THE NEW HARMONY
MOVEMENT
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GEORGE B.1 LOCKWOOD
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in the preparation qf the Educational Chapters
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and a New Foreword by

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DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
NEW YORK

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FOREWORD,

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TO THE DOVER EDITION
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Copyright © 197 J by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.

Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto,
Ontario.
Publ ished in the United Kingdom by Constable
and Company, Ltd., IO Orange Strllet, London WC 2.

This Dover edition, first published in 1971, is an
unabridged republication of the work originally published by D . Appleton and Company, New York, in
1905 . A new Foreword has been written specially
for the present edition by Mark Holloway.

International Standard Book Number: 0-486-22719-7
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-J'J4288

NEW HARMONY, a little town in the extreme southwestern corner of Indiana, is one of those small communities
-there is a handful scattered about in every countrywhich embody within their limits a disproportionately large
amount of significant history. At some of these places
1 decisive and epoch-making battles took place; at others,
great men or women lived or were born; and a few of them
were sites of social activities which have proved to be
important in the development of mankind. New Harmony
' belongs in the latter category. It was the setting for an
experiment that was intended to change the whole social
and commercial pattern of society. In this respect, the
experiment was a failure; but in others-in its by-products,
as it were-it was an influential pioMer.
.
New Harmony was the site chosen by Robert Owen in
~- 1824 for the initiation of a completely new social system
·. which was to be based on cooperation rather than competi,tion, and which sought the good of all rather than the enrich., ment of a few individuals at the expense of the majority.
·.Owen, who at this time was fifty-two, had an international
reputation as a philanthropic cotton-mill owner, and as a
~ reformer and socialist. He had been associated for twentyfive years, as manager and chief owner, with the largest
: cotton-spinning establishment in Britain, and had turned
this place, New Lanark, in Scotland, into the most benevolently conducted working community in the country. It

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Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc.
l 80 Varick Street
New York, N .Y. 10014

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-FOREWORD TO THE DOVER EDITION

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petitors; yet the factory paid, and paid well; and the more
had become a showplace of the industrial revolution, a
it paid, the more Owen ploughed back into the business
model of its kind that was exhibited with pride to all kinds
in improving the conditions and amenities of the workers.
of distinguished visitors from all over the world; for Owen
A feature of life at New Lanark which benefited greatly
not only created an efficient factory, but a healthy, wellfrom Owen's benevolence was education. The schools were
regulated and compassionately governed human community
much praised, and with good reason. They were a radical
as well.
departure from the orthodox system of cramming the
In those days the owner of a factory usually owned everymemory with facts learnt parrot-wise in an ambience of
thing connected with it: the houses in which his employees
rigorous control. Dancing, physical exercise, play, and conlived, the shops they used, and virtually the employ:es
versation were introduced as teaching methods as well as
themselves- for usually the only alternative to workmg
books.
Artificial rewards and punishments were abolished;
in the factory was starvation. The employer was thus alland
teachers
were instructed to be kind, for how could
powerf ul and often tyrannical. Employees were treated
the mind be expected to unfold in an atmosphere of terror?
with less consideration than many animals; they were
Such ideas and practices, as far ahead of their time as
grossly overworked and underpaid, and in consequenoe
those of Pestalozzi and Froebe!, anticipated methods which
were half-starved and appallingly ill-housed. They were
did not come into general use in Britain for almost a huntreated, in fact, as mere extensions of the new machinery
dred years. Education, indeed, was at the very basis of
and not as human beings at all. Children of seven and eight
Owen's philosophy: man's character, he insisted, was formed
were commonly employed in factories for fourteen and
by his environment, and the only way of making good
fifteen hours a day, going to and from work in darkness
citizens was by providing conditions in which man's better
for two-thirds of the year, and never breathing fresh air or
nature would be encouraged to grow, and in which body
feeling the warmth of the sun in all those months except
and
mind would be well cared for and trained in right
on Sundays.
habits and ways of living. The whole benevolent system at
Owen would have none of this. "Would any of us," he
New Lanark was based on this proposition.
wrote, "permit our slaves, if we were obliged to maintain
them, to be so treated? ... I feel almost ashamed to address ' rl- At New Lanark, Owen was in supreme control, and not
even a succession of timid or dissenting partners could
any human being on such a subject."* He also pointed out
prevent him from putting into practice what he believed.
that quite apart from humanitarian considerations it was
When he saw the results of his work, he found them good,
to the ultimate advantage of manufacturers to have welland he wanted to see them extended beyond the confines
taught, healthy, and prosperous employees; and he certainly
of his own factory. His employees were prosperous and
demonstrated by example that this was so. He paid higher
wages, demanded shorter hours of work, and provided far ' happy; he looked forward to the day when all employees
would enjoy the same conditions, and with his incurable
better housing, schooling and food than most of his comoptimism and rationalism, he saw no reason why · they
*Address to the Master Manufacturers of Great Britain, 1819.
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should not do so. He had only to spread his message abroad,
and point to the visible results of his beliefs, and surelysurely even self-interest would persuade other manufacturers to follow his example.
It was in this way that Owen became the leading propagandist for a radical change in human relationships. A New
View of Society (1813- 1816) carried forth his message, in
an elaborated form, that character is formed by environment: change the environment, and you change men, and
therefore society. Other writings described a plan he had
conceived as a solution to the widespread unemployment
and destitution that followed the manufacturing slump at
the end of the Napoleonic wars. This plan proposed Villages
of Cooperation, modeled on New Lanark, which would be
centers of social activity and rational education as well as
centers of production. They would be mainly self-supporting, agricultural as well as industrial. They would cooperate
rather than compete, and would exchange surpluses. They
would try as much to train good citizens as to relieve
poverty.
The more Owen thought about this plan, which is most
fully set out in his Report to the County of Lanark (1820),
the more it appealed to him as an end in itself. Why
shouldn't these Villages of Cooperation spread far and
wide over the land until the ideal state of society which
they represented should replace the competitive and cutthroat society of capitalism, and thus introduce a new era
of peace and brotherhood-not only in Britain, but in all
countries?
He appealed for the realization of this idea to the English ,
government. The Home Secretary, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and even the Duke of Kent all professed interest,
and owing to his enormous prestige as a manufacturer,

Owen was given a respectful hearing. Unfortunately, riots
and disturbances were widespread at the time, and the
government was much more concerned with putting these
down (with the utmost severity) than with getting at the
roots of the trouble and doing something to alleviate the
intolerable conditions that were responsible for these acts
of protest and revolt; consequently, the government regarded Owen's proposals as hopelessly unrealistic.
Owen therefore tended to turn away from appeals to
authority, and began instead to address the public in a
series of pamphlets and manifestoes. Being honest and outspoken, and not a tactful or tactically minded man, he
reiterated in these appeals what had not been noticed before,
but was now seized upon by his opponents and used very
effectively against him: namely, his uncompromising opposition to established religion. This, he pointed out, attributed
man's unhappiness to his own misconduct, whereas it was
not his fault at all, but the fault of his environment. This
attitude stirred up a good deal of opposition to, and suspicion of Owen, and made it evident that he would get no
more backing for his Villages of Cooperation from the general public than he had from the government. He would have
to look elsewhere for the furtherance of his schemes, or
attempt to set up a model community with his own
resources.

1t-1By this time-round about 1820-0wen had undoubtedly
' heard of the communities of the Shakers and the Rappites
in America, and when Richard Flower called on him at
New Lanark in August 1824, as agent empowered to sell

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the Rappite community* of Harmonie on the Wabash River , Lockwood calls "the greatest experiment in social reconin Indiana, Owen was very interested indeed. Although • struction which the world has yet witnessed" were pitiflllly
wealthy, he could not afford more than half the sum he
inadequate to support the invitation to take part in it.
For one thing, the constitution had no provision for excludwould have had to pay for an establishment of minimum
size in Britain. For a quarter of this estimated sum he could
ing undesirables, no means of expelling them if they joined,
buy Harmonie, ready-made as a community town, and
and no bond-to replace that of religion in the sectarian
including an acreage of land about twenty times greater
communities-to unite the greatly diverse members. In
than the least amount that was necessary. In October,
addition, the constitution of this Preliminary Society vested
therefore, he sailed to America, examined Harmonie, and
complete control of the community in Owen for a period of
in January 1825 bought the place lock, stock and barrel.
three years, and Owen almost immediately left New HarOn 20,000 acres of partially cleared land there were 180
mony, and did not return for six months.
buildings and accommodation for about seven hundred
When he did return, in January 1826, with his famous
people. It cost $125,000. He renamed it New Harmony.
Boatload of Knowledge, he came with the fixed purpose of
The story of what happened at New Harmony has often
establishing a Community of Equality at once-a second
been told. "I am come to this country," Owen announced
constitution which was duly adopted before anyone had
at the end of April 1825 in the Hall of New Harmony ' really got used to the first one. It proved to be so vague
(which had been the Rappite church), "to introduce an
as to be unworkable, and almost immediately led to a
entire new system of society; to change it from an ignorant,
division and the formation of another community. Interests
selfish system to an enlightened social system which shall
were by no means "united into one": within a year, five
gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes
constitutions had been used up, and the parent community
for contest between individuals." This sounded splendid,
had been split into four. Eventually, the communal basis
and so did his call to "the industrious and well-disposed
of ownership was abandoned and the little town relapsed
of all nations" to come to New Harmony and help found the
into individual ownership. For a time hope had been high,
new utopia. The call was soon answered: in a few weeks
in tune with Owen's own optimism; in 1825 and 1826 half
eight hundred people had assembled, of all classes, creeds,
a dozen Owenite communities had sprung up elsewhere than
professions, trades, and nationalities. Some sincerely wished ·
at New Harmony; but by 1829 at the latest, the whole
to try to bring about Owen's rather vaguely outlined vision,
Owenite communitarian experiment had failed.
but many were attracted by his reputation as a philanthroThe scheme failed, but some of the leading individuals
pist, and expected to step into a ready-made paradise, not
who took part in it did not fail, either as human beings or
to help make one. Moreover, the preparations for what
as experts and innovators in the various branches of learning
they represented, or in propagating the theories they be*For the history of the Rappites see pp. 7- 42 of this book; also
lieved in. The geological, educational, libertarian, and many
Arndt, Karl , J. R.: George Rapp's Harmony Society, 1785- 1847 (Philadelphia, 1965).
other achievements of Robert Dale Owen and Frances

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The son followed his father into journalism, and became acWright, of William Maclure, Richard Owen, and Thomas
tive
in Republican party politics whil~ . still at the university.
Say reached out not only into the state and legislature of
These
were the two main vocations of his life. He was editor
Indiana, but also into the life of the nation itself; New
and
publisher
of newspapers at Marion and Muncie; founder
Harmony remained a center of knowledge, as well as a
and
editor
of
the
National Republican, which began its life
monument to an uncommonly generous and optimistic con- ,
at
Muncie
and
then
moved, as Lockwood did, to Washception, throughout the nineteenth century. Even today,
ington;
secretary
to
the
Governor of Indiana, and then to
no serious student of Owenism-which is to say, no serious
Charles
Warren
Fairbanks
during his term as Vice President
student of socialism-can afford to neglect the collections
of
the
United
States.
He
was also secretary of the Rein the library of the New Harmony Workingmen's Institute;
publican
National
Committee
for two years, and director
and no one interested in the communitarian tradition
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at
Washington
of
the
Hoover-for-President
Club. Some
standing in this little town, surrounded by buildings erected
slight
notion
of
his
character
may
be
gained
from
the fact
by the Rappites and once used by the Owenites, can fail
that
his
Marion
Evening
Chronicle
ran
a
"dry"
campaign
.
to think wistfully of what might have been, if only some
in the years before the First World War; that two of his
level-headed practical organizer-like Joseph Meacham of
became Y.M.C.A. secretaries; and that he died
brothers
the Shakers, or John Humphrey Noyes-had been in charge
of
heart
failure (at the age of fifty-nine) after returning
of the place during the first crucial year or two of Owen's
to
Muncie
from Washington to help with the management
dispensation.
of his newspaper during the illness of the general manager.
, · Lockwood's life seems to have been unspectacular and
iii
aolid, like that of a thousand others with similar vocaThe story of New Harmony has been told, but too often
.tions, and it is interesting to speculate upon his possible
it has been told only in terms of failure. It is the great merit
,reactions to Robert Owen's great experiment, if it had
of the present work that it gives as much space to success
taken place, so close to home, in Lockwood's own lifetime.
as to unsuccess, and that the author, whom one would not
AB a chronicler of the succession of communities at New
suspect of having radical or even liberal sympathies, pre- ,
Harmony, from Rapp's arrival in 1814 onwards, his account
sents his subject with the proper impartiality of the historian.
is unexceptionable. It was originally published at Marion,
It was in the library of the Workingmen's Institute at ' Indiana in 1902 as The New Harmony Communities. In
New Harmony that the first work on this book was done, in 1; "' the following year the book was adopted by the State
the summer of 1893, when George Browning Lockwood
Board as required reading in the Indiana State Teachers
took up this study as a subject of research at De Pauw
'Reading Circle Course. A new and revised edition entitled
University. His family had moved, when George was five
The New Harmony Movement (1905) was published by
years old, from Illinois to Peru, Indiana, where his father
Appleton and Co., and was studied, amongst other readers,
became editor and then publisher of the Peru Republican.
by 14,000 Indiana teachers in 1905-6. Charles A. Prosser,
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then superintendent of schools at New Albany, collaborated
in the reconstruction and elaboration of the educational
chapters, and the book received national approval in the
form of an introduction by W. T. Harris, then U. S. Commissioner of Education.
The New Harmony Movement is still the only book-length
history of New Harmony. It is a carefully compiled history
of the vicissitudes of fortune experienced by that little town,
and a useful introduction to the complex activities associated
with it over a period of two or three generations; but the
book is sixty-five years old, and lacks important information
about the Owenite communities which has come to light
during that period. Since much of this information is essential to a serious student, bibliographical references to these
documents, together with an indication of their contents,
are given in the following paragraphs.

members, their doubts and dissensions, their struggles of
conscience over whether or not to compromise with ideals,
and the various detailed processes of attempting to transform theory into practicEr-the problems of management,
bookkeeping, the organization of labor and goods, the confrontation on a basis of supposed equality of one class of
member with another of a different class, of atheist with
believer, of habitual drinker with teetotaler, or radical communist with tentative cooperator-these were not revealed
in any depth until the publication of five important sets of
contemporary personal papers. These documents, as Professor Bestor points out, "provide the bulk of what we know
about the New Harmony experiment from its inception to
its failure";* and Professor Harrison refers to them as being
"indispensable for a picture of the community." t
The only one of these five sets of papers that covers the
whole period of the Owenite experiment is Education and
Reform at New Harmony: Correspondence of William Maclure
· and Marie Duclos Fretageot, 1820-1833; edited by Arthur E.
Bestor, Jr. (Indianapolis, 1948). In this series of letters the instigator of all that was most lasting at New Harmony-the
educational and scientific experiments and publications-discusses with one of his Pestalozzian teachers the possibilities
and actualities of the community. An able and level-headed
' intellectual and organiser, Maclure makes many forthright
and judicious criticisms of Owen and New Harmony, and
incidentally offers a wealth of detailed information on its
affairs.
. Two diaries that are complementary to each other and
cover the purchase of Harmonie from the Rappites, the
propaganda for New Harmony, and the early phases of the

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The official records of the community provide an incomplete and partisan account of what happened in an extremely
intricate situation; and not much is added by a study of The
New Harmony Gazette, which was forever optimistic and
Nelson-eyed. These, in addition to the elaborate and often
unrealistic statements made by Owen himself, were the
main sources upon which Lockwood had to draw, apart from
Paul Brown's Twelve Months in N ew Harmony (Cincinnati,
1827). This latter account, though detailed, illuminating,
and factually correct where it can be checked, was suspect
by its extreme anti-Owen bias of interpretation. No other
detailed or individual account covering the same period
(April 1826- May 1827) was available to Lockwood.
The impact of the various constitutions on individual
XIV

, •Backwoods Utopias, p . 262.
,'. tRobert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America, p. 164n.

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community, are those of William Owen and Captain Donald
Macdonald, published respectively in Indiana Historical
Society Publications, Vol. IV, No. 1 (1906) and Vol. XIV.
No. 2 (1942). William Owen, who had come out from
England with his father Robert Owen, was left, together
with Macdonald, in th e un en viab le position of caretaker of
the community d urin g the first crili<·al months, w ithout any
practical guidance or even consistent principles of governorship from the absent owner. They did their best in an impossible situation, and their accounts make it plain, explicitly
or implicitly, that whereas New Harmony could never have
been started without Owen's genius, it was doomed by it
at the same time.
There are also two sets of complementary letters covering
this same early period. Those of William Pelham in Indiana
as Seen by Early Travelers, edited by Harlow Lindley (Indianapolis, 1916), pp. 360-417, present on the whole an overoptimistic view, comparable to Owen's. Pelham even went
so far as to write (16 March, 1826), "you need not fear a
dissolution of this Society, for it cannot happen . .. the foun- ·
dation ... stands on a rock." But there are lively and vivid
passages describing daily life, and Pelham's faith and good
nature are typical of the best kind of member, whose devoted but practical idealism is a necessity in every community. The other letters are collected as New Harmony, An
Adventure in Happiness: Papers of Thomas and Sarah Pears,
edited by Thomas Clinton Pears, Jr. (Indianapolis, 1933).
They are of both general and particular interest, since Pears
was a bookkeeper in the community, and describes the prob- ·
lems of management that he encountered in that department
as well as those of community life in general.
The definitive work on Owenism is Arthur Eugene Bestor,
Jr.'s Backwoods Utopias (Philadelphia, 1950). A more recent

work which places Owen and his i11fluence within the context of philanthropy and millennialism, while providing a
reliable factual survey of the whole nineteenth-century field
of social experiment, is J. F. C. Harrison's Robert Owen and
the Owenites in Britain and America (London , 1969) . Both
books h ave excellent and extensi ve bibliographies.

xvi

Dorset, England
June 1970

MARK HoLLOWA Y

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INTRODUCTION

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WHAT is called in this book the " New Harmony Movement" forms a noteworthy practical lesson in sociologyin that part of sociology which treats of the ISMS of that
important science.
In the institutions of civili zation we count four cardinal types-th e famil y, civil society with its division of
labor, the state, th e church. The two ex tremes-the family and the church-g ive us, on the one hand, the first departure :from the individual with hi s n arrow experience,
and on the other the arrival at the highest reenforcement
by the r ace or the social whole. The family, although
nearest to the unassisted individual, does not for that very
reason permit much development of individuality. Its
principle is obedience to elders, and especially to parents
and naturally constituted guides. A high degree of selfactivity and independence is not found possible in this
institution, because blind obedience is irrational.
As compared with the family, civil society with its
division of labor gives greater opportunity for the development of individuality. '11 he individual through his vocation contributes something to supply the wants of his
community. He makes some article or performs some
function that is useful to the social whole, and thereby
lays his community under obli gation to him and gets recognition for his service. Ile has proved himself essential
to the society in which he lives, and society hastens to set
before him , for the supply of his own particular needs,
the aggregate production of all the units of society. It
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does this through and by means of the market wherein
his own product is measured with the products of others,
and he gets a quid pro quo.
In civil society, therefore, the individual manifests
his differences and idiosyncrasies, and gets them recognized and approved by the whole community. And, on
the other hand, he gets his needs and wants, his defects
and peculiarities, supplemented and provided for by his
fellow men. Their capacities and idiosyncrasies make up
for his deficiencies, just as he makes up for their defic~en­
cies to the extent of his own real power. Hence society
seems to be, in one respect, a larger individu~l, an i_nst~­
tutional person; more perfect than the parbcu~ar r~1d1vidual because it contains all the strengths umted mto
one great social strength, the defects and weaknesses eliminated by mutual compensation.
The state is the individuality of this greater human
self which comes to exist through the division of labor
and the process of compensation. It subordinates the individual to the social will. And it does this not only in
respect to the property and belongi~gs of t~e i1:1dividual,
but in reference to his liberty and his very hf e itself. It
uses the individual and his property to protect the life and
property of the whole, but by this neg~tive pr~cess it
secures the positive result of the protection of life and
liberty to all its citizens. The individual is reenforced
by the strength of his whole nation, and thus achieves an
individuality altogether transcendent as compared to that
which he realized in the family, or even in his industrial
vocation. We are ascending a ladder toward emancipation from natural limits, and toward achievement of a
colossal individuality-family, industrial vocation, citizenship in a nation.
There is one step of higher emancipation. The thr~e
institutions just considered are worldly. The .churc~ is
the other-worldly institution which has for its obJect
xx

. emancipation from the thraldom ' of space and time by
revealing to man his origin and his final purpose in the
divine order of the universe. Man as a moral being belongs to an other-worldly realm. In the church he celebrates his discoveries of the divine order, and founds upon
them a higher emancipation from the shortcomings and
imperfections, the restraints and limitations, of mere
nature.
These are the four rounds in the ladder of civilization.
The mere individual outside of these four institutions of
civilization exists in a state of rudimental freedom. A
,. state of Robinson Crusoe isolation is the lowest order of
rational life. Crusoe finds himself dependent on the products of nature for his food, clothing, and shelter, but is
without organized means for the subjugation of nature.
Hence he lives from hand to mouth and subject to all
the vicissitudes that visit his habitat in and out of season.
He exists also in a state of war, not only against natural
forces but of one savage man against other savage men.
Progress out of these evil conditions will demand social
organization through the four institutions which we have
been considering. These will emancipate his individuality and bring him beyond the stage of animal likes and
dislikes to the stage in which is revealed to him deeper
and deepest ideas of reason and higher and highest attainments of freedom and achievement.
· · By these institutions he will get command not only of
bread for his body, but of high positions of influence and
power among his fell ow men; above this, he will attain
insights into the science of nature and into the structure
of the moral order of society; the gradual unfoldment of
· human nature in the history of civilizations; insights int<'
the art and literature of the most gifted peoples. Reading
all things in the light of the highest principl:,. he will
· receive what is better than bread, or than domm10n over
and man, or than insights into special realms of
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INTRODUCTION
truth. Emerson, in his poem The Days, celebrates the
gifts which the days bring to man :
"To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all."

