If this be allowed, the further practical arrangements which Owen demanded must in like manner be granted: in place of individualism, socialism must stand. In this way private operation will be replaced by communal production, and competition will be in fact overthrown; also, the profit of the employer will flow into the pockets of the producers, the members of the social organisation. These ideas of socialistic production grew, for Owen, spontaneously out of the capitalistic system in which he lived.
Here we come directly to the attitude of spirit in which Robert Owen has conceived his socialistic system, and it is necessary for the completion of this sketch to make reference especially to the means which Owen would use to reach his goal. These means are essentially a universal understanding and agreement among men; to them the truth and beauty of this new order should be preached, so that the wish may be aroused in them to accomplish this new order. But Owen does not think of the possibility that, when it is once made clear how wonderful this new order would be and how wonderfully men would live therein, men would not wish for the new order, and even if they did wish for it, that they might not be able to accomplish it. Only let the matter be known, then the wish and the ability will follow. For this reason, it is possible that the new order may enter at any moment; "as a thief in the night," Owen expresses it, socialism can come over the world. Only intellectual perception is necessary, and this can illumine the mind of man suddenly as a lightning flash. This peculiar conception of the means and ways that lead to the goal is one of the characteristic traits which distinguish the system of Owen, and in like manner of all utopian socialists.
If we look at this system as a whole, we find as the starting-point a criticism of existing social circumstances in a proletarian community. We find, further, as the basis upon which the system stands, the social philosophy of the eighteenth century. We see, as its demands, the overthrow of the capitalistic economy and the replacing of private production by communal operation. We find, finally, as the means for accomplishing this, as the roadway that leads to the object desired, the enlightenment of mankind. How he then exerted himself to carry out his plans in detail, how he created a New Lanark, and how his plans were entirely frustrated--all that interests us now as little as does the fact that Owen reached large practical results, in the shortening of the hours of labor and in the limitation of work by women and children, through improvement and amelioration of work in his manufactories, in which a new race began to rise in intellectual and moral freshness. Just so little are we interested in the fact that he is the father of English trade-union agitation. We would only look at his significance for the social movement, and this lies especially in the fact that he first, at least in outline, created that which since has become the proletarian ideal. For this point must be made clear to us, that all the germs of later socialism are contained in Owen's system.