ABSTRACT
ONE of the most interesting and important developments of recent years amongst working men is embodied in the co-operative stores and manufacturing companies. Arising out of improved education and business experience, and perhaps also from a convic-- tion that in the organization of labour the employers have the best of the bargain ; they mark an epoch from which industrial life takes a new start, and promises within a short time to alter the principal features of trade and employment. The late Eobert Owen, of New Lanark, having seen the method of teaching pursued by Pestalozzi and Fellenberg on the continent, and being interested in the well-being of his own workpeople, set up the first infant school in the kingdom, at the village of New Lanark, in Scotland. The children were so pliable, and the results of object teaching so good, as to bring Owen to the conclusion that if he could control men's surroundings he could produce them to order; and he formulated the doctrine that " man's character is formed for him and not by him." Having noticed also the tendency of the factory system to centralize people in large towns without efficient sanitary arrangements, and that the rapid growth of real property did not prevent the growth of pauperism; he advocated the establishment of "communities" of about two thousand persons each, properly proportioned for agricultural and manufacturing operations. In these communities there was to be no private property; each person was to produce according to
his ability, and to consume according to his necessity ; and all accumulations were to be common property; all were to work productively until they reached sixty years of age, when they were to become legislators and administrators.