Emerson has indicated in his poem progressive steps
of emancipation of individuality. Bread gives freedom
from the wants of the body; kingdoms the sway over our
environment of nature and human society-wealth and
high station; stars the several insights and skills which
give us a deeper self-knowledge and the artistic power
needed for the poet and the sage; and " the sky that holds
them all " is the religious view or philosophic view of the
divine which is presupposed by all these gifts.
It happens that partial insights into the good and the
evil of institutions create sects of reformers who seek to
eradicate one institution by another. They would substitute civil society for the family and for the state. Communism or socialism undertakes to do this, and the failure of this view of the world is illustrated in a great
variety of phases in the history of New Harmony, both
in the experiment of the Rappites and in the longer and
fuller experiment of Robert Owen and his successors.
The Rappites, as pointed out by the author of this
history, were religious communists. Rapp himself was
prophet, priest, and king. As is usual in this kind of
communism, one prophet excludes all other prophets. He
prevents his disciples from growing into prophets, or, indeed, from undertaking any original thinking or planning.
Originality, if encouraged, would soon destroy the community. Morris Birkbeck is quoted as saying: " Strangers
visit their establishment and retire from it full of admiration; but a slavish acquiescence, under a disgusting
superstition, is so remarkable an ingredient in their character that it checks all desire of imitation."
With Rapp's community, the ideal disciple was
xx ii

1

obedient slave. Governed by a m~n who understood business, like Frederick Rapp, labor could be well organized
and the earnings could be accumulated in the strong chest
of the prophet and king. But in this case, the institution
which we have called civil society does not get established
in such a way as to develop individual freedom. The
Roman idea of property emancipates the individual from
the patriarchal ties of the family and develops individual
initiative, but New Harmony suppressed the individual
initiative and secured obedience to the priest and king.
" i Thus the church admitted civil society only in its
serfdom, and not in its freedom. But the church, in this
experiment, abolishes not only civil society in its aspect of
individual initiative, substituting the family principle of
patriarchal rule, but in turn it abolishes the family outright by introducing the principle of celibacy. And by
this it saws off the limb on which the whole community
· depends. Moreover, such a community is incompatible
with the state except in its most rudimentary form of
the tribe. No neighboring town or county could trust
the New Harmony citizens in a political election because
they were puppets moved by a king inspired by otherworldly interests and firmly keeping aloof from the interests of the county and the State of Indiana and the
· nation. There was in store for this community, when
the Indiana Territory should become populous, an exterminating persecution at the hands of a mob like that
which drove Mormonism out of Nauvoo in later years.
Its return to Pennsylvania anticipated the catastrophe.
, Religious communism attacks family, civil society, and
state in the developed form which these institutions take
on in modern civilization.
: · The second form of community, that of Mr. Owen,
which came to be established at New Harmony, was in
some respects the opposite of the religious community that
had preceded it. It established itself in the name of a
xx.iii

/

1I

INTRODUCTION
civil society more or less opposed to the family, more or
less opposed to the state, and, above all, opposed to the
church. The strict regulations penetrating to the private
life of the Owenite communist remind us of the Rappite
community of the prophet and priest, and so also does
the control of labor by a one-man power and the covering of all production into the common storehouses, and
in this it contradicted the ideal of the civil community,
smothered individual initiative and arrested the training of the population into civil freedom. Owen might
desire to have original initiative develop in the individuals
of his community. And his establishment of commonschool education shows that he was almost entirely unconscious of the meaning of the division of labor as a
function of the institution of civil society. He seemed
to think that not only could the laborer forswear selfactivity in planning as well as executing, but even could
be aroused by school education without the danger of feeling the absolute need for the exercise of original initiative
in his trade and vocation.
Involved in this contradict.ion, his communistic experi- 1
ment could not ·flourish, and did not flourish. The religious community, after the death of its prophet, gradually
changed into a civil community.
The lesson forced on us by these two experiments is
the necessity for each of the four institutions, and the
limitation of each through the other. If, in the name
of one of these institutions, an attempt is made to suppress
another institution, the attempt destroys the whole experiment. For each institution, in order to be complete,
demands the creation of the other institutions in their
full development. If the dominant institution endeavors
to create for itself the other institutions, it dwarfs them
or mutilates them.
The lack of a religious faith in the Owen experiment .
made impossible on the part of the other citizens of Indi•
xxiv

INTRODUCTION
ana the cooperation necessary for' an influential citizenship in the State. The outside citizens could never forecast what practical cooperation in their policy might be
secured from the Owen community. Hence they suspected even the best measures proposed by Robert Dale
Owen in the constitutional convention and in the legislature. They were afraid that his well-known opinions
. regarding the church concealed some latent mischief which
would come out as an injury to the commonwealth sooner
or later if adopted, and hence arose some of the opposition against the legislation which he proposed in behalf
of so good a cause as that of public free schools.
1
Public free schools have a tendency to develop the
power of the boys and girls in the line of original initiative. The school enables them to see not only things as
they are, but to compare them with the scientific and historical ideals of what they ought to be. They can see
possibilities of the manufacture of useful machinery in
beds of ore and forests of timber; they can see the possibility of mills for textile manufacture or for manufactures
of hardware in the waterfalls of their rivers. Armed with
science, the mind is able to make mechanic inventions.
·All classes of citizens gain in directive power by means
of the studies of the school. But the citizens of Indiana
looked upon the experiment of communism at New Harmony as in the direction of suppressing individual initiative and the substitution of a one-man power for independent ownership of real estate and personal property,
· and for independent freedom of choice.
1
·• •
If Robert Dale Owen had described the true effects
'of school education in the line of freedom of property
and independent initiative, he would have recommended
his scheme for free public schools more effectively than
, he was able to do as the representative of a communistic
experiment, for his communism preached a silent lesson
in contradiction to his plea for free schools. And his
xxv

I;

·~c-'

\

\·""

\

INTRODUCTION

~a ...,..<Y

..<.

l

;;:

· ····,
.~

.

'

'

..1'

" · .. o . . . .

I
i

opposition to the churches established in the several towns
and villages of Indiana aroused that deepest and most
bitter of all opposition, the opposition founded on divergence of theological views, divergence as to the fundamental view which one takes of the meaning of the world
of nature and of human destiny. This hostility of the
people of Indiana to measures which were really greatly
for the benefit of the whole State is a very interesting
feature in this history, and it is very clearly pointed out
by the author in this book.
The work of Maclure in the school at New Harmony,
and afterward as publicist, deserves study on its own account. He brought industrial instruction into his school,
and laid so much stress on the mechanical features of education that he in a great measure neutralized the effect of
the school on the characters of his pupils, for he more or
less turned off the minds of his pupils from those studies
which give original initiative, and turned them in the direction of matters of skill and routine practise. In these '
days of attempts in the direction of manual training and
other industrial education, the experiment of Maclure and
its results on the people of New Harmony deserve the
most careful consideration. How much directive power
came from his instruction in the way of industrial preparation? How much directive power in the way of enabling
his pupils to understand and cooperate with their fellow
men in other parts of Indiana and the United States in
later life?
I
I am greatly impressed with the value of this work
as a study for teachers everywhere, and would commend
its careful study especially to the great storm-centers of
social agitation, such as the cities of Chicago, Boston, and
San Francisco, for example.

w.

WASHINGTON, D. C.,

April 20, 1905.

xxvi

T.

HARRIS.

CONTENTS
PAOE

xix
By Hon. W. T. Harris, United States Commissioner
of Education.
ORA.PTER

1.-NEW HARMONY'S PLACE IN HISTORY
IL-THE RISE OF THE RAPPITES
'

1•
7.

IIL-THE RAPPITES IN INDIANA

15 .

IV.-THE RAPPITE HEGIRA

30.

•

V.-ROBERT OWEN AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

43

Vl.-AGITATION IN ENGLAND •

53

VIL-THE NEW MORAL WORLD

59

t VIII.-THE FOUNDING OF NEW HARMONY

IX.-THE PRELIMINARY SOCIETY
X.-"THE HALF-WAY HousE"
XL-THE "PERMANENT COMMUNITY"
· XII.-THE SocrAL SvsTEM ON TRIAL
; XIIL-THE DUKE OF SAXE-WEIMAR AT NEW HARMONY.
XIV.-Two VIEWS OF NEW HARMONY

69
82

92
103

112
123
134

141

XV.-CoMMUNITY PROGRESS
XVI.-COMMUNITY DISINTEGRATION

156

· XVII.-RoBERT OwEN's FAREWELL ADDRESSES,

166

XVIII.-THE TEN LOST TRIBES OF COMMUNISM •

174

xxvii

-----

. --~--·-----

CONTRNTS
PAGE

CHAPTER

XIX.-WoMAN AT NEw HARMONY
XX.-THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
XXI.-J OSI AH

w ARREN

1

186

\

\

209

I

294

XXIII.-NEW HARMONY'S LATER HISTORY •

307
314

XXIV.-THE MACLURE LIBRARY MOVEMENT

322

XXII.-RoBERT OwEN ' s LATER Ln'E •

336

XXV.-ROBERT DALE OWEN

379

APPENDIX: SOURCES

• 387

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

House No. 2

Frontispiece
on or following page
· New Harmony as it now appears from
. Indian
-·
Mound
xviii
~

xxx
George Rapp's Residence and Granary, or Fort
; The Old Fort as Built
,.. The Old Fort-Present Condition
.; The Rappite Church and Hall of Harmony
, ew Harmony during the Owen Occupation
homas Say
Charles Alexandre Lesueur
· A Typical Rappite House.
~ Thomas Say's Tomb at New Harmony
William Maclure
<Frances Wright
· l osiah Warren
Three Labor Notes Issued by Josiah Warren
, Robert Dale Owen

xxviii

xx ix

)

16
16
16
16
70
70
76
76
76
76
76
76
306
306
335
377
378
386

-

..._...................................................... . . . .

~----'""'II

~......... ....

rt

THE NEW HARMONY MOYEMENT
Law and procured for widows the absolute ownership of
one-third of the deceased husband's property. Owen accomplished this in 1838. 'rhe session of 1841 overthrew
the reform. He reestablished it in 1852.
( d) He modified the divorce laws of the State so as
to enable a married woman to secure relief from habitual
drunkenness and cruelty.
For his persistent and finally successful efforts to reform unjust laws, the women of Indiana, or a comparatively small number of them, in 1851, presented him with
a handsome silver pitcher, inscribed, " Presented to the
Hon. Robert Dale Owen by the women of Indiana, in acknowledgment of his true and noble advocacy of their independent rights to property, in the Constitutional Convention of Indiana." The presentation took place before a
large audience in the hall of the House on the evening of
May 28, 1851.
The women of this country owe to Robert Dale Owen a
debt of gratitude which they can discharge in no better way
than by a tardy respect for his memory. And nearly a
half century after Robert Dale Owen wrote into the statute
law of his adopted State the modern conception of the legal
rights of women, we find the women's clubs of Indiana
cooperating in a movement to place the bust of their great
emancipator in the rotunda of the Indiana State capitol,
almost on the site of the structure within which he carried
on his victorious battle in their behalf.

CHAPTER

XX

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

"Awake! ye sons of light and joy,
And scout the Demon of the schools :
The fiend that scowls but to decoy,
To pamper zealots : frighten fools :
To blind the judgment: crib the souL
Wake up! And let your actions tell
That you with Peace and Virtue dwell.
"A'vay with studied form and phrase,
A way with cant, and bigot zeal,
L et Truth's unclouded beacon blaze,
From Nature's kindness learn to feel:
From Nature's kindness learn to give
Your hands, your hearts, to all that live.
Wake up! 'Tis deeds alone can tell
That you with Peace and Virtue dwell."
- -Poem dedicated to the children of the New Harmony BoardingSchool, New Harmony Gazette, October 8. 1825.
"An age of hatred, strife and woe
Has long in terror reigned.
Its numerous victims are laid low,
The world in blood is stained,
But now the time is coming fast
When strife shall be forever past.
CHORUS

"The day of peace begins to dawn, '
Huzza! Huzza! Huzza!
Dark Error's might will soon be gone,
Huzza ! Huzza ! Huzza l
Poor mortals long have been astray, .
But Knowledge now will lead the way,
Huzza l Huzza ! Huzza l ·

208

209

THE EDUCATION AL EXPERIMENT

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
'

"Now Vice and Crime no more shall stalk
Unseen in open day,
To cross our silent, peaceful walk
Through life's enchanting way :
Old Ignorance with hoary head
Must seek his everlasting bed .
" Each warrior now may sheath his blade
And toil in vain no more,
To seek fair Virtue's genial shade,
For now all wars are o'er.
The battle's done, the day is won,
The victory's gained by Truth alone."

-Song written j01· the children of New Harmony.

"MAN does not form his own character but it is made
for him." This is th e motto which Robert Owen caused to
be inscribed upon the title-page of every issue of the New
Harmony Gazette, a publication which was at once the
official organ of the Communities and the medium through
which Owen and those associated with him exploited their
peculiar social, educational, and religious ideas. By this
Owen m eant to declare in the language of psychology that,
though heredity, will, and environment are the forces
which mold the characters of men, the greatest of these is
environment. It do es not lie within the scope and pur·
pose of this chapter to discuss the truth of Owen's belief.
To do so would be to reopen an ancient battle of the
psychologists in which the victor is yet to be named. But,
in order to understand the various schemes which the
found er of New Harmony projected for the betterment of
society in general and of the working class in particular,
it is necessary to r ernern her th::lt he always believed that
men were the creatures of their surroundings-that they
were in a sense but the clay which th e Great Potter presses
against the plastic wheel of circumstance.
There is a sense too in which environment is to-day
recognized as a greater factor in the shaping of human
210

w

1character than in the days w~en Owen wrought.

We have
come to recognize what Owen 't1aw, though his age did not,
'that the much vaunted human will itself, if not largely the
· result of the many-sided circumstances which have touched
. it, can be and is being skilfully trained in the schools, a
training which one must of necessity denominate as environment.
:;; · There are two great agencies which the social reformer
may invoke in his efforts to regenerate society. These are
environment and religion. Acquiring at the very outset of
· ·his remarkable efforts for the betterment of his fellows a
deep-set hatred for the clergy and the church, Owen de.liberately divorced his social schemes from the aid of the
Christian religion and pinned his faith to environment,
which to him was the only medium whereby the character
of the individual could be bettered and a Golden Age be
consummated.
Out of his belief in the all potency of environm ent as a
_reforming agency came his doctrine that it is vitally important that human beings be surrounded with circumstances favorable to their development. "How may we
make men and society better ? " The most unselfish social
reformer since the days of Savonarola would answer, "By
making their environment better." The story of Robert
Owen's career as philanthropist and reformer is the story
of· one man's earnest efforts, some wise and some unwise,
to surround human beings with more favorable conditions,
'!ithin which, if Owen's theory be true at least, they must
of.necessity become better men and better women.
, To him there were at least four phases of the environment surrounding the subjects of his philanthropy from
Fine to time. These phases were their home environment,
their social environment, their industrial environment and
their educational environment.
f, It was home environment he sought to better when he
p.ght the people of N cw Lanark cleanly habits and en211

.. . ..

· · -··------.-----

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
forced in the houses of the employees of his cotton-mills a
riO'orous sanitation. It was only in order that the deplorable industrial conditions under which the English factoryhand labored might be made such as should give him at
least a chance to become a man, that Owen began that
wonderful sixteen years of agitation of the labor problem
which culminated in the quickening of the conscience of
the British public, in the enactment of child-labor laws,
in increased wages for the productive classes, in parliamentary r egulations of factory sanitation, in the inauguration and firm establishment of the idea that government
has a right, in the interest of common justice and ~he
general welfare, to interfere in internal trade and with
industrial relations.
Swept from his usual safe moorings as a practical business man by his strong belief that under ideal surroundings a perfect race might be developed, the hero of ~ ew
Lanark sought to establish at New Harmony an ideal
social environment within which, unhampered by the artificial atmosphere with which our social system has enveloped us, man, living close to nature, might work out a
(
better character and attain a more perfect manhood.
So it was when Robert Owen sought to change the
educational surroundings of the children of his benef•
icence. So far as his connection with schools was con
cerned, they were only a phase of his struggle to create
a better environment for the development of character·
among the working people who w e~e the object of hi~ care.
In his days no schools opened their doors to the children
of the poor. Forced into the factory at a tender age,
denied even the rudiments of an education and surrounde<\
at home by squalor and vice, these unfortunates grew into
a distorted and debased maturity. To Owen, the school
was a weapon for social r egeneration to be used as a de~ice
by which these children of the great Fourth Estate might
be surrounded by a refining atmosphere during their tendc
212

•

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
I

'

and formative years. He was not an educator in the sense
in which we use the term to-day. He was not a teacher
and did not attempt to act as one. Unlike the schools
which Pestalozzi established, his schools were not experiments made for the purpose of teRting and proving th e
efficiency of preconceived educational theories nor attempts
to exploit any pet methods and devices of t eaching. They
were machinery for social and moral r egeneration.
1
Let it be remembered that primarily, Robert Owen was
a social and a moral rather than an educational r eformer.
· And yet we shall see that his search for social and moral
· reform through the avenue of the schools led him into
·< educational innovations, which justify us in placing his
name high in the list of great educational thinkers.
THE SCHOOL AT NEW LAN ARK

· Sixteen years after assuming charge of the mills at New
· Lanark, Robert Owen made his first experiment in education· as a means of social reform by founding a school for
the benefit of the children of that dreary factory town.
From An Outline of the System of Education at New
'Lanark, written by Robert Dale Owen during the existence
of the school and dedicated to his distinguished fath er,
we learn that the training was given in special quarters
erected for that purpose; that these quarters were made
much more attractive for the children of the factoryhe.nds than those of many of the most prominent boarding-schools of Dickens' day; that a large play-room, the
:first which the hiRtory of pedagogy has r ecorded, was
attached to the school; and that the enrolment exceeded
seven hundred.
Of this number, one hundred children between the ages
of two and five years were taught in what, for want of a
etter name, was termed the infants' school; and six hundred over five years of age in a higher or advanced school.
213

• -•

I'll • . . ._ .....

. .-·

~-·•u-----------~----

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
These six hundred pupils of the higher school
divided into two sections of three hundred each.
first section, consisting of children between the ages of
five and ten years, constituted a day-school; and the second
section, consisting of the children over ten years of age, ·
who worked in the factory during the day, constituted a
night-school. Both the infant school and the higher
school were in session each day of the week save Sunday
from 7.30 to 9.30 A. M., from 10 to 12 A. M., and from 3 to
5 P. M.; while the night session of the higher school began
.at 7 and closed at 9.30 P. M.
Of the two schools, which were really two departments
of a single school held under a common roof, the infant ·
school received the greater portion of Owen's enthusiasm
and attention. It was not only the feature of the educational work projected by him at New Lanark which
attracted more attention and drew more distin guished ·
visitors ther e than did all the other innovations which he·
introduced into town and factory, but it is also that featur ·
which, perhaps more than any other educational experi.: ·
ment he attempted in his long career as a r eformer, best
entitles him to be classed as a pioneer and thinker in the
educational field.
For the infant schools of that isolated Scottish factory,
town were the fir st .of their kind, and to Rob ert Owen•
rather than to Froebe! must be given the credit for the
discovery and practical application of the idea that there
is a type of educational training beneficial to both intellect
and moral fib er, which can be successfully given by the
schools to children under the t ender age of five years
Strip from the kindergarten as we know it to-day the gifta
and the games, the devices and the educational ideas with
which the name of Froebe! will ever be associated, and look
upon it as a garden for the training of children, and we,
may say without fear of giving offense that Robert Owen ·
was the founder of the first kindergarten. The infant
214

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•

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
.· school ~t New Lanark was inaugurated in the yeat 1816.

· It was not until twenty-one yeara-later (1837) that Froebe!
opened his first kindergarten, or " Garden of Children,"
;; in the village of Blankenburg.
·~ 1~ · This little village is not more than fifty miles distant
from the town of Hofwyl, where M. De Fellenberg con~. ducted a school whose training was based upon the edueational ideas of Pestalozzi and to which Robert Owen
'. sent his sons for an education. Here, in 1819, eighteen
~ years before Froebe! established his garden for children at
.. Blankenburg, came Robert Owen to investigate Pestalozzi's
· ideas and methods of teaching. For three years previous
.to this time, Robert Owen had been carrying on a school
at New Lanark. We know but little concerning the instruction in it during this period, for his educational work
.at New Lanark had not as yet attracted public attention.
We do know that, visiting Hofwyl, with a kindling en. thusiasm for educational reform, he received there both
information and added enthusiasm.
i There can be no doubt that Owen was greatly influenced in his educational thought by his visit to Hofwyl and
his contact with the educational principles laid down by
estalozzi. Owen and Pestalozzi were kindred spirits.
~th, like Abou-ben-Adhem of old, loved their fellow men;
both sought to raise the laboring class out of a degraded
atate; both had an abiding faith in the potential uplifting
of the common people; both believed that education was a
necessary means by which that uplifting was to be consummated. To the question, how may the peasantry be
. 'sed out of its degraded state, Pestalozzi had one answer,
:ind only one. This was, by ed-ucation. More a man of
affafrs and a deeper student of the whole sweep of the
aocial problem than Pestalozzi, Owen sought the aid of
·every phase of man's environment, yet recognized and appealed to education as the most effective of all weapons in
'the struggle for permanent social betterment.
215

.,
,J .

-··--··- -------THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

When he returned from Hofwyl, whatever may have
been bis previous views, Robert Owen transplanted to Briti.
ish soil Pestalozzi's enthusiasm for education and many of ·
his cardinal educational principles, of which he made immediate application in his school at New Lanark, then in
its third year. If he had done nothing else, Owen would ·
be entitled to notice in pedagogical circles as a carrier of
good seed. Though not an educational theorist, he had
instinctively applied much of the Pestalozzian creed in his
school before his visit to Switzerland. After his return;
the school was modeled almost entirely upon the educa•
tional principles which he held in common with the great
Swiss schoolmaster. We shall see that this is particularly
true of the higher school.

