Page:The Chartist Movement.djvu/86

 This logical anti-climax is a feature of nearly all the earlier writings of this school. It results partly from a want of sound economic teaching—a want which the yet indeterminate state of the science could not supply. It is due partly no doubt to a typically English unwillingness to push the arguments based upon natural rights to a logical conclusion. Later Socialist writers worked with better materials than Hall. They used the theoretical groundwork furnished by David Ricardo (1772–1823) and the practical experiments of Robert Owen (1771–1858).

The second decade of the nineteenth century saw an important advance in socialistic theory. The violent fluctuations in trade, the advance of factory production, the dismal conditions which followed the end of the great war, the panic-stricken measures of the Government to repress popular movement, and the increasing unrest of the manufacturing population, all seemed to attest the truth of Hall's most pessimistic prophecies. On the other hand, socialist thought received important reinforcements. In 1813 appeared Robert Owen's New View of Society, which came as a gospel of hope and happiness to many who desired the welfare of their fellows. It held out a promise of infallible success in the improvement of the lot of the poor and the oppressed. In 1817 appeared Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, the indirect source of nearly all socialist economics.

Owen, it is true, remained almost untouched by the development of economic theory. He was an empiric from first to last. His first work, the New View, contained the essence of all his teaching—that any character, from the best to the worst, may be given to any community by the application of the proper means, which means are generally under the control of those who have influence in human affairs. In itself this doctrine, that human character was the creation of environment, was by no means new. It had been almost a commonplace in pre-revolutionary France. But backed as it was by the evidence of the marvellous work accomplished at New Lanark by Owen himself, "by the application of suitable means," Owen's teaching at once acquired commanding authority. It at once became the theoretical and practical stand-by of the Factory Reformers. It taught others to see in a properly constituted government the means of social regeneration. It was therefore a chief source of Chartist theory. Many leading Chartists, Lovett, O'Brien, Hetherington, Watson, Dr. Wade,