ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we have indicated something of the setting of the activities of Robert Owen, manufacturer, utopian, co-operator, “father of British socialism.” The industrial revolution had completely transformed British industry, greatly increasing the wealth of England and heaping high the coffers of the manufacturers. For the workers, however, it meant unemployment, misery, and starvation. Child labor in a most pernicious form had increased many fold. The old personal relations between master and worker had been dissolved, labor was being brought together in large masses in factories and mills, and, in consequence, economic and political labor groups were springing up on all sides.