-was realiy the first kindergartner ·and Owen's school the
anticipation of Froebel's later attempt. Aside from the
theory and the system which the Prussian pedagogue introduced into the infant school there is little if anything
of pedagogical value in the modern kindergarten which is
not to be found at New Lanark. Let us see if this can not
be readily demonstrated.
· ( 1) Like all the kindergartens or infant schools which
follow it, the purpose of Owen's infant school was to influence the character of children at a tender and formative
. age. This was Froebel's purpose in inaugurating his
kindergarten. " In his conference with teachers Froebel
found that the schools suffered from the state of raw material in them. Till the then school age was reached the
children were entirely neglected. Froebel's conception of
arrnonious development naturally led him to attach much
itnportance to the earliest years."
~i Twenty-one years earlier we find Robert Owen founding
his infant school to meet the same difficulty. Like Froebel's school, it was an afterthought. In his description of
the higher school at New Lanark, Robert Owen complained
that the work was handicapped by the habits which the
children had formed before the opening of school-life.
llow keenly every modern school-teacher can sympathize
with this complaint! To meet it the infant school was
established by means of which it was hoped that children
- ansplanted at a tender age into an atmosphere of love
and refinement might be dominated in their habits by the
'nfiuence of the schoolroom and not by that of their rude
omes. How like this is our modern practise of placing
. ·'ndergartens in the slums of the large cities!
' Like Froebel, and many years in advance of Froebel,
bert Owen saw that "each age has a completeness of its
own. First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in
the ear. 'l'he perfection of the later stage can be attained
only through the perfection of the earlier. If the infant

Ii

THE INFANT SCHOOL

The infant school, however, was a distinct departure in
educational thought and procedure in many r espects. Its
one hundred children were given in charge of a simplehearted, almost illiterate fellow named Buchanan, who1
though cursed by a shrewish wife, loved little children,
and was when free from her domination tender and
skilful in their moral training. Little attempt was made
to impart serious knowledge whether in or out of books
The children were gradually and incidentally taught the
nature and uses of common things by familiar conversa~
tion and little stories, when the children's curiosity eithe11
on the playground or in the schoolroom led them to ask
questions.
"Infants above one year attended school 11nder specia
care." Play and stories were the medium through whicll
the heart and mind of the child were besieged and led; an
games, sometimes within the attractive schoolroom and
sometimes, when the weather permitted, out on the green(
constitutecl the major part of the curriculum. Buchanan
216

217

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
is what he should be as an infant and the child as a child,
he will become what he should be as a boy just as naturally
as new shoots spring from the healthy plant. Every stage
then must be cared for and tended in such a way that it
may attain its own perfection."
(2) Like all the true kindergartens which follow it, the
aim of the infant school at New Lanark was not to impart
serious knowledge whether in or out of books, but to fix
habits and shape character. To the master of New Lanark,
the formation of character was the chief end of all educational efforts not only in the infant school, but also in the
higher school, where the imparting of serious knowledge
was made a secondary though important consideration.
Almost half a century before Dickens attacked the " cramming system" of the English boarding-schools, a system
which throttled the development of character as well as
intellect, Robert Owen said: " It must be evident to common observers that children may be faught to read, write,
account, and sew and may yet acquire the worst habits and
have their minds rendered irrational for life.
Reading and writing are merely instruments by which
ideas either true or false may be imparted, and when given
to children are of little comparative value unless the children are also taught how to make a proper use of them."
Of his infant school it could be said even more truthfully than of Pestalozzi's school at Stanz, more truthfully
than of any other school preceding Froebel's: " The thing
was not that they should know what they did not know, , .
but that they should behave as they did not behave. If
they could be made conscious that they were loved and .
cared for, their hearts would open and give back love and .
respect in return."
·
The elimination of all serious knowledge, the absence of ·;·
the teaching of all facts as such, is the feature of Owen's '
school which stamps it as a pioneer in a new field. Overenthusiastic admirers of Pestalozzi have maintained that i.
218

- ------

THE EDUCATION AL EXPERIMENT
he operated an infant school on the Continent ·before the
New Lanark school came to be. But the records of. the
schools at N euhof and at Stanz,' which were the only educational experiments in which Pestalozzi preceded Owen,
reveal, according to the declarations of Pestalozzi himself,
that the children of both schools were of a variety of ages,
the oldest being not more than fifteen and the youngest
not less than five years old. Neither was, in the sense in
which the term was used at New Lanark, an "infants'"
school. Nor did Pestalozzi ever conduct a school of any
type in which the acquirement of serious knowledge, the
teaching of facts as such was not made an important
though a subordinate aim of the training bestowed. This
more than the difference in the ages of the children is the
distinguishing mark between the infant school at New
Lanark and all previous educational attempts upon the
Continent.
The difference between Owen's infant school and its
contemporaries is the difference between the mission of
the modern kindergarten and the mission which this
utilitarian age is seeking to thrust upon it. An impatient
thirst for the glittering prizes of this industrial epoch has
taken hold upon the prospective college student. He is
asking that some arrangement be made so that he with his
sheepskin may step into the arena of business or professional life at an earlier age. There are not wanting signs
to indicate that in the interests of this earlier graduation
the domination from the top may next demand that the
kindergarten shall serve chiefly as a preparatory school
for the primary unit. Then the kindergarten must decide
" whether, like the other units of the system, it will bow its
neck to the yoke or whether, ignoring the call from above,
it will continue to solely seek the moral development of all
· childhood rather than the higher educational interests of
· the few who are destined for college walls.
The claim has been made repeatedly and the dictum ac219

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THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
cepted without controversy that Froebel's kindergarten at
Blankenburg was the first infant school that did not attempt to teach any serious know ledge, the first to make
games a means of training the character of children. This
dictum merely overlooks Owen's attempt. It is true that
after Pestalozzi's repeated failures as a school manager,
numerous " infant schools" arose on the Continent; that
these sought to apply P estalozzian educational principles;
and that, like all of the attempts made by him whose efforts they imitated, these inf ant schools made the teaching
of elementary knowledge the nucleus of their training.
But these differ as much from the infant school at New
Lanark as they do from the kindergarten at Blankenburg,
whose forerunner they were.
Sargent, in The Social Philosophy of Robert Owen,
says, " The Infant School System was an inevitable consequence of Owen's doctrine as to the vital importance of
surrounding human beings with circumstances favorable
to their development. It has been said that the plan was
previously carried out on the Continent. That may be true.
It has also been said that the experiment was suggested
in a conversation between Owen and a lady. Both statements may be true, and yet Owen's claim to the invention
remains unimpeached. Owen's glory is not that he sent for
a Swiss instructor, nor that he went about craving the advice and aid of any one, but that he threw his own energy
into the work, and with the feeble instruments at his command commenced and completed his long projected task."
In a speech delivered at a memorial exercise in Kensal
Green Cemetery on the 21st of April, 1871, T . H. Huxley,
the great English scientist, said:
"I think that every one, who is compelled to look as
closely into the problem of popular education, must be led
to Owen's conclusion that the infant school is, so to speak,
the key of that position; and that Robert Owen discovered
this great fact and had the courage and patience to work
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THE EDUCATION AL EXPERIMENT
out his theory into a practical reality is his claim, if he
had no other, to the enduring' gratitude of the people."
( 3) Just as in all other infant schools and kindergartens worthy the name, love was the dominating factor in
Owen's school. In the face of ridicule, Owen retains as
the head of his infant school a teacher who is both illiterate and without professional training because " he does not
know how to teach what is found in books, but he does
know Nature and loves children, and by that love will
bring Nature and the children together." With Owen as
with Pestalozzi and Froebel, "the essential principle of
education is not teaching. It is Iove. The child loves
and believes before it thinks and acts."
( 4) In the New Lanark school the "benevolent superintendence" which Pestalozzi and Froebel practised characterized the teaching. This was an educational idea
which Owen received at the feet of Pestalozzi. His great
faith in the ultimate uplift of the common people made
him a steadfast believer in the innate possibilities of
childhood-in its large capacity for physical, intellectual,
and moral development. Powers are hereditary, but it is
the duty of the schoolroom environment to assist to the
fullest extent in calling them forth. There is a natural
method by which these powers unfold. The natural
method is as certain, if we could but discover it, in the development of moral and intellectual powers as in that of
physical powers.
Bacon taught that we command Nature only by obeying
her. Nature is in the schoolroom with the teacher eager
to assist in the developing process. Let the t eacher beware lest in his blind following of a system or in his devotion to a false educational creed, or in his anxiety to cram
·. childish minds with the letter that killeth, he interfere
with that development which Nature at his elbow seeks to
bring about. Let him rather practise that benevolent superintendence which remembers that "the purpose of
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THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
teaching is to bring ever more out of man rather than to
put more and more into him"; which perceives that the
purpose of instruction is not to teach but to develop; which
follows Nature and not a svstem; which lead s the mind of
the child and yet follows it wit!~ trusting footsteps; and
which vaunteth not itself but stands in the presence of
Nature, the handmaiden, with uncovered head.
'l'o the criticism that the teacher of the infant school at
New Lanark merely played with the children, let it be
urged that though he would not have understood the term
"benevolent superintendence,'' yet with Owen's encouragement he practised it almost a quarter of a century before
Froebel made it one of the chief features of his kindergarten. For the simple pedagogue of New Lanark gave his
charges, through play, that which Nature asked for them
at their stage of growth, and drew out of them through its
physical exercise, spontaneity, quickness of thought and
action, happiness, and love.
What part ought benevolent superintendence to play in
the schoolroom to-day ? In 1889 Charles De Garmo, in
his E ssentials of Method, after discussing the question, declared that the teacher has his activity limited to these two
things: "First, the preparation of the child's mind for a
rapid and effective assimilation of new knowledge; second,
the presentation of the matter of instruction in such order
and manner as will best conduce to the most effective assimilation." Quick, in his Educational Reformers, after
discussing and approving the above, adds that " besides
this he must make his pupils use their knowledge, both '
new and old, and reproduce it in fresh connections."
( 5) Just as in the kindergarten which followed it, the
infant school at New Lanark brought into play the activity
of the children. While, like Froebel, Owen limited the
function of the educator to "benevolent superintendence"
of the natural unfolding of childhood, yet, like Froebel
also, he recognized that since the natural development of ·
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THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
childish powers requires their appropriate exercise, "benevolent superintendence " must both originate and direct
childish activity. Som e of the games which Buchanan and
his female assistant gave lo the chil llren at N cw Lanark
were Scottish games peculiar to the Low lands; some, they
devised to teach indirectly important ethical, moral, and
physical truths; some, the children themselves invented.
All were of a wholesome type and designed, like the
games which Froebel bequeathed to the kindergarten, to
call forth the spontaneous and untrammeled activity of
the children.
It must of course be admitted that these games lacked
the efficiency which the theory, and the plan, and the gifts,
and the system which Froebel bestowed have given to the
play of the modern kindergarten. But they were based
upon the same idea and sought to achieve the same purpose. Though Robert Owen did not possess the mysticism
which characterizes most of the utterances of Froebel, he
showed by his efforts in the infant school at New Lanark
that he too believed that "man is primarily a doer"; that
"he learns only through self activity"; that "the formative and creative instinct has existed in all children ana
in all ages"; and that when the activity of the children
is properly directed by benevolent superintendence they
t " render the inner outer," which is the end of all true
education.
HIGHER

SCHOOL

In the higher school at New Lanark the following sub,., ·jects were taught: Reading, writing, arithmetic, natural
history, geography, ancient history, modern history, sew<ing, singing, and dancing. No books were used, fo:r ''his
1aim was to train the children to good habits, not to cram
their heads with facts." Only amusement in the form of
· games was offered to those under six years of age. Instruction was made pleasant and agreeable, no lesson being
223
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--THE NEW HARNONY MOVEMENT
given more than forty-five minutes in length.
the instruction was given by the "object method," for William Maclure, who visited the school in 1824, says that
u the children are taught by representations in all cases
where they can be obtained, the transparent being used
only in part for the explanation of the elements of botany,
the shape of the leaves, etc." Much attention, and properly so, for it is the basic study in the acquirement of
knowledge, was given to reading.
Robert Dale Owen in his description of the school dwells
but little upon the course of study, but takes occasion to
say, "Children should never be directed to read what they
can not understand. Reading should be preceded between
the ages of five and seven years by a r eg ular course in , ,
natural history, ancient and modern history, chemistry,
and astronomy. All this on the plan prescribed by Nature
to give a child such particulars as he can easily be made to
understand concerning the nature and properties of the
different objects around him, before we teach him the
artificial signs which have been adopted to represent these
objects." Robert Owen doubted "whether in a rational •
state of society children under ten years old would be
taught to read."
Absurd as was Owen's plan to prepare children for in- ,
telligent reading, from our point of view,· it was made
necessary by the exceedingly difficult vocabulary and technical subject-matter in the most elementary readers of that ·
day. In these days when the makers of readers are, in the
name of classical literature, filling them with selections
that lie beyond the vocabulary, the experience, and the comprehension of the children for whom they are intended, it '
would be well to remember again and again the simple
declaration: " Children should never be directed to read what they can not understanrl."
The higher school, better than the infant school, perhaps, shows the effects of Owen's visit to Stanz. Through
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THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
the meager accounts which Robert Owen, his son, and various visitors to New Lanark, have written concerning the
methods of instruction in the higher school, we can state
with safety that in it, with one notable exception, the main
features of Pestalozzianism prevailed. Those features as
summed up by Morf in his contribution to Pestalozzi's
· Biography are:
( 1) " Instruction must be based on the learner's own
experience.
·
' (2) "What the learner experiences must be connected
with language.
( 3) " The time for learning is not the time for judging, nor the time for criticism.
('4) " In every department instruction must begin with
the simplest elements and, starting from those, must be
carried on step by step according to the development of
the child; that is, it must be brought into psychological
· sequence.
( 5) " At each point, the instructor shall not go for, ward till that part of the subject has become the proper
intellectual possession of the learner.
( 6) " Instruction must follow the path of development, not the path of lecturing, teaching, br telling.
(7) "To the educator, the individuality of the child .
: must be sacred.
' · ( 8) " Not the acquisition of knowledge or skill is the
main object of elementary instruction, but the development
and strengthening of the powers of the mind.
(9) "With knowledge must come power, with infor, mation, skill.
(10) "Intercourse between educator and pupil, and
'School discipline especially, must be based on and controlled by love.
(11) "Instruction must be subordinated to the aim of
, education."
The one tenet of the creed espoused in common by Pes-

225

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'·

- - ·--- THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
talozzi and by Froebel, which Robert Owen neither accepted nor practised in his various educational experiments
was the one which, if added to the declaration of principles
given above, would be numbered twelve and reads as follows: "The ground of moral-religious bringing-up lies in
the relation of mother and child."
Extremely clear and strong is the attitude of Pestalozzi
and Froebel with respect to the necessity of religious influence in education. Pestalozzi placed moral and religious training above the intellectual, and with him moral
and religious training were one and the same. He revolted against the prevailing elementary education of his
day because "everywhere in it the flesh predominated over
the spirit, everywhere the divine element was cast into the
shade. Everywhere selfishness and the passions were taken
as the motives of action." To him the education which was
to lead forth the soul powers as well as the mind powers
of the people must be different from this, for "man does
not live by bread alone. Every child needs to know how to pray to God in all simplicity, but with faith and love.
If the religious element does not run through the whole of
education, this element will have little influence on the
life; it remains formal or isolated. The child accustomed ·
from his earliest years to pray, to think, and to work is
already more than half educated."
With Froebel, all true education was found ed on religion. He pointed the way to that halcyon day when
" education should lead and guide man to clearness concerning himself and in himself, to peace with Nature and
to unity with God"; when the training of the schools
"should lift him to a knowledge of himself and of mankind, to a knowledge of God and Nature; and to the pure
and holy life to which such knowledge leads." With him
always " the object of education is the realization of a
faithful, pure, inviolate, and hence holy life."
With Froebel as with Pestalozzi, moral and

22G

THE EDUCATION AL EXPERIMENT
training were one and inseparable. Owen divorced the two
· by ignoring in all of his educational, as in all of his other
attempts at social reform, the religious nature of man. At
the time of the New Lanark experiment, he had made at
least no public declaration of his religious views. It was
not until seventeen years later that, on the very verge
of sweeping reforms in English factory laws, which his
unceasing agitation coupled with the public confidence
reposed in him had made possible, Owen, then the largest
figure in the public eye, made such a sweeping attack upon
all existing religious creeds and displayed such a bitter
hatred toward all existing religious institutions that he
astounded the British public, alienated the support of
Christian people, defeated his proposed reform measures,
and handicapped all his after efforts at social reform by
the common public belief that they were the outgrowth of
atheistic and anarchistic tendencies. Yet we find that even
at the New Lanark school, in the language of Robert Dale
Owen, "No religious instruction was permitted, but much
moral instruction, some of it direct, but most of it indirect,
was given."
Owen's attitude on the subject of religious instruction
grew, of course, out of his peculiar religious beliefs, so
different from the simple trusting faith of his great educational contemporaries. Though in reality not an atheist
in the sense in which we use the term to-day, his God was
not the God of Pestalozzi and Froebel, but the God of
· Huxley-not a living, regenerating force in human hearts
touched by His quickening spirit, but a great creative
force, which, having endowed life with potential perfection, has left it to be developed by the tender mercies of
a chance environment.
The question of religious instruction in the public
"": schools has become a much mooted one at the present
·. day, particularly in the United States. In those lands
· where church and state are one, the question becomes

227

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THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
comparatively easy. There state schools become an arm
of the church for the teaching of its creed-a task
which, though all other phases of educational training
be neglected, must be thoroughly executed. An overwhelming public sentiment approves of the religious instruction given and the voice of a hopeless minority is
ignored. But in this country, where freedom of religious
thought and speech is guaranteed by Constitutional provision, and where the twenty million children receiving
public instruction come from homes where every ph ase of
religious belief and even of unbelief finds enthusiastic supporters, the problem of what to do with religious instruction in the schools becomes exceedingly difficult.
No clearer statement of this problem which confronts
legislatures and courts, as well as educators, can be found
than that given by Nicholas Murray Butler in th e Meaning of Education (McMillan & Co., 1901, pp. 28-31 inclusive). After tersely setting forth the difficulties surrounding religious instruction in our educational system,
and showing that the drift in the schools of the United
States is away from the simple r eligious instruction which
Pestalozzi and Froebel gave and toward the non-religious
instruction of the schools at N ew Lanark, Butler comments
as follows: " Two solutions of the difficulty are proposed.
One is that the State shall tolerate all existing forms of religious teaching in its own schools. The other is that the
State shall aid by money-grants schools maintained by religious or other corporations. Neither suggestion is likely
to be received favorably by the American people at present,
because of the bitterness of the war between the denominational theologies. Yet the r eligious element may not be
permitted to pass wholly out of education unless we are to
cripple it and render it hopelessly incomplete. It must
devolve upon the family and the church, then, to give this
instruction to the child and to preserve the religious insight from loss. Both family and church must become
228

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
much more efficient, educationally speaking, than they are
now, if they are to bear this burden successfully." ·
While Robert Dale Owen "~rote but little concerning the
methods of instruction and course of study at N cw Lanark,
he has described at length the plan of school government
and the moral training attempted there. From this description, the following principles regulating the New
Lanark schools may be gathered:
(1) "All rewards and punishments whatever, except
such as Nature herself has provided, arc sedulously excluded. By natural punishment, we mean the necessary
consequences immediate and remote which result from any
action." In his instructions to the teachers Robert Owen
declared that, " they were on no account ever to beat any
one of t he children, nor t o t hreaten t hem in any manner in
word or action, nor to use abusive terms; but were always
to speak to them with a pleasant countenance and in a kind
manner and tone of voice."
Robert Dale Owen but voiced the sentiments of his distinguished father when he declared all rewards and punishments other than those which Nature bestows to be unjust-" unjust as on the one hand loading those individuals
with supposed advantages and distinctions whom Providence, either in the formation of their talents and dispositions or in the character of their parents and associates,
seems already to have favored; and on the other, as inflicting further pain on those whom less fortun ate circumstances had already formed into weak, vicious, or ignorant,
or, in other words, into unhappy beings.
"And prejudicial in rendering a strong, bold character
either proud or overbearing, or vindictive and deceitful; or
,' in instilling into the young mind, if more timid and less
decided, either an overweening opinion of its own abilities
and endowments or a dispiriting idea of its own incompetency-such an idea as creates a sullen, hopeless despondency and destroys that elasticity of spirit from whence
229

.

