Egypt or India, but in the early nineteenth century demand exploded and ironically, this bold experiment in social improvement most probably sourced its cotton from the slave fields of southern America.

However, let us not judge, for we in our turn will be judged by those who, in two hundred year’s time will look back and wonder.