ABSTRACT
The year 1815 is a critical time in history of Great Britain. The transition is gradual, and Robert Owen’s Socialism appears first as a moderate plan for philanthropic reform to be carried out by the governing classes. But for all that it contains in germ essence of his Socialist doctrine. The change was much less in the wool industry, and in different plane altogether in the metal industries, while many occupations were still hardly touched by the process of change. New Lanark, doubtless, furnished the substance of the idea on which Owen based his Plan. Owen’s Plan, in its original form, was essentially a way of providing work for the unemployed, and at the same time laying the foundations of better social order. The supersession of human labour and the forcing down of wages, Owen adds, mean the diminution of the home market; and thus the circle of distress grows ever wider.