-:

--THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
many of our best actions proceed, but which is lost as soon
as the individual feels himself sunk, mentally or morally,
below his companions, disgraced by punishment, and
treated with neglect or contempt by those around him."
"Artificial rewards and punishments are introduced;
and the child's notions of right and wrong are so confused
by the substitution of these for the natural consequences
resulting from his conduct-his mind is in most cases so
thoroughly imbued with the uncharitable notion that whatever he has been taught to consider wronodeserves imme0
diate punishment; and that he himself is treated unjustly
unless rewarded for what he believes to be right; that it
were next to a miracle if his mind did not become more or
less irrational; or if he chose a course which otherwise
would have appeared too self-evidently beneficial to be rejected."
(2) "Every action whatever must be followed by its
natural reward and punishment."
( 3) " A clear know ledge and a distinct conviction of
the necessary consequences of any particular line of conduct is all that is necessary, however skeptical some may
be o~ this point, to direct the child in the way he should g~,
provided common justice be done in regard to the other
circumstances which surround him in infancy and in childhood."
( 4) "Whatever in its ultimate consequences increases
the happiness of the community is right; and whatever on
the other hand tends to diminish that happiness is wrong."
( 5) " The happiness of the child is intimately connected with that of the community. Experience aids in
this. Artificial rewards and punishments confuse this
t?ought. Rightly understood, the child is led to right action, for he could not deliberately make himself miserable
in preference to making himself happy."
(6) "A c~ild who acts improperly is not an object of
blame but of pity. The fact of wrong action simply shows
230

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
that he has not been properly trained." Here Robert Dale
Owen draws an analogy between the child who is a wrongdoer and the traveler who, improperly directed; takes the
wrong road and fails of his destination. We would not
think of chiding or punishing the traveler. Not he, but
they who failed to direct him properly are to blame.
Rather will we care for his wants, place him upon the right
road, and send him upon his way rejoicing. The child who
has gone astray is not to blame; but those who have directed him wrong. Like t he traveler, he is to be pitied, not
' censured; cared for; and set again in the path of right
action.
Though, as compared with the other schools of the
period, the New Lanark school was as successful educationally as the great cotton-mill which maintained it was
. financially, some of the same difficulties were encountered
which confront the public-school administration to-day. '
Robert Dale Owen recites some of these :
( 1) " The children were only five hours at school and
under its influence each day; the remaining nineteen hours
being spent under the influence of parents more or less
ignorant, more or less unrefined, more or less brutal and
vicious." The problem of the home handicap is still with
us, but it becomes less serious as the home grows better
from one decade to another.
·~
(2) "There was great difficulty in securing . proper
· '..teachers for the work-those possessing the general and
particular knowledge, habits, and temper necessary to successful teaching, without the pedantry to which members
of the teaching profession are susceptible."
(3) "As soon as the children arrived at the age of ten
years, they were withdrawn and placed in the cotton-mills."
Child-labor laws and truancy regulations have made this
impossible under the age of fourteen years in many of the
, States of the Union.
( 4) Many of the children, because of poor home-train231
/I

.,

,.
/

l

Ii

i

1·=

---

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

ing, had formed bad habits which both infant school and
higher school found it difficult to eradicate.
Even in that day, when the public conscience had not
been quickened in educational matters, the schools at New
Lanark attracted wide-spread attention. The visitors who
came to New Lanark for the purpose of seeing the schools
in operation were very numerous. They arrived by thousands annually. "I have seen,'' says Hobert Owen, "as
many as seventy strangers at once attending the early
morning exercises of the children in the school." Among
these visitors were many of the first persons of the kingdom as well as numbers of illustrious strangers. The
Duke of Holstein (Oldenburg) and his brother stayed
several days with Owen at New Lanark that they might
thoroughly understand the system of infant instruction
in operation then~. The Grand Duke Nicholas, afterward EmpPror nf Hn~ ~ ia , offrrrr1 ::\Tr. 0 11-r n hrgc' inducements lo remove his colony to the Russi:in Empire.
Prince John Maximilian of Austria snen t, sorne Li rne at
New Lanark. Many foreign ambassado~s became guests of
Mr. Owen. among them Baron Just of Saxony, whm;e sovrrcign prcscnfrd a golCT mcr1a1 to Robert 011·en as a mark
oi approval. An aUempt was made hv disciples of Owen
Lu e::itauli:;h a l::iimilar l::ietLiement in Lorn.ion, but unfavorable conditions caused the failure of the ex periment.
It is interesting to note that on the 30th of July, 1824,
William 1\faclnre. a wPalthy retired men·lrnnt of T'hil11rlelp hi a. a rn an dcst in(' d in pl :i y sucl1 a l e:1 d 111~ pa r t i 11 011·(' n 's

will produce; and, second, for the encouragement it infuses
into my long-projected plan, of forming experimental
schools, which, in so superior a field as the United States,
can scarce fail while such an extensively profound and
beneficial system seems to flourish in spite of all the opposition both in church and state."

later ed ucational experiment at New H inmnny, visited the

New Lanark schools. From this visit there came a friendship between the two men which culminated in their association as partners in the New Harmony venture. Maclure
says of the New Lanark schools at this time: " It is really
astonishing the order, happiness, and comfort that pervade the whole. His (Owen's) success gives me much
pleasure on two accounts: First, for the good it certainly
232

THE SCHOOL AT NEW HARMONY

In less than a year after William Maclure wrote in such
enthusiastic terms his approval of the school at New Lanark, Robert Owen had determined to abandon his social
and educational labors there and found a " New Moral
World" somewhere on the American continent. The
very Providence whose jntcrference in human affairs
both men denir(1 must have brought abo11t the strange
associnhnn of Tiolwrt Ov;cn anrl \Yi ll iam ?lfaclu r r in th e
N cw Harmony >cnturc; for out of it came not only the
greatest cxperi men t in social reconstruction which the
world has yet witnessed, but also the firm establishment
of Pestalozzian principles of education in this country, a
great imprtuc; to the American scientific spirit . anc1 a C:('rirs
of rnove111c11ts which largely aliected Americau cJucalional
tlevelo pmern.
There was much in common between the two menmore in common between them than there had been bet.wePn OwPn anrl tlir hero of Rla117.. TioLh mPn wrrn wPalthy
arnl tiicrdon~ aiill' to put their schc111cs for reforming ,;o-

ciet.y to the teft. }{ot.h ;;:ere phdrtnthropl;;:.t.s; v,:iiling to g ive
their all for social betterment. Both eliminated religion
from their schemes of reform. Both espoused the cause
of the productive classes who, in the language of Maclure,
"make their living in the sweat of their brows." Both
brought a severe indictment against the existing social
order. The means by which the reformation of that social
order should be consummated was the one serious point of
233

I!

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

difference between them. Owen seized upon every phase of
man's environment as a weapon in his fight for the uplifting of his fellows. Interested as he was in the educational
experiments at New Harmony, the social Utopia he sought
to create there claimed the greater p1:J.rt of his enthusiasm
and attention. Maclure, on the other hand, believed that
"free, equal, and universal schools" were the only means
by which the rise of the productive classes could be
achieved. Interested only in the educational phase of the
New Harmony movement, he manifested little interest
and less faith in the dreams which his partner sought to
realize.
Both believed in the educational principles enunciated
by Pestalozzi. Maclure in his Opinions on Various Subjects, a publication of three volumes, printed and bound
in the industrial school at New Harmony, sets forth at
length his reasons for approving of the Pestalozzian system of instruction. After criticizing the evils of the social
order, he declares that "to rectify as far as education can
the foregoing evils, the system of Pestalozzi through all its
manipulations is admirably calculated. Having traveled
seven summers in Switzerland, and some months of each
residing at Pestalozzi's school at Yverdun, I never saw the
pupils in or out of school without one of the teachers presiding at their games, etc., all of which were calculated to
convey instruction. They were constantly occupied with
something useful to themselves or others from 5 A. llL to
8 P. M., with the exception of four half hours at meals, at
which all the teachers ate with the pupils; their attention
was never fatigued with more than one hour at the same
exercise, either moral or physical; all was bottomed on free
will by the total exclusion of every species of correction.
Their actions were cheerful, energetic, and rapidly tending
toward the end aimed at.
" I do not recollect ever to have heard a cry or any
demonstration of pain or displeasure nor even an angry
234

word from teacher or pupil all the time I lived -among
them. One of the most beneficial-consequences is the pleasure all of Pestalozzi's pupils take in mental labor and
study. Though I often went out of my road fifty leagues to
examine young men taught under this system, I do not remember ever finding one of an ill-natured temper ,or bad
conduct of all I saw either in Europe or in this country,
and I usually found them greatly superior in all the useful
accomplishments to all those educated by other methods."
It was in 1805 that Maclure first visited Pestalozzi's
school in Switzerland, where, to use the language of Joseph
Neef, "he was soon convinced of the solidity, importance,
and usefulness of the Pestalozzian system. Indeed, to see
Pestalozzi's method displayed before his eyes and to form
an unalterable wish of naturalizing it in his own country
were operations succeeding each other with such rapidity
that Maclure took them for one and the same operation."
On being asked by him to recommend a disciple capable of
carrying on the work in America successfully, Pestalozzi
named Joseph Neef. Maclure supported Neef for two
years while he was learning the English language, after
which he established, on the Schuylkill River, five miles
from Philadelphia, with Neef as principal, the first Pestalozzian school on the Western continent. After several
years of indifferent success the school was tr an sferred to
Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where in 1814 the effort
was abandoned because of public prejudice against N eef's
boldly proclaimed atheism. Neef moved to Louisville,
· bought a small farm near the city, ·and renounced teaching
altogether. From this retreat he was brought to N ew Harmony by Owen and Maclure in 1826.
When the partnership between Owen and Maclure gave
the latter sole charge of the educational efforts at New
Harmony, he gathered together some of the members of
. the teaching force of his former school and the scientists
whom his own distinguished achievements had attracted to
235

<

I

I

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
the venture and set out with his "Boat-load of Knowledge" down the turbid Ohio. The party arrived at The
New Moral World eight months after Robert Owen had
established his colony there. Maclure began at once to
organize the school system, which he fondly hoped would
become. the center of American education through the introduction of the Pestalozzian system of instruction. One
of his first acts was to publish a prospectus, or "course
of study,'' for the contemplated schools.

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
(2) ]{echanism and lJfathematics
\

\

" The children are to learn mechanism by machin~s or
ex~ct models of them, arithmetic by a machine called the
arithmometer, ?eometry by a machine called the trignometer, by which the most useful propositions of Euclid
are reduced. to ~he comprehension of a child five or six years
old; mathematics by the help of the above-mentioned instruments."
(3) Science

MACLURE'S OUTLINE, OR COURSE OF STUDY, FOR THE
NEW HARMONY SCHOOLS

In Silliman's Journal, early in 1826, and before the
organization of the schools had been much more than begun, Maclure outlined the system of instruction to be
pursued, stating that Phiquepal d' Arusmont, and Madame
Fretageot, with Messrs. Say, Maclurc, and other educators,
"are now prepared to organize at New Harmony a boarding-school on those principles >r h ich have for some time
been in operation at New Lanark, Scotland."

."_Natural hi_story in all its branches is learned by 'exthe obJects in substance or accurate representat10ns of them in designs or prints; anatomy by skeletons
and wax figures; geography by globes and maps-most of
the. last of their own construction; hygiene, or the preservation of health, by their own experience and observation
of the co n~equences of all natural fun ctions. T hey learn
natural philosophy by the most improved and simple instruments."
( 4) Writing and Drawing
a~mmng

(1) Great or Fundamental Principle of Education
~· .. "They are taught the elements of writing and design· ~ng by t.he freed?m of hand acquired by constant practise
" The great or fundamental principle is, never to attempt to teach children what they can not comprehend, and
:n form:ng all kmds of figures with a slate and pencil put
to teach them in the exact ratio of their understanding
mto their hands when they :first enter the school, on which
without omitting one line in the chain of ratiocination,
they. d.raw lines, dividing them into equal parts, thereby
proceeding always from the known to the unknown, from
obtammg an accuracy of the eye which, joined to the conthe most easy to the most difficult; practising the most ex' Blll:nt exe:cise of judging the distance of objects and their
tensive and accurate use of all the sen ses; exerci s ing, im· ="~= height, gives them a perfect idea of space."
prov ing, and per feeling all tlic mental anrJ cor poral faeul- ___,.-=(5) .M usic
ties by quickening combination; accelerating and carefully
arranging comparison; judiciously and impartially making "
.: "They learn music through the medium of an organ
deductions; summing up the results free from prejudice,
,. constructed for the purp~se, and a sonometer, first learning
and cautiously avoiding the delusions of the imagination,
_ the sounds and then bcmg taught the notes, or signs of
a constant source of ignorance and error."
... those sounus."
236
237

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

THE EDUCATIONAL .EXPERIMENT

( 6) Gymnastics

of age, was the reproduction of the night-school which
Owen had conducted for the ·· benefit of tile operatives of

" Gymnastics, or the exercise of all muscular motions,
they acquire by the practise of all kinds of movements always, preferably, those that may lead to utility, such as
marching, climbing, the manual exercise, etc. They are
taught the greatest part of these branches at the same time,
never fatiguing the mind by giving more than an hour's
attention to the same thing, changing the subject and
rendering it a play by variety."

(7) Languages
" The pupils learn as many languages as there are languages spoken by the boys of different nations in the school,
each instructing the other in the ...-ocabulary of his language."
(8) Manual Training
" Lithographing and engraving as well as printing are
to be carried on in the school building, as well as other mechanic arts, that the children may receive manual training.
The boys learn at least one mechanical art-for instance,
setting type and printing, and for this purpose there are
printing-presses in each school by the aid of which are
published all their elementary books."
..'·
j

I~

,,~,.

In attempting to carry out the course of study an- ·
nounced in Silliman's Journal and outlined above, Maclure patterned the New Harmony educational system ·
closely after the successful system which Owen had abandoned at New Lanark. H e not only adopted the same
educational principles, but also the same school units and
organization. The infant school at New Harmony, receiving children from two to five years of age, was the 1
exact counterpart of Owen's infant school at New Lanark;
the higher school, enrolling those from five to twelve years
238

his New Lanark mills.
\
\
The schools, though established primarily for the benefit of the children of the community, were open, on payment of tuition, to children from outside the community,
and pupils came from as far east as Philadelphia and New
York. The terms for non-resident children were: for
boarding, lodging, washing, clothing, medical attendance,
medicine, and instruction in the various branches taught,
one hundred dollars per annum. Girls were received upon
the same terms as boys, the course of instruction pre·
· scribed for them being the same as that laid down for the
other sex. The doctrine of the social system as officially
promulgated was : " It is contemplated in ~fr . Owen's
system, by giving our female population as good an education as our males, to qualify them for every situation in
life in which, consistently with their organization, they
may be placed."
To an age which coeducation has conquered, Owen's
declaration that the females of New Harmony were to receive as good an education as the males seems superfluous,
• but in the far-off year of 1826 the declaration attracted
additional public attention to the educational experiments
on the Wabash. While it is true that previous to the New
·;l' Harmony venture a few private and endowed schools were
founded for the express purpose of affording better educational advantages for girls, yet it is also true that the
educational system at New Harmony was the first publicschool system in the United States which offered the same
" opportunities to girls as it did to boys. For though the
.' schools at New Harmony were open to non-resident pupils
upon the payment of a tuition fee of one hundred dollars
· per annum, yet, so far as the children of the community
itself were concerned, they were public schools in an even
wider sense than that in which we use the term to-day, for
239

'I

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
in them the children were not only trained but fed, clothed,
and sheltered.
At the time of Maclure's arrival at New Harmony there
were no public schools in the United States save the township schools of New England. In these public schools of
the New England colonies some provision had been made
for the education of girls before the close of the eighteenth
century, but these provisions were meager and unsatisfactory. The training which they received was given either
in short summer terms or at the noon hours or at other intervals of the town or boys' school. Boone, in his History
of Education, says: " But no such opportunity was offered
girls to make the most of themselves as had been forced
upon most boys for a half-dozen generations." Even in
most of the private schools, where better educational facilities were offered to girls, instruction was confined to writing, reading, spelling, arithmetic, and English grammar.
In the very year in which the New Harmony schools were
inaugurated, an attempt was made at Boston to establish
a high school for girls. In a year, however, it failed because the attempt to give an education to both sexes involved too great a drain upon the public purse. It was
not until 1843 that Providence opened its high school for
boys and girls. It was several years before another community took up the interest. In 1840 the city of Philadelphia established a separate high school for females. It was
not until 1852 that Boston reestablished the girls' high
school.
These are the facts in the past history of education in
this country which led Boone to say, "By a kind of traditionary blindness, few among the colonial fathers saw
the contradiction of the most fundamental of their religious and political principles in disregarding or thwarting
the intellectual life of their daughters." The educational
experiment at New Harmony then was not only far in advance of the other schools of this country in its methods of
240

THE EDUCATION AL EXPERIMENT
government and in its Pestalozzian system 0£ instruction,
but also in the provisions whi~h it made £or the proper
education of the gentler sex.
'.
In Community House No. 2 Madame Neef, assisted by
Madame Fretageot, conducted an infant school of over one
hundred .children. Mrs. Neef was the wife of Joseph Neef
and the mother of :five of the teachers in the higher school
of the community. She was a native of Wiirtemberg. Her
brother became a professor in Pestalozzi's Institute, and
she was educated under the supervision of Mrs. Pestalozzi.
Professor Neef was her French teacher, and just before his
departure for America they were married. The laws of
the social system provided that children should become the
property of the community at the age of two years, and it
was in the infant school that they were :first received. The
chief work of the teacher was to direct the amusements of
the children, who were taught various games, some of them
instructive, similar to those employed in the present-day
kindergarten. The training of the school was copied very
largely after that which Buchanan had given in his crude
efforts at New Lanark.
The higher school for pupils between the ages of five
and twelve years was taught by Joseph Neef, as principal,
assisted by his four daughters and one son, all of whom
had been pupils of Pestalozzi and had been brought to the
community because of their familiarity with his system of
instruction. In the palmy days of the New Harmony ex. periments the enrolment in this school was between one
' hundred and eighty and two hundred pupils of both sexes.
It was, strictly speaking, the Pestalozzian school of the
system. The prospectus published by Maclure in Silliman's Journal constituted its course of study. A portion
of the time of the pupils of this school was devoted to
some branch of the work of the industrial school, the two
schools constituting what we would call to-day a manual
training-school.
241

.....
THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
The school for pupils over twelve years of age, called by
the New Harmony Gazette the" School for Adults," had at
one time an enrolment of eighty. 'rhese received, usually
at night, special training in mathematics and the useful
arts together with lectures on chemistry by Troost, drawing
by Lesueur, natural history by Thomas Say, and experimental farming by ::M:. Phiquepal d' Arusmont.
The industrial school was the one innovation which
Maclure grafted upon the educational system. Every
other feature, as he himself acknowledged in the prospectus
of the school, he copied, not from his own unhappy effort
on the Schuylkill, but from Owen's brilliant success in
Scotland. Maclure was one of the earliest champions of the idea of industrial education. He founded an agricultural school near the city of Alicante, Spain, on an
estate of ten thousand acres purchased for this purpose, but
an end was put to these plans by a political revolution which resulted in the confiscation of his property. New
Harmony afforded another opportunity for an industrial
experiment, which he eagerly seized. Though in his eccentric career Maclure championed many ideas with all the
vigor of his vehement nature, there was none he espoused
more vigorously than he did the educational theories upon
which he organized the manual labor work in the schools
of The New Moral World. These theories were:
( 1) There should be free, equal, and universal schools
to which at an early age children should be surrendered
and in which they should be clothed, fed, sheltered, and
educated at the public expense.
( 2) Every child of the productive classes should be
taught a trade in order that he may be self-supporting and
independent.
(3) Properly managed, the labor of th e child at his
trade in the industrial department should more than pay
for his maintenance and entirely r elieve the public from
the financial burden of supporting the schools.
242

--•

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

When the children who were the property of the community had arrived at the age of five years they passed
from the infant school into the higher or true Pestalozzian
school. While pursuing the work in this school as set
:forth in Maclure's Prospectus or Course of Study, they, at
the same time, were learning some useful occupation or
trade in the indus trial school. The child was permitted to
choose the branch of industry in which he wished to be
trained. Where he made no choice, the management sought
to assign him to one for which he had special aptitude.
At night the children did not return to the homes of their
parents, whom they saw but seldom, but slept in an upper
room or loft above the workshop in which their daily
manual task was performed. Every child was expected to
learn at least one occupation or trade well. When this had
been done he might receive permission to enter another
workshop and learn a seco nd ind ustry.
It appears certain that at some time or other during the
life of the industrial school at New Harmony each of the
:following useful occupations were taught: Taxidermy,
printing and engraving, drawing, carpentry, wheelwrighting, wood-turning, blacksmithing, cabinet-making, hatmaking, shoemaking, agriculture, washing, cooking, sewing, housekeeping, dressmaking, and millinery. Whatever
may have been the character of the training in other de..
partments, there is absolute proof that the work of the
printing-shop was thorough. Maclure's Opinions, a publication in three volumes, was printed and bound by the
pupils in it. The typographical work of these books is excellent, and after the lapse of eighty years the binding is
in good condition.
We catch a faint glimpse of the industrial system in the
diary of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who writes of his visit
to the community schools in April, 1826: . "I found Professor Neef in the act of leading the boys of his school out
,, ·to labor. Military exercise formed a part of the instruc243

/

-

..
THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

tion of the children. I saw the boys divided into two ranks •
a much greater age than the children who were taught in
and parted into detachments, marching to labor. On the
the workshops of the community.'..
.
way they performed various wheelings and evolutions. All
The Rensselaer Institute was strictly a technical school,
the boys and girls have a very healthy look, are ch~erful
while the New Harmony experiment was purely a tradeand lively, and by no means bashful. The boys labor m the
school. In the latter a trade is taught, in the former
field and garden and were now occupied with new fenc.ing.
both the trade and the technique of the trade are taught.
The girls learned female employments; they were as little
Though the Rensselaer Institute was the first industrial
oppressed as the boys with labor and teaching; these happy
and the first technical industrial school in the United
and interesting little children were much more employed
States, Maclure's attempt afforded the first purely tradein making their youth pass as happily as possible.
school. After reciting a list of manual labor organizations
" Madame Neef showed me their schoolhouse, in which
which followed in the wake of these pioneer ventures,
she dwelt, and in which places for sleeping were arranged
Boone, in his History of Education, says truly: " Though
for the boys. Each slept upon a cot frame, on a straw
many of these efforts to promote industry in connection
bed. . . . I went to the quondam church, or workwith literary institutions failed, and most of the schools
shop for the boys who are intended for joiners and shoewere closed or reorganized as academies, they served a
makers. These boys sleep upon the floor above the church
double and worthy purpose; the function of intelligent
in cribs, three in a row, and thus have their sleeping-place
labor was magnified and the seed sown for a more fruitful
and place of instruction close together. We saw also the
harvest. For how much of the idea of technical education
shops of the shoemakers, tailors and saddlers, also the
in agriculture and the mechanic arts the present is insmiths, of which six were under one roof, and the pottery,
debted to these institutions can not perhaps be determined.
in which were two rather large furnaces. The greater part
Enough is known to suggest that the obligation must be
of the young girls whom we chanced to meet at home we
large."
found employed in plaiting straw hats."
But little concerning the workings of the New HarThe industrial school at New Harmony was the second
mony educational experiment can be gleaned from the
to be established in the United States. There was at this
official records of the community. Though still in a retime but one other manual training-school in this country
markable state of preservation, they are almost entirely
-the Rensselaer Institute, which was founded two years
occupied with the endless bickerings of the social syst:m.
previously ( 1824). 'l'hcse two pioneer ins~ituti~ns, so
The most reliable and interesting information concernrng
closely associated in point of time, differed widely m cur. the community schools is to be de~ived from the accounts
riculum. " The Rensselaer school had for that day ex- ·
, given by those who in the days of The New Moral World
tensive laboratory advantages in chemistry and physics, ·
in the capacity of teacher or pupil or visitor came in conand taught the analysis of soils, fertilizers, minerals, and
tact with them.
animal and vegetable matter, with their applications to
Mrs. Sarah Cox Thrall, who died in New Harmony a
a!ITiculture, domestic economy, and the arts, and as early
few years ago, was a pupil in the community schools. She
a~ 1835 had a department for instruction in engineering
__, · stated that in summer the girls wore dresses of coarse
and technology." This course appealed only to students of
with a coarse plaiu costume for Sunday or for
244
245

\

'\
THE EDUCATION AL EXPERIMENT

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
special occasions. In winter they wore heavy woolen
dresses. At rising, a detail of the girls was sent out to do
the milking, and this milk, with mush cooked in large
kettles, constituted the essential part of the morning meal,
which the children were expected to finish in fifteen minutes. "We had bread but once a week-on Saturdays. I
thought if I ever got out, I would kill myself eating sugar
and cake. We marched in military order, after breakfast,
to Community House No. 2. I remember that there were
blackboards covering one side of the schoolroom, and that
we had wires, with balls on them, by which we learned to
count. We also had singing exercises by which we familiarized ourselves with lessons in various branches. At dinner we generally had soup, at supper mush and milk
agam.
" We went to bed at sundown in little bunks suspended
in rows by cords from the ceiling. Sometimes one of the
children at the end of the row would swing back her
cradle, and, when it collided on the return bound with the
next bunk, it set the whole row bumping together. This
was a favorite diversion, and caused the teachers much
distress. At regular intervals we used to be marched to the
community apothecary shop, where a dose that tasted like
sulphur was impartially dealt out to each pupil, just as .
in Squeers' Dotheboys school. Children regularly in the
boarding-school were not allowed to see their parents, ex- .
cept at rare intervals. I saw my father and mother twice
in two years. We had a little song we used to sing:
"Number 2 pigs locked up in a pen,
When they get out, it's now and then;
When they get out, they sneak about,
For fear old Neef will find them out."

"t

Robert Dale Owen also gives us a picture of the New,
Harmony schools in operation. " In the educational de246

partment," he writes, " we had considerable talent, mixed
with a good deal of eccentrid.ty. We had a Frenchman,
patronized by Mr. Maclure, a Phiquepal d' Arusmont, who
became afterward the husband of Frances Wright, a man
well informed on many points, but withal a wrong-headed
genius, whose extravagance, wilfulness, and inordinate selfconceit destroyed his usefulness. He had a small school,
but it was a failure-he gained neither the good-will nor
the respect of his pupils.
"Another, of a very different stamp, was Prof. Joseph
Neef, from Pestalozzi's school in Switzerland. Simple,
straightforward, and cordial, a proficient in modern languages, a good musician, he had brought with him from
Pestalozzi's institution at Yverdun an excellent mode of
teaching. To his earlier life, as an officer under Napoleon,
was due a blunt, offhand manner and an abrupt style of
speech, enforced now and then with an oath-an awkward
habit for a teacher, which I think he tried ineffectually
to get rid of. One day, when I was within hearing, a boy
in his class used profane language. 'Youngster,' said Neef
to him, 'you mustn't swear. It's silly, and it's vulgar,
' · and it means nothing. Don't let me hear you do so again.'
· "'But, Mr. Neef,' said the boy, hesitating and looking
· half frightened, 'if-if it's vulgar and wrong to swear,
. why--'
_ " 'Well, out with it. Never stop when you want to say
anything; that's another bad habit. You wished to know
.why--'
"'Why you swear, yourself, Mr. Neef.'
, '· "'Because I'm a fool_! Don't you be one, too!'
" With all his roughness, the good old man was a general favorite alike with children and adults. Those whose
recollections of Harmony extend back to the '40s preserve a genial remembrance of him, walking about in the
sun of July or August, in linen trousers and shirt, always
bareheaded, with a grandchild in his arms, and humming
247

I

I

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

',

to his infant charge some martial air in a wonderful bass
voice, which, it is said, enabled him in his younger days,
when giving command to a body of troops, to be distinctly
heard by ten thousand men."
Robert Dale Owen thus relates an experience of his own
in teaching one of the community schools: " When I first
took charge of the school, finding that the teachers occasionally employed corporal punishment, I strictly forba~e
it. After a time the master of the eldest boys' class said
to me one day: 'I find it impossible to control these unruly rascals. They know I am not allowed to flog them,
and when I seek to enforce rules of order, they defy me.'
"I sought to show him how he might manage them
without the rod, but he persisted. 'If you'd try it yourself
for a few days, Mr. Owen, you'd find out that I'm right.'
" ' Good ' I said ' I'll take them in hand for a week
'
'
or two.'
"They were a rough, boisterous, lawless set; bright
enough, quick of observation; capable of learning w?en ·
they applied themselves, but accustomed to a free swmg,
and impatient of discipline, to which they had never been
subjected. I said to them at the start: ' Boys, I want you
to learn; you'll be very sorry when you come to be mei: if
you don't. But you can't learn anything worth knowmg
without rules to go by. I must have you orderly and
obedient. I won't require from you anything unreasonable,
and I don't intend to be severe with you. But whatever I ···
tell you to do is what has to be done, and shall be done,
sooner or later.' Here I observed on one or two bold faces ·
a smile that looked like incredulity, but all I added was:
' You'll save time if you do it at once.'
" My lessons, often oral, interested them, a?~ things
went on quietly for a few days. I knew the cnsis would
come. It did, in this wise. It was May, the thermometer
was ranging toward ninety degrees, and I res.olved. to take
the class to bathe in the Wabash, much to their delight. I
248

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
told them that by the doctor's adv.ice they were to remain
in the water fifteen minutes only; that was the rule.
When I called, ' Time's up,' they all came out, somewhat
reluctantly, however, except one tall fellow named Ben, a
good swimmer, who detained us ten minutes, notwithstanding my order., several times repeated, to come on
shore.
" I said nothing about it until we returned to the
schoolroom, then I asked the class: ' Do you remember my
saying to you that whatever I told you to do had to be
done sooner or later?' They looked at Ben and said, ' Yes.'
Then I went on. ' I am determined that if I take you to
bathe again, you shall stay in fifteen minutes only. How
do you think I can best manage that?' They looked_ at
Ben again, and seemed puzzled, never, very surely, havmg
been asked such a question before. ' Has no one any
plan ? ' I asked.
"At length a youngster suggested: 'I guess you'd better thrash him, Mr. Owen.' . 'I don't wish to do that,' I replied. ' I think it does boys harm. Besides, I never w~s
whipped myself, I never whipped anybody, and I know it
must be a very unpleasant thing to do. Can't somebody
think of a better plan? '
" One of the class suggested : ' There's a closet in the
garret, with a stout bolt to it-you might shut him up in
there till we got back.'
"'That's better than flogging, but is the closet dark?'
"'Yes.'
"'I think Ben would not like to be shut up in the
. dark for nearly an hour.'
· · " 'No, but then we don't like to be kept from bathing
just for him.'
. .
.
.
"Then one little fellow, with some hesitat10n, put m his
word: 'Please, Mr. Owen, wouldn't it do to leave him in
• the playground? '
" ' If I could be sure that be would stay there, but he

249

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

might get out and go bathing, and remain in half an hour,
of the various communities we.re under its care. In Decemperhaps.'
· ber, 1826, William Maclure forwarded to the State Legis" At this point Ben, no longer able to restrain himselflature a petition for the incorporation of the New Harhe had been getting more and more restless, turning first
mony Educational Society, and a bill was introduced
to one speaker, then to another, as we coolly discussed the
stating that William Maclure "had bought, in and adjoincase-burst forth: 'Mr. Owen, if you leave me in the
ing New Harmony, one thousand acres of land with suitplayground, when they go to bathe next time, I'll never
able buildings erected therenpon, devoted to the establishstir from it. I won' t. You'll see, I won't! '
ment of schools, and had furnished a liberal endowment,
embracing many thousands of volumes of books, with such
" ' Well, Ben,' said I, 'I have never known you to tell a
falsehood and I'll take your word for it this time. But
mathematical, chemical, and physical apparatus as is necremember, if you lie to me once, I shall never be able to
essary to facilitate education, and is desirous to obtain
trust you again. We couldn't believe known liars if we
an act of incorporation to enable him more fully to carry
were to try.'
- out his benevolent designs." This bill was rejected in the
"So the next time we went in bathing, I left Ben in the
State Senate by a vote of fifteen to four, on account of the
playground. When we returned, he met me, with eager
popular impression that atheism was promulgated in the
face, at the gate. 'I never left, even for a minute. Ask
New Harmony schools. The Gazette, in commenting on
them if I have,' pointing to some boys at play.
the action of the Legislature, says: "We presume, from
their conduct, that they have no confidence in our society
" ' Your word is enough. I believe you.'
"Thereafter Ben came out of the water promptly, as
or its intentions."
soon as time was called; and when any of his comrades
In a discussion following the signing of the articles of
·- partnership between the two men, Maclure assured Owen
lingered he was the first to chide them for disobeying
orders.
that not only would he guarantee that instructors and
" Once or twice afterward I had to take a somewhat
professors of a superior type would be enlisted in the prosimilar stand (never against Ben), persisting each time
posed educational experiments, but also that by the deuntil I was obeyed. Then, bethinking myself of my :
~ - partmental system of instruction all the children of the
Hofwyl experience, I called in the aid of military drill,
.., schools would be brought into contact with the superior
which the boys took to very kindly, and when three weeks §§!& §- qualifications possessed by all these teachers. Contrary to
had passed I found that my pupils prided themselves in
this understanding, when the schools were organized each
principal teacher assumed entire charge of the training of
being what, indeed, they were-the best disciplined and
most orderly and law-abiding class in school.
a particular group of children. During the larger portion
" So I carried my point against a degrading relic of
of the life of The New Moral World l\faclure was traveling
barbarism, then countenanced in England, alike in army, ~
· elsewhere, leaving the New Harmony schools without any
navy, and some of the most accredited seminaries."
leadership save that mildly exercised by Thomas Say,
An account of the formation of the educational society ·
whom he had deputized to assume charge during his abhas already been given. With this Mr. Maclure and his
sence.
These things, together with the failure of the Pestalozassociates allied themselves, and the educational interests
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zian school to achieve expected results and of the industrial
school to be self-supporting, caused Owen, dissatisfied with
the educational experiments of his partner, to establish a
separate school system, independent of Mr. Maclure's,
under the leadership of a Mr. Dorsey, a short-lived venture
that achieved no other result than to inaugurate a quarrel
between the two proprietors which culminated in legal
complications.
When at last Robert Owen saw the social temple tumbling about his head, with the characteristic blindness of
the enthusiast who has failed to achieve his golden dream,
he cast about for every reason save the right one to explain
the downfall of his ideal social order. 1'hough the real
cause of the defeat of his plans at New Harmony lay in
the fact that he had trusted too largely to that imperfect
human nature which if perfect would make social reform
unnecessary and even our present social system ideal, Owen
did not hesitate to charge the defeat of his communistic
schemes to Maclure's educational experiment.
In his farewell address to the people of New Harmony
made in 1827, just before the utter collapse of The New
Moral World, Owen said : " If the schools had been in
operation upon the very superior plan upon which I had
been led to expect they would be, so as to convince parents
by ocular demonstration of the benefits which their chil- _
dren would immediately derive from the system, it would
have been, I think, practicable, even with such materials,
with the patience and perseverance which would have been
applied to the subject, to have succeeded in amalgamating
the whole into a community.
"You also know that the chief difficulty at this time
arose from the differences of opinion among the professors
and teachers brought here by Mr. Maclure, relative to the
education of the children, and to the consequent delay in
putting any of their system into operation.
"Having been led to entertain very high expectations of
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THE EDUCATION AL EXPERIMENT
the abilities of these individuals, I looked to them to establish superior arrangements for the instruction of _all
ages, and I was induced to' suppose that the population
would be compensated by the unequaled excellence of the
system when put into operation; and i~ consequ~nc~ ?f the
unlimited confidence which I placed m these mdividuals
to execute this most important part of my plan, you all
know how much I have been disappointed. Instead of
forming one well-digested arrangement, in which all the
children of the community should have the benefit of
the superior qualifications possessed by each professor
and instructor, each principal teacher unde~took the ~n­
tire instruction of a certain number of pupils, by which
arrangement they were prevented from associating with
other pupils.
" By this error in the practise, the object which I had
most at heart could not be attained; the children were
educated in different habits, dispositions, and feelings,
when it ·,vas my most earnest desire that all the children should be educated in similar habits, dispositions,
and feelings, and should be brought up truly .as members of one large family, without a single discordant
feeling.
. .
"It is true that each of the professors and prmcipal
· teachers possessed considerable abilities, and acquirements
in particular branches of education, but the union of the
best qualities and qualifications of several of even the best
modern teachers is required to form the character of the
rising generation as it ought to be formed, and ~nable
children when they attain maturity to become sufficiently
rational and intelligent to make good, useful members of
the social system."
Ii Though the Educational Society perished in the ruins
of the social order and Robert Owen retired broken in fortune from the Waterloo of his efforts as a social architect,
Maclure remained in New Harmony and continued his
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e~ucational experiments. Almost pathetic is the story of
his after efforts as an educational architect. In 1827 he
published an announcement of "Maclure's Seminary"
stating: "Young men and women are received witho~t
any expe~se to them, either for teaching, or food, lodging
~nd clothmg. Hours, from five in the morning until eight
m the evening, divided as follows: The scholars rise at
five; at h~lf past five each goes to his occupation; at seven
the bell rmgs for breakfast; at eight they return to work·
at eleven their lessons begin, continuing until half past
two, including half an hour for luncheon; then they return to their occupation until five, when a bell calls them
to dinner. Afterward until half past six they exercise
themselves i~ va~ious ways; then the evening lessons begin,
and last until eight. The basis of the institution is that
the scholars repay their expenses from the proceeds of their
seven hours' labor, but to effect this will require several
years more."
On May 27, 1827, Mr. Maclure announced "The
Orphans' Manual Training-School." The Manual Train- .
ing-School had its laboratory in a separate building '
equip?ed "with such requisites as are necessary for a~
ex~er.ime~tal course of lectures in chemistry. In another
bu~ldmg i.s a small room lately fitted up for containing the
philosophic apparatus, for which it is well adapted. The
other room of this building has been used for some time as
the drawing-school, but it is to be converted into a museum
in which all the natural productions of Harmony and th~ ·
surrounding country will be accumulated as well as the
collection made by Mr. Maclure during his' travels through
Europe and America." Mr. Maclure also founded what he
c~lled "The School of Industry,'' which had for its prin- "
cipal motto, "Utility shall be the scale on which we shall
ende~vor to measure the value of everything." Under the
auspices of this organization Mr. Maclure established, on
January 16, 1828, the New Harmony Disseminator, "con254

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
taining hints to the youth of the United States; edited,
printed, and published by the. pupils of the School of Industry."
·
When one by one his educational experiments in the
training of children, in each of which he placed such high
hopes, came to naught, William Maclure, still eager to do
something for the cause of education and for the produc.tive classes, " who earn their living in the sweat of their
brows," directed his philanthropy toward the formation of
an educational society for adults which he dubbed "The
Society for Manual Instruction." Announcing its formation, the Disseminator, in 1828, explains that the new society is really a mechanics' institution; that it differs only
in name from the mechanics' institutes of the United
States and Europe, its objects and means being the same as
these; and that its objects are to "communicate a general
knowledge of the arts and sciences to those persons who
have hitherto been excluded from a scientific or general
~4;,_. education by the erroneous and narrow-minded policy of
· colleges and public schools, which have invariably endeav'· ored to confine learning to the rich few, so that they might
tyrannize over the uneducated many."
In 1828 Maclure went to Mexico to recuperate his fail, ing health, leaving his financial and educational interests
under the management of Thomas Say. The state of his
health finally compelled him to take up his permanent resi•. dence there. Within a few years after his departure, the
. last School of Industry which he established closed its
doors because of the withdrawal of the financial support of
er.
its founder. The Society for Mutual Instruction led a
more or less insignificant and halting existence for several
years and then "died for want of breath." Strange to say,
after his departure from New Harmony Maclure seems to
have lost all his former abundant interest and faith in his
educational ventures for children. Not even in his correspondence with Thomas Say and Madame Fretageot does
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he allude to his former efforts in behalf of rcstalozzianism
eleven postulates of the so-called Pestalozzian creed as
and self-supporting schools.
·
- given by Morf constituted the chart and compass of the
Yet within a year before his death in a strange land, we
-- educational experiments on the Wabash.
find Maclure still interested in the productive classes at Morf' s twelfth postulate, advocating religious training,
New Harmony, still eager to do something for the education of the children of a larger growth. Through Mr.
" was rejected at New Harmony, as it had been at New
Lanark. 1\faclurc was a pronounced atheist and opposed
Achilles E. Fretagcot, son of J'lfadamc Frctagcot, he in- even more bitterly than Owen the Christian religion, which
augurated in 1837 a corrcspo11dence with the workingmen
of New Harmony which resulted in the establishment of a
he denounced as an institution by the aid of which the
Working Men's Institute and Library, which rose like
non-productive oppressed and held in bondage the productive classes. The peculiar religious opinions of Owen
P 11enix of old out of the dormant ashes of the Society for
Mutual Instruction. The gifts which he 1'ad contemplated
and Maclure attracted to their venture, along with the idle
and the vicious and the adventurous, men vehementlv_adfor this Working Men's Institute had not been bestowed at
the time of his death. They were executed in part by
vocating every shade and phase of religious belief and unthe brother and sister, whom he named as the executors
belief. In such an atmosphere religious training was
<>f his will.
neither popular nor possible. From the columns of the
New Harmony Gazette it is apparent that the two features
This Working Men's Institute, as will be described in a
or phases of the Pestalozzian system most emphasized
subsequent chapter upon the Maclure Libraries, is in existence to-day, operates the New Harmony Library, was the ~
· (a) The object method of teaching.
first of the large group of institutes and libraries which
Maclure established through the terms of his will, and is . 1
" Children in course of instruction are not perplexed
the sole r emaining evidence of the educational efforts of
· with words of the meaning of which they have no concepthe first American geologist. All the other educational
tion." Models or pictures of the objects to be explaimd
ventures perished as perished the social order, leaving no
are employed where the object itself can not be immediately
record of their existence save that which they have writpresented to the senses of the child.
(b) The concrete in preference to the abstract.
ten by their influence upon the educational methods and
systems of the country.
"The whole of the time at school is devoted to demonWhat were the educational principles and aims of the
. strable fact, leaving all abstract studies until judgment is
New Harmony schools?
matured by a correct knowledge of them and an extensive
( 1) First of all, as has been stated repeatedly, the Pesacquaintance with the things around them."
talozzian system of instruction was followed even more en- ·( 2) The children, in the language of the New Harthusiastically than at New Lanark. Owen advocated this
mony Gazette, "were taught to value virtue for its own
system and Maclure was its devoted apostle. The prosake, without the hope of artificial reward or fear of artispectus for the schools written by Maclure was simply an
ficial
punishment." The abolishment of all reward and
exposition of the Pestalozzian method of teaching the varipunishment
save that arising out of the very nature of the
ous branches of study treated in the prospectus. The
act of the child was the cardinal principle of the New Lan-

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THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

ark schools and the feature of the work there in which
Robert Owen took the greatest interest. When Robert
Dale Owen, while teaching in the community schools, conquered Ben in the manner which he describes on a previous
page of this chapter, without the use of the ferule he was
but carrying out the chief educational principle wl1ich his
distinguished father espoused.
Maclure, strongly approving of the system of school
government exploited by the Owens, incorporated it into
the_ educational system of the community. He was especially vehement in his opposition to the methods of
punishment prevailing in contemporary schools. In the
~ew ~ar~ony Gazette of March 21, 1826, after stating
his obJect10ns to those methods of punishment which produce fear, he continues: " F ear is a sensation so humiliatin~, irksome, and disagreeable to all the feelings of our
species (as well probably as to those of all other animals),
that the best disciplined t emper can not prevent attaching
hatred to th e cause of it. But of all the manifold and de~truct~v~ e~ects th at fear has on the human family none
is so n~Jurwus to the well-being of society and so totally
subversive of the true interest of mankind as the fear of
the child for the teacher, for, in addition to the innumerable. bad. consequences inseparable from fear in any stage
of life, it closes the mind against r eceiving instruction
from the only source that is accessible to children, their
entire attention being occupied in watching the symptoms
of anger in their teacher in order th at they may be prepared to ward off the blow or contrive some means of
escaping punishment."
It is well to remember here that twenty-five years before ." Nichola_s Nickleby" exposed the brutality of the
English boardmg-schools and in the very days when the
birch rod lay like the sword of Damocles across the desk of
every New England schoolmaster, a school system whose .
only means of government was the love between teacher and i

pupils, which, permeating every school, would render corporal punishment obsolet~, flourished in a Western wilderness.
·
( 3) More of the aims and hopes of the educational experiments at New Harmony are to be gathered from the
educational views of the proprietors and teachers than
from what little the schools accomplished or failed to accomplish during their brief career. Some of these will
be briefly set forth in the paragraphs which follow.

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The ideal training which the educational system of
the social scheme hoped ultimately to bestow is described
in an article, evidently written by one of the Owens (either
Robert or Robert Dale, probably the latter), published in
the New Harmony Gazette, May 16, 1827, from whioh the
following is taken :

" The right education of children-not that education
' which teaches the child but a few, to him, unmeaning words
- and phrases, gives him, perhaps, a knowledge of some of
the sciences, or even instructs him to hold converse with
-, men of other days in their own languages, and makes him
familiar with the history of ancient nations and people-yet too often leaves him morose, sullen, bigoted, and deceitful or cruel, passionate, and overbearing; a prey to envy,
ambition, pride, vanity, and conceit; a being incapable of
enjoying life himself and equally a source of misery to
others-but that education which watches over the child
·, from its most tender infancy, with a care that knows no
· ~ intermission; that superintends his instruction and neglects him not in his amusements; that assists him in his
difficulties and prevents their recurrence; that seeks to give
him such habits, feelings, and desires alone as experience
_may prove to be a source of happiness; that leaves him not
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on his entrance into the world, but ever endeavors to surround him through life with circumstances in unison with
his previous habits and inclinations and thus to make him
an int'=llligent companion, a pleasing associate, and a happy
being."
Value of interest and the means by whfrh it may be secured.-Some of the educational ideas which Maclure sets
forth in the three volumes of his Opinions are ridiculous from the standpoint of the intelligent teacher and layman of to-day. Some of them, however, even the pedagogue of the twentieth century would do well to remember.
After making the query, whose interest has been consulted
in all our old-school operations, Maclure continues: "Attention is the only medium through which instruction
passes into the mind; without it nothing makes a lasting
impression on any of the mental faculties. Can undivided
attention be secured by fear or coercion? 'rhis is a query
necessary to be solved, as a principle upon which education
must be bottomed. Does not fear brutalize and paralyze
all the faculties of the mind? Let any one at a mature age
reflect on his feelings when under the impression of fear
and he will find that neither his memory, judgment, nor
any other of his mental faculties were sound. Fear perhaps is the great predisposing cause of many both moral
and physical diseases.
"If fear has so debilitating an influence upon the
physical and moral qualities of men hardened and strengthened by practise and experience, how much more must its
baleful influence pervert and deteriorate the young and
tender minds of children. In a. state of fear the attention
is tli::;trad(' <l, and cnn 110L ad in unison wi Lh Uie s ubj ect
taught but is secured bv uoo<l-will, arising- out of the
pleasure and amusement children take in exercises that
interest them. If so, and my experience does not permit
me to doubt it. the essential hnsiness and duty of at.cacher
is to find-on t lhc inclination of his pupil::;, anu teach them
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any and all the useful lessons he may find they study with
pleasure."- Maclure's Opinions, vol. i, page 66.
.
Reasons why the useful arts should be introduced into
the schools.-As has been before stated, Maclure was a
thorough-going believer in ii:tdustrial ed~cation. After
condemning the pleasures which n_ien denv~ f~?m sports
involving the practise of " tormentmg crue~t~es (such as
fishing, shooting, horse-racing, and bull-_bai tmg), h~ continues: " If pleasurable ideas can by habit and practise be
united with such mortifying exhibitions of human depr~v­
ity where every result is annihilated the moment the action
is flnished how much more easy would it be for teachers
to imprint on the tender minds of child~en the union of
pleasurable ideas with the usef~l occupation of some mechanical art. This would furmsh the necessary musc~lar
exercises so conducive to health, while, at the same time,.
the gratification would be_ prolonged b)'." the permanent
benefit obtained by the utility of what is produced, and
securing pecuniary independence in being _capable of practising a productive trade in case of necessity.
"The being taught to make shoes or coats does not
force the possessor of such knowledge to ~e a shoem~ker_ or
tailor any more than learning mensuration or navigation
oblig:s one to become a surveyor or , sailor.. They a:e all
acquirements good to have i~ case of n_ecessity, and m no
state of society is that necessity more likely _to occur than
in our svstem founded on liberty and equality, where the
only ha; to the most complete equalization of_ the whole
population is the ignor~n~e of th~ gnO)at produc r~g clas ~cs,
which, however, is vam shmg rap1d.ly before t~c m c r eas1~g
mcnn" nf <1l il nining 1Fcfnl kn (m lc\lgc; an 11 chiltln;i1 011gllL
to be t rained and etlucaled to :mit the probable l:ii tuation
which the circumstances of the next age may place them
in. Even at present, all our farmers and manufacturers,.
nine-tenths of our population, would be very much bene:filed 11y po;;sc;;::: ing 011c or two of lhc m ec hanic arts, suit;2Li l

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able to their occupations."-Maclure's Opinions, vol. 11,
page 147.
The value of natural science as a study.-After discussing the obligation of every parent to give his children an
education, Maclure recommends that the pursuit of some
natural science be included in the training given, in these
words: " vVhile parents are giving their children the useful knowledge to carry them respectably through life, they
ought not, on any account, to neglect giving them an occupation or an amusement to fill up their spare time, the
want of which is the cause of most of the drinking and
debauchery of youth. The best, most useful, and cheapest
pastime is the natural sciences, which can be practised in
all countries and climates at the least expense of either
money or morals; the pursuits of which are productive of
health, liberality, and the utmost extension of toleration
.
'
as there is room enough for all, without jostling or infringing on each other's rights or property; they banish
envy and promote contentment, raising their votaries above
the silly squabbles of disappointed ambition and teaching
them an accurate mode of examining the properties of substances they are interested in knowing."-1\faclure's Opinions, vol. iii, page 224.
" The senses and the imagination ought to be trained."Maclure believed this with all the radicalism of his strenuous nature. His scientific pursuits had made him thoroughly utilitarian. In his eager search for the accurate
knowledge which only the senses can vield he had lost
sight_ fore:er ~f the realm of the spirit, vwhe;e faith reigns
and imagmat10n dwells a handmaiden. Hear the argu~en_t by which he exalts the senses and eliminates imagmat10n from the curriculum!
. "Nature has given us our senses, through which we receive all our ideas. Nor can the ingenuity of men invent ,
the figure or form of anything that has not come to them
either entire or by piecemeal through the medium of their
262

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
senses.
Our senses being the only medium
through which we can receive our knowledge of matter or
motion, the only channel by 'which we can receive information of the qualities or properties of animat~d things, it
must follow of course that teaching the correct and rapid
use of all our senses and avoiding all abuse and deceptions
of them ought to be the principal object of education.
" The delusion of the imagination, being one of the
greatest abuses of our sentient faculties, ought to be left at
a great distance from all places of instruction.
Imagination has been so beaten up, mixed, and compounded
with the wisdom of our senses, that it is difficult to draw
the line of separation between them; but every vision of the
mind, which neither directly nor indirectly has come to
us through our senses, may be considered to be the child
. of the imagination, which sometimes produces pleasure,
like an opiate, to end in debility or disappointment; but
most frequently it exaggerates imaginary evils, and, perhaps, nine-tenths of the anxiety, misery, and wretchedness
of humanity are the fruits of imagination. It is probably
not the natural state of man, but the artificial state, engen'· dered by the fallacies of education, and kept up by the
· _rulers of the church and state."
Proper subjects to teach in the school of a fre e people... In his Opinions, vol. i, page 48, Maclure declares that education, like mankind, may be divided into two species, the
productive and non-productive, the useful and the ornamental, the necessary and the amusing. The productive,
· useful, and necessary subj ects in t eaching are those which
we acquire through the senses, such as drawing, chemistry,
natural history, mineralogy, geology, botany, zoology, arith. metic, mechanics, natural philosophy, geography, and
; astronomy. The non-productive and ornamental subjects
are those which train the imagination, such as literature,
-. mythology, etc. " It is the productive, useful, and necessary that constitute the comfort and happiness of the
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THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

millions, and ought alone to occupy the care and attention
of all representative governments, elected by the majority
of the millions, who produce all that is consumed under
the domination either of public or private revenue. The
millions have a right to what they produce; and all appropriations out of the public treasury, for teaching the nonproductive knowledge which is merely ornamental or
amusing to the possessor, may perhaps be considered as a
deviation from right and justice, in expending the fruit of
the labor and toil of the productive classes, to teach the
children of the idle and non-productive how to consume
their own time and the public property in learning to
amuse themselves and kill time agreeablv."- Maclure's
0 .tJ.i.uioms, ml. i, }lage 1.3.

the common schools should be open to pupils without
charge. Even the township , schools of New England,
though bestowing an education that was " free and equal,"
were not "universal," for, basing their moral and religious
training upon the narrow creed of the dominant sect, they
often alienated the support and the patronage of the followers of other faiths.
Yet in 1825, nine years before the first free school supported by taxation on Indiana soil opened its doors, and at
least half a century in advance of the prevailing thought of
the era, Robert Owen and William Maclure established upon
the very frontier of civilization an educational system for
all where instruction could be obtained "without money
an<l wiLhout price."
Though the non-resi<leuls were
charged tuition, to the children of the community the
schools were indeed and in truth free, equal, and universal;
and it was hoprd thry would become self-supporting. for
it was expected that tl1eir industrial training wo11l1l ultirnaich· rdie,:e The ;\ c11· l>fonil \\' orl\l o [ t lie e.\ JWil 0 e of

FREE, E Ql:'cU , "\ND FKIYETIS,\L

EDFC~l.3IO~

T he pcrsisicnc.v wi th 1d1ich both Owen aml i\laclure
througl10ul il1c1r ~tonuy cal'L'lTc! adrnulll'd tlil· l':-:t:ilJli~h ­
ment of a sys tem of State schoo ls, su p po rt ed by the public
pnrse, wher('in without. enst every ehild rni~.dit reeeive an
cdut·at inll l"ill:il lri tli:11 (11' Iii .' lr·l!rm". eo11-.:(1t11t1•,; their
g re:de,; L d:111n ()Jl jllli1li1· ,1..;rnt lllH IC. \\'li(' ll t i1 f' S()('i:t! PXr10rimcnt rl]'f'J101[ if~ t\nnrs iJffifiJJ!!il' f(l liJI' ,jj~l'()l]JP!J[(>([
o[ the H(•p1ilJi1(' , tiH·rc \\('!'<'. 11•1 pu !il 1t· ~1·!1r111l·.:. ill the
Sf'llC:(' in 11 i1i1·h 1n• 11~1· 1111' 1i'rn1 11l-1L1y. n1i1,i iJ,. 111' :\cw
En gland. "l:' ulil1c c:ch 11nl' ·.· in tl1c :\lidd\1.' :lllri ;-;,ndlicrn
St al es "·ere ci1 l1 1'!" "free• "1 ·IJtwl:; .. nr "1 1n11tH'r c:t·li111ils.'' It
wns not· until lt-:'11 ih:d snnw seeli n11 s of tlil' J•::isl 1•rn
8tn1•''! cen..,r•d tn cii:P','..''" :1 f,.,, fnr tlw f1wl enn"11 1J!•1l Iii· the
pupil. J11 lllll' n11n iin11· ilu• 1111l1lir'-"1·l11H1] iil1·:1 in ,.:t'lllC
portions of Lhc South is cornJJasscJ b\· th e care 11hicl1 il is
thought tlie Rfate sl1011lrl bk!• of the 1l1 ·pernle11t anrl imfortn rrn ie c·lns:or•s. It t'('quire1l t iH' e1111siit11tioI1 Ill JSiJ? to
f:'f'tf1hiish in indiam1 tile pri11eiplP 1i1ai il1P propPriy o f the
1

State should educate the chrldren of the
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and that ail

maint:i.ining the educational system. Just as Owen held
up before t he eyes of the nations a new social order, which,
cominccd of its bcneJiL, tl1cy 1rere cxpccfrll lo arl"pt in
their J'PSJH'ctivc civilization~ . so Machll'e linp1•11 thrnugh the·
cf! 1!l':iti ()11 :i! ('\Iwril?le111:' \i:i!l!in iirni ~ocial order tn g11ide
tlw l111n1:rn r:H·;• tn1rn rd (lie lilr•"s111gs of c:chools" free as the
living 1rntl'rf' ...
'l'hc pnblic 11ttcranc<'s :rnd 1rrit ings of holh men arc
n·p!elc \rill! 1111 f'lurrly :1sscrt 11J11 of t lie idea. tha t schools
ought tn he "of thP people, for the Jll'"flle , hy lhe prople.''
Af!er rn:li11taini11g that pnhlic sclinnl~ f11rnish th0 most.
effect in· 1111':111~ of ~lwping clwrnl'ier. Hllliert Chrcn <1el'larcs
that "il1e na(i()J 1al pla11 for lhc formation of cha racter
shon lrl inrlnrlr n11 thr modern imprrwemenls of erl1wation
withnut r0r:rarrl t o thn S\'siPm of anv one iml ivi d11a l an<l
should nol.exclude the ('itiid o f one s;1hjeet in the em pi1T.''
_)!]qually vehement 1s .M aclure, who says: '' One of the

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most sacred duties of a free people, the first time they
living waters of knowledge bought without money and
exercise the right of universal suffrage, is to elect into
without price; for, so shouk1 \hey be in a commonwealth
power none but such as will enact such laws as will selike this.''
cure to all free, equal, universal, and general instruction,
Startling to the age in which they were proclaimed as
at the expense of the public, which is the people's purse. - , were the declarations of the founders of New Harmony
concerning free public schools, they were no more so than
Once secure an equality of knowledge by placing the whole
popnlat.ion hy free schools on the same footing, the equalthe innovations which Maclure read into them, and by
ity of the two other essentials of freedom, property and which he proposed to secure and perpetuate them. 'l'o a
power, must follow as certainly as light and heat follow
people vigorously debating the very legality of "pauper
schools,'' he proposed an<1 sought, lhrough the ed ucational
the ravs of t.he sun.''
'l'l;e sm1R of Rohert Owen caught the spirit of free
experimen ts at The N ew :Mor al W or ld, to demo n st ra t e th e
schools from th eir fa !lie r. In au aclJ rcss delivered at
wi sdom and the feasibility of a S1JarLan sy~tem of cclucaNew Harmony in 18-±0 HicharJ Owen t"aid : "T L slwul cl
be our strenu~us endeavor to give an education free and
SPARTAN SYSTEM OF EDUCATION
universal to the son of the poorest farmer as to the son
of the chief magistrate. It may require much time and
Like Pestalozzi, Maclure believed that in education lay
patience to attain the desirable result, but it should never
the only hope of uplift for the working classes, whose cause
be lost sight -of. Ijet our fin:it. patriotic object at all times
he always championed. That this educntion might he open
be--equal and universal education."
to them, he contended for free, equal, and universal
Though a subsequent chapter presents the invaluable
schools. That such schools when established might reach
services which Robert Dale Owen rendered to the cause of
the productive classes and serve them most efficiently, he
free schools in the formative days of the Indiana educaproposed that in them all the children of the State, whether
tional svstem we can not forbear to mention here his atti, of low or high degree, "should be fed, clothed, and in'
tude on the question of equal and universal education.
structed at the expense of the people's purse, formerly
Years after the educational experiments went down in the
. called the public treasury." Not since the days of ancient
ruins of the social order, Robert Dale Owen still breathed
Sparta had a system of instruction been advocated which
their spirit, when, through the editorial columns of the
was predicated upon the surrender of children of tender
Free Enquirer, he declared: "We desire to see our public
.·years to the absolute care and control of the State. Under
schools so endowed and provided that they shall be equally
' the Spartan regime, home control did not cease and that
desirable for all classes of society. To effect this the means
. of the government begin until the child had attained the
of instruction which are offered to the poor should be the
· age of seven. In Maclure's system, the infant at the age
very best which can be provided. This is no mere fanciful ·
of two years must be transferred from parental to State
theory. I object, therefore, to all exclusive establishments
care. The aim of the system of instruction in Sparta was
for education in a republic; and exclusive every school or
~ bodily strength and agility. Maclure sought for the chiluniversity is which denies admittance to the son of the
dren of his care utility and mechanical skill. The original
~partan system of instruction was designed to prepare the
poor on account of his father's poverty. I desire to see the
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~ale

Y?uth for the pursuit of war. Maclure hoped through
its revival to prepare both the male and female descendants
of the productive classes for industry and for an "independence of the oppression which their ancestors had suffered from the worthless classes of society."
Maclure gave numerous reasons for" pressing a revival
of the ancient Spartan school organization upon the people
of North America."
( 1 >. The children would be divorced during their
formative years from the handicap of ignorant and immoral homes.
( 2) The productive classes, relieved of the burden of
maintaining the children, would be better able to work out
their own redemption.
( 3) 'rhe forcibl e removal, if necessary, of children to
the State schools would defeat the indifference of parents
toward education.
( 4) By making the surroundings as well as the instruc·
tion of children the same, a greater equality of opportunity
of all social classes would be secured.
(5) By the grouping of the children in large numbers,
they could be instructed an<l maintained for less than the
cost under the present arrangement either to the parents of
supporting them or to the State of educating them.
,
( 6) Only by a system wherein the State commands the
entire time of a child can he be properly taught a useful
trade that will insure his industrial independence as a ·
citizen.
( 7) Through the useful trades and occupations taught
the pupils, "free, equal, and universal schools" could be
made self-supporting, thus "relieving the productive .
classes of the burden of maintaining them."
( 8) Best of all, the complete surrender of all childre
to the care of the republic would settle, once and forever;
in the affirmative the question of State responsibility for
the education of. its wards.
2G8

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
•' Robert Owen accepted Maclure's innovation because it
afforded an opportunity to trai:'isplant the offspring of
rude, debased, often vicious homes into the refining atmosphere of the system of instruction which he hoped to
see established at New Harmony. When he drew up the
· p~ans of or?anization for The New Moral World, he pro. v1ded ther em for the absolute surrender of all its children
at the age prescribed by his partner, to the educational
system. During the brief life of the new social order no
feature ~f its educational work was so rigidly enforced as
· that, which, for want of a better name, we may term Maclure's New Spartan System. Robert Dale Owen became
a firm convert to the idea, for many years later he declared
. throu~h the .editorial col~mns of the Free Enquirer, "I
· hold it befittmg a republic that the State should furnish
· throughout the land, at public expense, State institutions
where every young citizen should be educated and maintained from youth to manhood."
(> ,

Self-supporting Schools
.:/ W~ile the educational experiments at New Harmony
·were m progress, the people between the Connecticut and
the abash were opposed to the maintenance by public
taxat10n of free schools wherein the pupils received instruction only. Maclure's innovation added maintenance
·to the burden of instruction which the populace had aleady refused to bear. In order to secure the coveted
free training to which the majority had not yet granted
support, and fearful lest the burden of taxation even
if shouldered, might fall too heavily upon his f~vorite
.!'producing classes," Maclure revived Pestalozzi's scheme
-for s~lf-supp?rting schools_. and during the educational
. enments m community days made repeated efforts
·to demonstrate their feasibility. Though his industrial
hools fell as far short of self-support as did the less
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THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

ambitious effort of the Swiss schoolmaster at N euhof, yet · ·
Maclurc, nothing daunted, still stoutly contended that the ·~.
foremost r eason for the introduction of the useful arts into the schools was "the great economy of enabling children
to feed, clothe, and educate t hemselves by their own exertions; thus rendering them independent of the labor of
others and establishing an eq uality founded on each administering to his own wants from the most early age."
- •·

• . . "Materials used in construction ought to be solid
and durable." "Wood to be avoided because of perishable
quality and liability to harbor noxious insectF<."
"Pise, a mixture of gravel, sand, and clay, rammed
solidly between a shifting frame, might perhaps fulfil
all the requisites of durability, health, and economy for
buildings." . . . "With a coat of whitewash ~t ~as
the solid and h andsome appearance of a stone bmldrng
· and might be r oofed with tiles or slates that would make
it fireproof. " " It might be heated by hot ai~ or steam
Consolidation or Cen tralizing of S chools
by the latest improvements in the construction of the
Modern advocates of the consolidating or centralizing
kitchens." . . . " A parallelogram or square may be
of rural schools will be interested in knowing that three- .
thought the best form for centralizing all the inhabitants,
quarters of a century ago William Maclure r ecommended
· · that the least time might be lost in changing place. A
for the schools patterned af tcr the New Harmony expericourtyard would occupy the center and all around_ the
ment, which he confidently expected to be established
buildings would be the gardens, both for the convemence
throughout the land, the same procedure.
of culture and collecting the fruits."
At a period when educational affairs in the country
With the characteristic confidence of the reformer,
west of the Appalachians were in a chaotic state, Maclure ·
Owen's partner describes the benefits to be derived from
strenuously and r epeatedly urged that th e newly formed ·
such a plan of centralization:
.
States adopt a civil township of the New England type as
• ( 1) " In a township six miles squ~re, the s~hool_ situthe local unit for the administration and support of the .
ated at its center would be only three miles from its distant
schools.
parts, bringing the scholastic operation within the reach of
When these townships had been so created by process of
the inspection of all the inhabitants who are to benefit by
law, Maclure hoped to see er ected, at the center of each,
· the good management or suffer by the had.
.
one of his " Spartan systems of self-supporting free public
·
(2) "All being fed and clothed by the establishment,
schools." With extreme care he locates and describes the
the vicinity of parents is not necessary and the schools may
schoolhouse. "The locality must be chosen in a healthful
collect the children of a large district to the number of
situation, removed from swamps or stagnant water, on or
some hundreds, and each would serve in pla:e of twenty or
near canals, great roads, or navigable rivers, surrounded at
· thirty small district schools, when the children eat and
least by two acres of land for every child, as a productive
sleep at home.
. .
.
farm from which they might obtain wherewith to feed
(3) "An immense saving would be effected m time m
them." "Buildings must be erected expressly for the pur. a country so thinly peopled as the United States, where the
poses of the school." " The arrangement and commodious ·
· greatest part of the children's time is wasted in g~ing and
position of the workshops, houses, courtyards, gardens,
. coming at least once a day to a school necessarily at a
etc., are necessary to successful execution of the plan.'.'
. considerable distance.
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produce the greatest advantage to the society of which I
am a member, whether by clearing and tilling some secluded spot of land, or by cultivating the pretty bewildered
field of education. After mature examination, I became
fully convinced that in the latter capacity my faculties will
be more likely to be beneficial to my fellow citizens.
Hear it, ye men of the world! To become an
obscure, useful, country schoolmaster is the highest pitch
of my worldly ambition!"
The meaning of education. While Socrates, Plato, and
' many of the profound thinkers of the Christian era had
uttered related truths, it remained for Pestalozzi to define
education, as he does many times in different phraseology,
to be "the natural progressive and symmetrical develop. ment of all the powers and faculties of the human being."
NEEF'S PLAN OF EDUCATION
1;\Vhen Joseph Neef, transplanted to the Western continent by William Maclure, became the first great American
. No discussion of the methods of instruction or the prin- •
apostle
of Pestalozzianism, he brought with him, as the
c1ples of education which dominated the experiments at
·
cardinal
tenet of his creed, the same conception of the
New Harmony would be complete which failed to set forth ·
and
purpose of education which the author of his
meaning
at lea~t some of the views of Joseph Neef. Preceding pages ·~
faith
had
proclaimed.
In an age in which the cramming
of this book have sketched briefly the career of the man
sat
enthroned
in
the boasted New England schools
system
who was principal of both the early schools founded for ;= ·
and
threatened
a
triumphal
march westward, Neef anthe purpose of perpetuating the Pestalozzian system of in- .
nounced
to
the
people
of
the
United States through his
struction in this country. No man since the great Swiss ·'-;
Sketch
that
accorcling
to
his
humble
opinion "education
scl:oo~master has possessed either a greater devotion to his ~ -is nothing else than the gradual unfolding of the faculties
prmciples or a more unselfish allegiance to the cause of ·
and
powers which Providence chooses to bestow on the
education.
noblest
work of this sublunary creation, man. This definiIn the introduction to his book, published seventeen •:...
_:
tion
may
appear new, but I trust that its newness will not
years before the birth of Robert Owen's Utopia, and styled
prevent
its
being as solid and true as just and plain. Cera Sketch of a Plan of Education Suited to the Offspring
~ · tainly it requires no superior degree of acuteness to diso~ a Free_ People, wherein the author e-xploits at length
cover that Nature gives every human being physical, intelhis peculiar educational principles and methods, Neef
and moral capacity. The new-born infant contains
lectual,
humbly acknowledges that the training of children and the .
the
germines
of those faculties as the acorn comprehends
rearing of vegetables are the only occupations for which ·"'
th~ future majestic oak. Teach and accustom the young
he. feels_ any _aptitude. "I have, therefore, seriously inmmd to make a just use of these faculties and your task
qmred m wlnch of these two spheres of activity I should 0 .
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.. ( 4) " T~e grouping of the children as to age, capability, or aptitude would be facilitated, which is utterly impossible in the present method of small schools.
( 5) " Such a centralized system of schools would render possible the employment of more and better teachers
the teaching of a wider range of subjects, and the purchas~
of mo~els, prints, and i~struments incalculably superior to
anythmg that the parish schools can possibly afford to
buy.
. ( 6) " Best of all under such a system, free, equal, and
umversal schools could be operated successfully at a minimum of expense, if not entirely without expense to the
productive classes."

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TIIE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

as an educator is done. This unfolding of these powers is
was to unfold the powers and faculties of the child.
the real object of education, or, rather, education itself.
Though both realized to some extent that the welfare of the
Our arts and sciences, by the means of which that display
social order was dependent upon the training of its future
is effected, are but accessory things."
citizens, both made the interests of the child the center
While the definition of the meaning and purpose of
and circumference of all educational effort. There is a
education given by Pestalozzi and Neef was too broad for large element of truth in this view. All instruction must
the age to which it was uttered, it has become too narrow
be individualized, since it must be comprehended and
for our own. Education has always been a subject having
absorbed, not in social groups but personally and indimany phases. Successive reform ers in its fi el<ls have revidually. .Just, and only, in the proportion that the childefined it in terms of the phase which each wished to
. dren of the Republic are made individua lly better and wiser
emphasize; in terms of the reform which each so ught to
- will t he society which they arc to constitute become better
achieve. The scholars of the llenai ssance, aglow with en- and wi ser.
thusiasm for the glory that was Athens and the power
These latter days have become more altruistic in stating
that was Rome, declared learning and culture to be the
- the mi ssion of th e schools. The ecl ucational thin kers of the
sole aim of instruction and made education and knowledge
twentieth century have focused their eyes upon the child
synonymous. This view emphasizes the content of the
as a fartor in society. Th ey see both the child as an incourse of study. Pestalozzi and Neef, attacking the system
dividual, who must be unfolded; and the social order for
of instruction in the schools of the Humanists, maintained
which he must be fitted , and wherein he should play his
education "to be not knowledge, but the unfolding of
part as a citizen, touch elbows with his fellows, live to their
childish power." This view emphasizes education as a
fulness the measure of his days, work out his own inprocess. It addresses itself to the method of instruction
dividual destiny and be a weapon for good in the fight for
rather than to the content of the curriculum. By it one
social uplift. From the broad view-point of twentieth-cenmay determine better how to teach than what to teach out
- tury altruism the supreme duty of the schools is not to
of the wealth of possible subjects that confront the twen· perfect the ego, but to fit it to play well a part which
tieth-century pedagogue. Them definitions of the meaning
throughout life it must play in the struggle for the betterof education, asserted by the Humanists and by Pestalozzi,
ment of the race. By common consent we are seeking to
are, within certain limit's at least, phases of the truth. Yet,
rewrite the definition of education in altruistic phrase, are
both fall short of the lofty purpose which the twentieth
restating its meaning in terms of life, and reading into
century is breathing into the educational process.
·
the very web and woof of the educational process a great
All previous ages, in attempting to state the purpose of
social purpose.
the schools, have focused their attention upon the child as
What is the new meaning and purpose of education?
an individual. The definition of education which they
Many would answer, " preparation for life," and many,
framed emphasized the ego and r ead into the educational
"training for citizenship." Excellent as are these replies,
process only an individual purpose. To the worshipers of .
.· they have grown so gray in the service of writers on eduthe New Birth the summum bonum of instruction was to
cational topics that they have degenerated into meaningbestow learning upon the child; to Pestalozzi and Neef it
less catch-phrases.
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Nicholas Murray Butler would answer, "A gradual adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race." While
Columbia's president would doubtless read and probably
has read into his answer much, if not all, that the critics
find wanting, nevertheless, in its wording his definition
seems inadequate and one-sided. 'l'he schools must not
only bring the child into an adjustment with his spiritual
possessions; they must prepare him to be a thinker and a
worker, who shall so react upon those possessions that they
shall be transmitted, enlarged and enriched, to posterity.
Otherwise, progress would be impossible.
These, and many other similar rlefinitions, reflect with
a greater or less degree of accuracy the educational thought
of the hour. Language is always more limited than
thought. Any attempt to state in words the aim of the
schools must necessarily fall short of the high mission
which this altruistic age has assigned to them.
Conceding these things to be true, many believe that
so far, at least, Paul Hanus has made the best statement of the aim of education when he declares it to be
" preparation for complete living." " 'l'o live completely is
to be as useful as possible and to be happy." To be as useful as possible one must be a worker, striving with skill
and earnestness. " To be happy one must enjoy both his
work and his leisure."
This description of the educational process is best because it encompasses all that the other definitions emphasize, and more. To prepare for complete living is
certainly to inculcate learning and culture, since without
these life must needs be narrow and fragmentary; is certainly to unfold completely every childish power and faculty; is certainly to prepare for life in its fulness; is
certainly to train for citizenship, since one could not live
completely who was deficient in civic duties; is certainly to
bring the student into adjustment with the spiritual possessions of the race, since one could not even begin to live

276

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
completely until he had been brought into the ownership
of his scientific, his literary, h~s esthetic, his institutional,
and his religious inheritance. ·
'
If each generation be prepared to live completely, it
must be a testator as well as an heir, receiving from the
educational process both the priceless inheritance which its
forefathers have bequeathed, and the power to make that
legacy still more priceless for generations yet to come.
..:.

School Republics for Self-government of Children

The last few years have witnessed numerous attempts
in the United States to demonstrate the wisdom and the
feasibility of managing schools through no other authority
than that exercised by juvenile republics organized for the
purpose of training their members in self-government.
These attempts have been heralded as distinct departures
in school management. Yet, in 1808, Joseph Neef outlined and subsequently attempted, both on the Schuylkill
and on the Wabash, to execute successfully an elaborate
plan for a self-governed school.
It was N eef's thought that the organization of the republic should be preceded by a very elaborate course in
ethics, dealing with rights and duties, most of which must
have been beyond the comprehension of the children. At
the completion of this preliminary preparation for citizenship, Neef stepped before his pupils and inaugurated the
republi c in this language :
. " Hitherto, my dear little friends-hitherto, my will
was your law; it was the supreme rule to which you were
obliged to conform your actions; I was your despot; your
government was despotic. But you have now discovered
the eternal laws of reason, which are to be the supreme regulators of your future behavior; that is, of all your actions;
you are capable of being your own legislators, your own
governors; you are, therefore, worthy of a free govern277

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THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

ment; you are worthy to be governed by your own laws,
or rather by the dictates of universal reason, which the
Almighty has made a constituent part of your nature, anP.
which you have now discovered; you are no longer my
subjects, but you are, and must ever be, subject to your
duties. To be a member of your society, a citizen of your
little republic, is my ambition; it is your business to determine whether, by my preceding deportment toward you,
I deserve to be your fell ow citizen and fell ow student."
The first business in order after the "inaugurating
speech" was the formation of a constitution for the doubly
infant republic. With characteristic enthusiasm and con:fidence, Neef describes the growth of the written instru- '
ment of government to which he had assigned his "gubernatorial authority."
"Do unto others that which thou wouldst have done to
thee. This shall be the fir st statute, or rather the basis and
foundation of our constitution. On one side we shall set
down our unalienable rights, on the other our immutable
duties, correlative to and resulting from our rights. All
our laws will be nothing else but corollaries from and
further explanations of our first and supreme law.
" Regulations of police will soon be found indispensably
necessary, and of course they shall be made.
" The first transgression of a law or regulation will
convince us that our little republic wants a court of justice
and an executive power, and they will, of course, be es- .
tablished; a penal code will be wanted, and consequently
created.
"That punishment and trespass ought to be rigorously .~
proportional will not be liable to the least doubt; and this ·
exact proportion we shall, therefore, strive to explore and
to establish.
" If one of us happens to be accused, he shall enjoy all ·
possible liberty to def end himself against his accuser; and,
should his fellow citizens declare him to be not guilty, his ·.
278

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

accuser shall suffer the same punishment to which the
accused would have been liable had he been found culpable.
"In framing our laws, statutes, and regulations we
shall take peculiar care to make as few as possible, and exert all our skill to remove from them the least shade of
baneful equivocation. All the citizens of our republic shall
know and understand all their own laws."
Classical Education Unnecessary

r

Neef was in hearty sympathy with the utilitarianism of
the New Harmony curriculum and shared in Maclure's
violent antipathy toward the learned languages. "It is
universally believed," says Neef, in his Sketch, " or at least
pretended, that in order to render a boy's education liberal,
learned, and classical he must absc.lutely learn that the
Athenians called a fox J.AJ,7MJ~, and the Romans vulpes.
. Against this sufficiently ridiculous belief I make no great
opposition, because I care very little about what is called
a liberal, learned, and classical education, and because I believe that the education of a rational man ought to be
rational, and nothing more. I shall raise against me the
tremendous outcry of all our learned Hellenists and Latinists; I shall be charged with barbarism and vandalism, but
I can not help starting the following question: Is the
knowledge of those languages necessary, and consequently
useful? Is it reasonable, is it comformable to common
sense, to lose, nay, waste, from six to ten precious years in
acquiring those languages? Are the advantages flowing
from that knowledge a competent requital for the loss of
time and of better knowledge that might be acquired in
that time?
"I have maturely weighed and reflected on the matter
and my answer to these questions is decidedly in the negative. I can not find the least necessity, nor consequently
- the least utility, in learning those learned languages. I
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~ill ~o longer be thrust across, the path of the pilgrim seekam wholly unable to discover any r eal advantage which
mg
light; when the entrance requirements of all 9ur schools
they bestow on the learner. I conclude, therefore that it
.is repugnant to common sense to lose so many years
' as is
' will be as broad as the tastes and the aptitudes of the children of men; when the fittest shall be all those who have
usual in studying them."
even
the one talent which our educational system may
~ eef's radical opposition to the study of the Greek and
enroll
in the service of the republic.
Latin tongues was an attack upon the narrow curriculum
of contemporary schools. In them the classical course constituted the one course of study required of all. The eduNEW HARMONY'S FAILURES
cational experiments on the Wabash were a r evolt against
the content as well as the method of the prevailing system
· What features of the New Harmony schools were obof education. But in their eagerness to offer and do full
jectionable?
What features has the evolution of schools
justice to the utilities which the New England schools igdemonstrated
to
be either erroneous or impracticable?
nored, Maclure and Neef eliminated the cultures from the
..
(1)
First
of
all, though Maclure never completely
New Harmony course of study and made their boasted curabandoned
the
hope
that they might be successfully operriculum as narrow as that which it came to conquer.
ated
at
a
later
day,
the
self-supporting schools of the new
Both the group of educators in The New Moral World
social
order
fell
of
their
own weight. Neither then nor
and their contemporaries were right and yet wrong-right
since
has
any
type
of
industrial
school been self-maintainin that each emphasized an important phase of the twenattempts
as did Maclure's to
ing.
No
modern
trade-school
tieth-century curriculum, and wrong in that each failed
and
shelter
as
well
as
train
all its students.
feed,
clothe,
to recognize the value of that which the other advocated.
Yet,
so
little
has
the
labor
product
aided
in meeting the
Few, if any of us, will agree with Neef that the so-called
that,
in
most,
if
not
all,
our
technological
expense
budget,
learned languages ought to be entirely eliminated from
.
and
trade-schools,
no
pretense
is
made
of
placing
upon the
the curriculum. There is still a place, and that place a
market
the
handiwork
of
the
pupil.
Not
even
in
the
modvery important one, for a classical education in the affairs
ern
reformatory,
where
needs
are
the
simplest,
cost
of
of men. Such a training provides unsurpassed mental ·
.
'
maintenance
the
lowest,
and
the
workmanship
of
the
indiscipline; is an unchallenged badge of scholarship and
mates better than that of immature children can ever hope
culture; leads, as no other road can, to the mastery of
to
be, do the receipts from either the labor or the products
language, to skill and distinction in oratory and literature;
of
the institution lift from the shoulders of the taxpayers
and girds the learned with the open sesame by which the
of
the State more than a small portion of the burden of
inn er life of the ancient world is being laid, a priceless
maintaining
it. A self-supporting factory is a commontreasure, at the feet of these latter days.
place
thing.
But if it were continuously and solely depend"\fany, however, have come to believe that differences in
.·
ent
upon
the
labor
of an ever-shifting body of promiscuous
taste, aptitude, ability, and prospective calling in life make
immature in strength and experience,
children,
unskilled,
the enforced pursuit of a classical course in many cases
as
well
as
years,
and
often lacking taste as well as aptitude
"unnecessary, useless, and unjust." Moreover, many will
,ior
the
work,
then
the self-supporting factory, like the
live to see the day when the hurdle of a foreign tongue "

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self-supporting school, would become an unattainable
dream.
(2) The Spartan system of education, which Maclure
hoped to revive, eliminated the home as a factor in the
training of the child. His scheme, providing as it did for
the surrender of the infant to the community as soon as
he could be safely taken from the arms of the mother
who bore him, would rob the home of its sociological and
educational importance.
In that little masterpiece, Through Nature to God,
John Fiske shows conclusively: ( 1) rrhat in the enormous
increase in duration of infancy, or the period when parental care is needed, lies the fundamental difference between
man and any of the higher mammals, such as dogs, horses,
and apes; ( 2) that this prolonged period of infancy is
necessary to bring the child into proper adjustment with
his environment; ( 3) and that this long period of helplessness and dependence, by knitting the parents together
around a common center of interest, lies at the foundation
of the human family and therefore at the foundation of
society and of institutional life.
History demonstrates it to be equally true that as civil- :
ization has become more complex and life richer, deeper,
and more far-reaching, we have extended further the
period of infantry or tutelage," until now, while the physiological period of adolescence is reached in perhaps fourteen or fifteen years, the educational period of dependence
is almost twice as long." (The Meaning of Education,
Nicholas Murray Butler, page 12, Macmillan Company,
New York, 1901.) This is but saying in other words that
the length of the period of infancy has kept step with the
progress of the race and that the duration of parental care
furnishes an accurate barometer of the civilization of any
given epoch.
Maclure's proposition to transplant the weanling from
its mother's breast to a motherless school system was a
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EDU C A TIO NA~ L

EXI'E HIJIE1VT

blow at the very vitals of the institution of the family, for
since it arose only to care for the child during the years of
his adjustment, without him the home has neither meaning
nor purpose. Nor is it any the less true that the surrender
of the infant at the tender age of two years to a hard-andfast industrial system was a retrograde movement, a turning back of the hands of the clock of civilization, since
such a procedure practically abolished the all-too-short
period of dependence and parental care prevailing in the
days when Maclure sought to revive the custom of ancient
Sparta.
It is no answer to this last criticism to argue that in
:M:aclure's proposed regim e the State was to stand in loco
parentis to the child. For that institution we call the
government can no more be father and mother to the
human offspring than the incubator can perform all the
functions and duties of motherhod. Both the home and
the school are necessary factors in the process of adjusting the child to his environment. To eliminate either is
to rob him of a portion of his heritage.
( 3) Enthusiastic over the evident efficiency of Pestalozzian methods and devices, the New Harmony group of
educators ascribed to them power in the teaching of abstract conceptions and difficult processes which they did not
possess. The prospectus of the school promises that "by
an instrument called the trignometer the most useful propositions of Euclid are to be reduced to the comprehension
of a child five or six years old." (!) After a very detailed
description of the construction of Pestalozzi's three arithmetical tables, Neef cites triumphantly a series of problems which-though he declares that with the aid of the
tables they were solved with ease and rapidity by children
nine years of age-are beyond the intelligent cornprehen- . sion of any class short of second-year algebra to-day.
These instances are typical of the confidence with which it
expected that the Pestalozzian system of instruction
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THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
would make every branch of the scientific course of study
as plain and easy to little children as the road to market.
The mistake lay not in the system of instruction, but in
ascribing to that system the impossible. The inevitable
consequence was a curriculum which throughout its length
and breadth was beyond the capabilities of those for whom
its various studies were intended. Against the New Harmony course of study the criticism may be urged, just as
it has been rightfully urged against many of the educational practises of later days, that "all instruction should
be adapted to the capabilities of the learner. The important thing is not what children can be made to do, but what
they ought to do at their stage of development."
( 4) The course of study in the schools of the new social
order bestowed upon the child only one of the five spiritual
inheritances which successive ages have transmitted, enriched and enlarged, to posterity, and which it is the privilege and duty of the educational process to bestow.
These five inheritances to which the child is entitled
are: (a) His scientific inheritance. The child is entitled ·
to be armed with the modern scientific method and the results of modern scientific research. Thus prepared, he is
entitled to go out into nature " to love it, to come to know
it, to understand it," above all, to commune with it and to
master it.
(b) His literary inheritance.
This is the richest
legacy because it is the one to which, for twenty-five hundred years, the race has given the most attention. The
child is entitled to dip deeply into the storied lore of the
ages, for through it will he quicken his imagination, enrich ·
his vocabulary, master his own mother-tongue, think the
thoughts of the prophets, seers, and sages of old, and
acquire the learning and culture which the Greeks best
describe by the use of "that fine old word Humanitas."
( c) His esthetical inheritance. The child is entitled
to be brought into a feeling of appreciation and love for·
284

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
the beautiful, the artistic, the picturesque and the sublime. He is entitled to the \)ultivation of that dorlllant
esthetic sense which, whatever be his vocation, will lift
his thought and taste above the sordid things of life into the
realm where the soul revels in the true and the beautiful;
and transform him from a hewer of wood and a drawer of
water into a king with a destiny.
( d) His institutional inheritance. The child is entitled to know how the human institutions, which are to
play such a large part in his life-story, came to be; to receive a clear insight "into his rights, which are so easy to
teach, and into his duties, which are so easy to forget"; to
be brought into sympathy and harmonious relationship
with the institutional life enveloping him, which, if he
understands it aright, will teach him needed lessons concerning the duties and responsibilities of citizenship and
"the necessity of cooperation in the working out of high
ideals."
( e) His religious inheritance. Somewhere, either in
the schoolroom or in the home, the child is entitled to
know the wondrous story, freed from creed and dogma, by
which that branch of the human family to which he belongs
explains its own origin and destiny. Call that story a
superstition, if you will, it is the only superstition which
time has strengthened. Leaving out of consideration even
the acceptance of its truth, the child is yet entitled to the
Christian story, since it is so closely interwoven with the
last nineteen centuries of racial progress that it is abso' lutely essential to their interpretation.
NEW HARMONY'S SUCCESSES

What features of the New Harmony educational experiments merit our approval? Though in 1826, Albert Gallatin, then ambassador to Great Britain, declared "the New
Harmony system of education to be the best in the world,"
285

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

even the special pleader in their behalf must concede that
the early educational ventures on the Wabash (1) failed
to meet the expectations of Owen and Maclure; ( 2) failed
as institutions as dismally as did those of the social order;
and (3) failed to influence the few contemporary schools
surrounding them. The value of the educational efforts in
The New Moral World must be measured not by what they
achieved in themselves, for they accomplished little and
perfected nothing; but rather by what they attempted-by
the precious seed which they sowed on a frontier soil; and
by the results which came from them in after years-by
the golden harvest into which after many days that seed
has ripened.
(a) The precious seed sown by the New H armo-ny educational group. To describe this is to enumerate almost all
the innovations, to recapitulate almost all the educational
fields in which, both in thought and practise, the r eformers
of the new social order were pioneers. They advocated
and embodied into institutions educational ideas half a
century in advance of contemporary thought. To Owen,
Maclure. and N eet and to the group of distinguished scientists and lesser educational lights aiding and abetting them,
we must thankfully rest debtor for those priceless contributions :
( 1) The first infant school established in America.
This was in 1826. It was not until three years later that
a school for children of tender years was inaugurated in
New York City-a school to which Boone erroneously gives
the credit of being the first infant school on this side of
the Atlantic-an error not surprising, in view of the absence of any published account of the New Harmony educational experiment at the time his interesting and valuable work was written.
( 2) The first kindergarten of any type in the Western
World. To the extent that the play-school at New Harmony, like Buchanan's earlier efforts at New Lanark, was a.

forerunner of Froebel's more efficient organization, the
kindergarten of the New Harmony schools preceded the
first kindergarten of the Froebe! type by thirty-four' years,
for it was not until 1860 that Miss Peabody, "without a
knowledge of the details of Froebel's system," opened in
Boston a school based upon the kindergarten idea.
( 3) The first use of the kindergarten as a part of the
public-school system. Though the Froebel kindergarten was
introduced in 1860, its recognition and adoption by the
public-school systems of the country was tardy. It was
not until 1873 that Dr. W. T. Harris, then superintendent
of the public schools at St. Louis, after years of agitation of
the question induced that city to be the first in the United
States to introduce the kindergarten into its public educational system.
( 4) The first distinctively trade-school and the second
industrial school in point of time inaugurated in the
United States.
( 5) The first industrial school of any type to be made a
part of a free public-school system.
(6) The first noteworthy American attempt and the
second American attempt of any character to introduce
and perpetuate the Pestalozzian system of instruction
which has conquered the schools of this nation.
(7) The first public-school system, free or unfree, offering the same educational advantages to both sexes.
· ( 8) The first free public-school system in a land in which
to-day the blessings of an education, "free as the living
waters" (as Robert Dale Owen so earnestly hoped that it
might become), forces itself upon the American children, if
need be, by due process of law.
( 9) The first real public-school system west of the
Appalachians.
(10) The first formidable revolt ever made by a publicschool system in this country against that so-called " liberal" education, which, regardless of taste and aptitude,
287

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THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT

ability and prospective calling, persist in thrusting the
classics down the throats of all its unwilling victims.
( 11) The most humane and enlightened system of
school government to be found anywhere-for it was not
equaled even by that in the schools of the tender-hearted
Pestalozzi himself.
( 12) The most enthusiastic and determined advocacy
and support of "free, equal, and universal schools" that
history records.
( 13) The most ambitious and pretentious educational
experiment which the world had yet witnessed and, with
the exception of Pestalozzi's earlier effort, the most courageous and unselfish educational experiment which the
world has yet witnessed.
(b) The results that came from the sowing. Immedi- ·
ate results there were none. It was not to be expected
that there would be. Owen and Maclure and the "Boatload of Knowledge" were prophets and seers upon the
mountain-top, their backs to the wilderness, their faces
turned toward a fleeting vision of the promised land. The
New Harmony educational experiments were half a century in advance of their times. The educational principles
and practises of that all-too-brief golden age on the Wabash
did not lie within the comprehension of either the frontier
pedagogue or the New England schoolmaster. Both followed blindly and implicitly in the footsteps of Master
Cheever. rl'he prejudice with which the sturdy pioneer
from New England viewed the social and religious ideas
of the Commune extended to its educational system and all
pertaining to it. Schools were few and far between,
poorly equipped and poorly attended, uncertain in duration and taught by poorly paid, poorly prepared backwoodsmen or roving adventurers from the East. The
rough frontiersmen, engaged in a life-and-death struggle
with the forces of the wilderness, had little time and
less thought for the affairs of the schoolroom. The :
288

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

few who, in that age of slow communication between
widely scattered settlements, had heard the story of the
educational ventures at New Harmony associated them
with the " other social vagaries " by which the new social
order astonished, and yet at the same time amused the
practical pioneers of the Western country. When the last,
lingering school of the Commune closed its door it was
apparent, even to an unprejudiced observer, that, meas. ured by the immediate effect upon contemporary education,
the New Harmony group of educators had labored and
given of their substance entirely in vain.
But one "can not see, 'neath winter's field of snow, the
silent harvest of the future grow." If Owen and Maclure,
standing on the ruins of their golden dream for the betterment of their fellows and vouchsafed one clear vision into
the future, could have seen the seed seemingly fallen among
thorns and on stony ground grow, as it did grow, into a
golden harvest of methods and measures and institutions
for the educational betterment of men, they would have
exclaimed in unison, " It is well." For, measured by its
after-effect, the educational experiment at New Harmony
deserves to rank among the most important educational
movements in this country.
A subsequent chapter tells, in detail, the story of the
chain of public libraries, modeled after the Society for
Mutual Instruction of community days, which Maclure
by the generous provisions of his will, established in one
hundred and sixty frontier settlements of the West.
.Given at a time when there were few private and no
public libraries, it is impossible to overestimate the impetus which this wise benefaction gave to intellectual development in every one of the one hundred and sixty
communities which enjoyed the benefits of Maclure's liberality.
Subsequent pages describe the attainment and distinr guished services of the noted group of scientists who,
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THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
drawn to The New Moral World originally by the first
American geologist, made the scene of Maclure's disastrous educational efforts a rendezvous and Mecca of scientists for many years. By their labors New Harmony
became not only the first important scientific outpost in
the West, but also the strongest scientific center in America.
The closing chapter of this book deals with the life
and distinguished services of Robert Dale Owen. He
was the very incarnation of the spirit of the founders
of the new social order. In him both his father and
William Maclure lived again, for his act was their act,
made more effective by his talent. Whether as editor
of the Free Enquirer or law-maker, we find him always
the earnest, effective champion of " free, equal, :tnd universal schools," and of wise measures for their betterment. As a member of the National Congress, he became
the legislative father of the Smithsonian Institution. As
a member of the legislature of the very State from which
his distinguished father had withdrawn in chagrin over
the failure of his educational, as well as his social schemes,
Robert Owen, filled with the ancient enthusiasm of his
house for popular education, formulated and brought to
a successful passage the school-law whose enactment marks
the natal day of the Indiana educational system. Robert
Dale Owen was truly the legislative father of the Indiana
common-school system. Through the wise legislation for
which he must be credited, most of the educational principles and plans for the organization of common schools
which the New Harmony group of reformers advocated,
triumphed throughout the Middle West.
Though denied immediate consideration by contemporary schools, the educational doctrines of the New Har- .
mony group found entrance to them in other ways. Neef's
Plan and Method of Education and his Methods of
Teaching, both published almost a generation before
Hall's Lectures on School Keeping and Page's Theory

290

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
and Practise of Teaching, were among the first peda, gogical treatises in America. The New Harmony experiments gave these two books for the first time the
recognition and prestige which made them one of the
authorities in school management and methods throughout
the country west of the Alleghanies for fully a quarter of
a century after the collapse of the educational ventures of
The New Moral World. Through the writings of his first
American disciple Pestalozzi influenced the pioneer teachers on the frontier of civilization.
During their brief career the New Harmony educational experiments afforded the first training-school for
teachers in all the West. Boone says that "the Pestalozzian theory found admirable exposition in the community
school for both young men and young women, to whom it
was more than a model school in their later teaching; it
was at once an inspiration and a liberal training." When
Owen's social system dissipated into thin air, there went
forth from brief homes on the Wabash men and women
who, scattering in every direction through the Ohio and
Mississippi valleys, and becoming the instructors of the
pioneer youth, sowed in almost every isolated hamlet the
tenets of the educational creed which Pestalozzi and Neef
and Maclure had espoused.
The eminent scientists who made New Harmony a
rendezvous were themselves bearers of good seed and glad
tidings. Their achievements and contributions drew renewed attention to the best features of the educational
"light that had failed." Most of them, enthusiastic believers in the methods and aims of the. New Harmony
group, carried with them on their scientific explorations to
every remote spot the new educational faith. Climbing
to eminence in every Western State as surveyors and geologists and university instructors, their advocacy of the free
public school and the Pestalozzian system of instruction
commanded the attention which their distinguished attain-

291

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT
ments merited. They secured, after many days, the tardy
recognition for which the New Harmony group of educators had asked, and asked in vain.
When the social system went to pieces, hundreds of
its most enthusiastic devotees turned their backs upon the
scene of the great disappointment and sought permanent
homes elsewhere. Some returned to the country east of the
Appalachians, while a greater number scattered themselves
through the promising hamlets of the Ohio and Mississippi
valleys. All carried to the new habitation an enthusiastic
support of the free public school and the Pestalozzian
creed. Who can estimate the influence which they have
exerted in molding the spirit, the method, and the organization of the public-school systems both north and south
of Mason and Dixon's line?
The second distinctive Pestalozzian movement in this '
country invaded the conservative atmosphere of staid New
England. It numbered in the list of its enthusiastic champions such men as Horace Mann and Barnas Sears and
George Boutwell and Lowell Mason and Agassiz and David
Page and E. A. Sheldon, and a host of others almost as
illustrious. No more distinguished group of educators has
blessed any epoch in our career as a nation. Their achievements constitute one of the brightest pages in our educational history. Combining with the enthusiasm that characterized the New Harmony group the conservatism and
intellectual balance necessary to permanent reform, they
gave the Pestalozzian faith a firm foothold on American
soil, wrote its spirit into wise laws and enduring institutions, and sent it westward to complete the work that New
Harmony had inaugurated. Whence came the first inspiration of this second Pestalozzian group? From the
East or from the West, or from both? Who can answer 1
with safety? Would it not be pardonable, at least, if the
teachers of the Middle West should elect to believe that the
traditions and the influence of the New Harmony experi292

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT
ments, working silently through the years, played at least
a small part in the awakening of New England and served
in some slight degree to turn the minds and ·hearts of its
educational thinkers in expectant faith to the teachings
of the master of Burgdorf?
Most of the educational doctrines of the New Harmony
group of educators have triumphed and a national free
public-school system, for which they so strenuously contended, more far-reaching and efficient than pictured in
their fondest dream, is consummating that very equality of
opportunity among the classes which the social experiments
of The New Moral World sought to achieve. Robert Owen
and William Maclure did not fail, for in the fulness of
time they have come into their own.

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SOURCES

n. n.

OWEN.

"THE New Harmony Communities" was taken as a
research topic in 1893 by the author as a member of the
seminarium of political science at DePauw University, and
was followed during his senior college year under the direction of Colonel James Riley Weaver, Director of the seminarium, whose helpful suggestions have contributed materially to whatever success may have attended the effort to
complete a thorough study of the social experiments at
New Harmony. The initial work was done in the library of
the Working Men's Institute at New Harmony during the
summer of 1893, and a visit was made to the same library
in 1896. The secretary of the institute, Mr. Arthur Dransfield, has for years been collecting with commendable ·care'
all the material obtainable with reference to the · history
of the Rappite and Owenite experiments, sparing neither
trouble nor expense to make this collection complete. He
has cooperated with the writer in his search for data, has
made frequent corrections and suggestions, and under Mr.
Drans:field's supervision the collection of photographs which
form the basis for the illustrations in this volume was
made. Considerable work was done in the Indiana State
., library at Indianapolis, where valuable material was found
and rendered available through the courtesy of the former
State librarian, Miss N. E . Ahern, and the present Hbra.:
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rian, Mr. W. E. Henry. The paucity of material in the
Library of Congress at Washington served to emphasize the
fact that the story of the New Harmony experiments had
become a lost chapter in the history of American social
reform movements. Through the courtesy of the Librarian
of Congress, Mr. Herbert Putnam, and the librarian of
Yale University, Dr. A. VanName, the Macdonald manuscript! which forms a part of the Yale collection, was temporarily transferred to the Library of Congress and used
under the supervision of the manuscript division. The
Macdonald manuscript is a history of the earlier communistic experiments in America, and the familiarity of the
author with the Owenite communities rendered this material especially valuable.
In the New Harmony library, one of the most interesting book collections in the country, the files of the New
Har~on_y Gazette, a weekly paper published throughout
the lifetime of the Owenite experiment as the organ of the
~ovement, was found the most prolific source of information. The scrap-books of Richard Owen and Mrs. Arthur
Dransfield, the letters and papers of Josiah Warren the
.
'
commumty account-books, and the letters wills and deeds
o_f William Maclure, were also found in the Ne~ Harmony
library. From Dr. Aaron Williams's book on "The Harmonists," the author has drawn liberally, this being the
?nly authoritative publication on the history of the Rapp1tes. :1ckno'"'.ledgments are due to Mr. John Holliday,
of Indianapolis, who placed at the disposal of the writer
data collected in a study of the New Harmony communities
some years ago.
The chapter on Josiah Warren, as shown by the footnote, is the production of Mr. William Bailie of Boston
~ho has through several years prosecuted a ;tudy of th~
life-work of the founder of the philosophy of individualism.
Mr. Char~es A. Prosser, of New Albany, Indiana, collaborated m the preparation of the chapters bearing on the
380

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APPENDIX
educational phases and relations of the New Harmony
'·
movement.
A list of the more important manuscript and book
sources is appended. No attempt has been made to catalogue the great mass of fragmentary material found in
magazines and newspaper articles:
The Harmonists, or The New Harmony Society.-Aaron Williams,
D. D., 1866.
History of American Socialisms.-John Humphrey Noyes, 1870.
History of New Harmony, Indiana : The Rappites.-Dr. J. Schnack
and Richard Owen.-Pamphlet, 1890.
Communistic Societies of the United States.-Charles Nordhoff, 1875.
Two Years' Residence in the Settlement on the English Prairie in
the Illinois County, U. S.-John Woods, London. 1822.
Travels in North America.-Charles Lyell, F. R. S., 1845.
History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois.George Fowler, 1882.
American Communities.-William Alfred Hines, 1878.
A Journey in America.-Morris Birkbeck, London, 1818.
Brief Sketch of New Harmony.-Library Catalogue of Working
Men's Institute, 1845.
Visit to New Harmony.-William Herbert, London, 1825.
Life of Robert Owen.-Lloyd Jones, 1890.
Socialism, By a Socialist.-Charles P. Somerby, 1879.
History of Cooperation.-George J acob Holyoke, 1878.
Speech at New Harmony, April 27, 1825.-Robert Owen.
Two Discourses on a New System of Society.-Delivered in the
Hall of the House of Representatives.-Robert Owen, Pittsburg, 1825.
Twenty-three Lectures on the Rational System of Society.-Delivered in Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly.-Robert Owen, London, 1841.
Owen's Universal Revolution, With Supplement.-Robert Owen,
London, 1849.
Lectures on the New State of Society.-Robert Owen, London, 1842.
New Religion.-Lecture.-Robert Owen, London, 1830.
The Addresses of Robert Owen, as Published in the London Journal.-London, 1835.
The Report of the Committee of the Association for the Relief of
the Manufacturing and Laboring Poor to the Committee of the
House of Commons.-London, 1825.

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APPENDIX
New View of Society.-Lecture.-Robert Owen, London, 1842.
Social State of Man.-Robert Owen, London, 1842.
Manifesto of Robert Owen to Parliament.-London, 1840.
The Religious Creed of the New System.-Abram Combe, Edinburg, 1824.
The First Trumpet.-An Address to the Disciples of Robert Owen.
-William Cameron, London, 1832.
Life and Last Days of Robert Owen.-George Jacob Holyoke, 1871.
The Town of New Harmony.-Proceedings of a Meeting of the
Inhabitants held April 13, 1842.-Tract.
Memoir of William Maclure.-Samuel Geo. Morton, D. D., 1844.
Communism and Socialism.-Theodore D. Woolsey, 1888.
The Cooperative Movement in England.-Beatrice Potter, 1891.
The Cooperative Commonwealth.-Laurence Gronlund, 1890.
Richard Owen's Scrap-Book.
Letters and Papers of Josiah Warren.
New Harmony Community Account-Books.
Journal (MSS.) Proceedings of Meetings of Working Men's Institute.
Manuscript Copy of Community Dance.s.-Robert Fauntleroy
Scrap-Books of Mrs. A. Dransfield.
Letters, Wills, and Deeds of William Maclure.
The New Harmony Gazette. Vols. I, II, and UL-October 1, 1825,
to March 1, 1829.
The Disseminator. New Series, Vols. I and II. Published at New
Harmony, 1834-'35.-William Maclure, Editor.
The Free Enquirer. Vols. I-VI, inclusive. Published at Baltimore
and New Y ork.-Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, and Amos
Gilbert, Editors.
The Crisis. Vols. I and II, 1832-'34, London.-Robert Owen and
Robert, Dale Owen, Editors.
The Beacon. Vol. III, Old Series, 1838. Vol. I, New Series, 1839.G. Vale, Editor.
The Disseminator. "Containing Hints to the Youth of the United •
States." Old Series. Edited, Printed, and Published Semimonthly by the Pupils of the School of Industry, New Harmony. First issue, January 16, 1828.
The Indiana Statesman. May 13, 1842, to March 14, 1846.
The New Moral World. Vols. I to VII. London, 1834-'40. Edited
by Robert Owen and Disciples.
The Cooperative Magazine and Monthly Herald. London, 1820.
Southwestern Sentinel. Vol. I, No. 1. Evansville, February 28,
1840.

382

APPENDIX
Millennial Gazette, London.-Robert Owen, Ed.itor. .
Practical Details of Equitable Commerce.-,Jos1ah W~rren, Evansville, 1835.
..
E uitable Commerce.- Josiah Warren, 1835.
P~ctical Application of the Elementary Principles of True Civiltzation.-Josiah Warren, 1873.
A Few Days in Athens.-Frances Wright.
Autobiography of Raffinesque.-Con~tantine Rafl_inesque.
A Brief History of Socialism in Amer_ica.-Fredenc Heath, 1900.
A History of the People of the Umted States, Vol. V.-John B.
McMaster. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1900.
Cooperative Communities in the United States.-Rev. Alexander
Kent. Bulletin of the Department of Labor, 1901.
Education.-Joseph Neef, Philadelphia, 1808..
.
Neef's Method of Teaching.-Joseph Neef, Ph1ladelph1a, 1813.
American Conchology, or Description of the Shell~ ?f North AJ:ierica. Illustrated by C-0lored Figures from Or1gmals, Dra~gs
Executed from Nature.-Thomas Say, F. M. L. S. Engrav~gs
drawn and colored by Mrs. Say and C. A. LeSueur. Engravmgs
by J.... Lyon, C. Tiebout, and I. Walker.
Course of Popular Lectures.-Frances Wright.
Campbell and Owen Debate. Cincinnati, 18?~· .
. ..
Reise Durch Nord Amerika.-Alexander _Ph1hp Max1m1ll1an. Co. blentz 1838 1843. London, 1843.
Travels Through North America.-His ~ighnes~ Bernhard, Duke
of Weimar, Saxe, and Eisenach. Philadelphia, 18~8. . .
Method of Science Teaching in the Colleges and Umvers1t1es of
North America.-C. S. Raffinesque.
.
.
Self-Help a Hundred years Ago.-History of Cooperation m England.-George Jacob Holyoke.
A History of Socialism.-Thomas Kirkup, .1892.
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.-Frederick Engels, 1892.
Working Class Movement in America.-Edward and Eleanor Marx
Aveling, 1892.
Socialism in England.-Sidney Webb.
Robert Owen and His Social Philosophy.-Sargent.
The Manufacturing Population of England.-Keel.
Stories of Indiana.-Chapters on New Harmony and Raffinesque.Maurice Thompson.
History of American Education.-Rich:ird Bo~ne.
.
Pocahontas, A Drama; Hints on Pubhc Architecture, 1840, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, 1859; Wrongs of Sla-

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APPE'NDIX

APPENDIX·

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very: The Rights of Emancipation, 1864; Beyond the Breakers,
1870; The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next
1871; Threading My Way, or Twenty-Seven Years of Autobi~
ography, 1874.-Robert Dale Owen.
United States Geological Reports. 1838-'59.-David Dale Owen.
Key to the Geology of the Globe.-Richard Owen.
American Entomology.-Thomas Say.
Account of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier.-Parke Godwin.
Recent American Socialisms.-Richard T. Ely.
Essay on Robert Owen.-Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Science Sketches.-David Starr Jordan. Chapter on Raffinesque·
Comparative Socialism. Chapter IL-Woodrow Wilson.
Letters and Lectures of Robert Dale Owen.-Richard D. Owen.
Twelve Months in New Harmony.-Paul Brown, 1827.
Higher Education of Women.-Lange. New York: D. Appleton &
Co., 1890.
Journal Indiana House of Representatives, Twenty-second Session
1836-'37.
'
Journal Indiana House of R epresentatives, Twenty-third Session,
1837-'38.
Journal Indiana House of Representatives, Thirty-sixth Session,
1851-'52.
Debates Second Indiana Constitutional Convention, two volumes.
Journal Second Indiana Constitutional Convention, two volumes.
History of Woman Suffrage, three volumes.-E. C. Stanton, S. B.
Anthony, M. J. Gage, Rochester, N. Y., 1887.-Charles
Mann.
Education in Indiana, a monograph prepared by State Superintendent F. A. Cotton for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.--Indianapolis, W . B. Burford, 1904.
The History of Modern Education.-S. G. Williams. Syracuse, N. Y.
C. W . Bardeen, 1903.
Education in the United States.-Edited by Nicholas Murray Butler.
Albany, J. B. Lyon Co., 1900.
The Wrong of Slavery and the Right of Emancipation.-Robert
Dale Owen. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864.
Maclure's Opinions on Various Subjects, three volumes. New Harmony Industrial Srhools Press, 1834.
A Proper System of Education for the Schools of a Free People.Joseph Neef, 1807.
The Meaning of Education.-Nicholas Murray Butler. The Macmillan Co., N. Y., 1901.

384

Pestalozzi: His Life and Work. De Guimps.-New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1890.
Pestalozzi: His Life, Work, and ' Infiuence. Cincinnati, Ohio: Van
Antwerp, Bragg & Co., 1875.
A History of Education in Indiana.-R. G. Boone. New York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1892.
.
.
Indiana Libraries, 1904, Monograph by W. E. Henry, State Librarian
for Louisiana PurchMe Exposition.
Pamphlet on the Maclure Libraries by Jacob Piatt Dunn, State
Librarian, 1893.
Quick's Educational Reformers. New York: ·o. Appleton & Co.,
1890.
Education in the United States.-R. G. Boone. New York: D.
.
Appleton & Co., 1890.
School Law of Indiana, 1901.-F. L. Jones, ex-State Supenntendent
of Public Instruction.
Johonnot's Principles and Practise of Teaching. New York: D.
Appleton & Co., 1883.
Thoughts.-Horace Mann. Boston: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham,
1872.
Synopsis Minutes Minerva Society.-Arthur Dransfield.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.-Mary Wollstonecraft.
New York: Scribner & Welford, 1890.
1
Scheme for the Reconstruction of the Union with New England
Left Out.-Pamphlet by Robert Dale Owen, 1863. New Harmony Library.
The Perils and Exigencies of the Present Crisis.-Address by R. D.
Owen to Citizens of Indiana, State House, Indianapolis, 1860.

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