ouse or ginshop, and it is only since the introduction of this
baneful trade that poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid and
fearful strides throughout the community.

"Shall we then go unblushingly and ask the legislators of our country to
pass legislative acts to sanction and increase this trade--to sign the
death warrants of the strength, morals, and happiness of thousands of
our fellow-creatures, and not attempt to propose corrections for the
evils which it creates? If such shall be your determination, I, for one,
will not join in the application,--no, I will, with all the faculties I
possess, oppose every attempt made to extend the trade that, except in
name, is more injurious to those employed in it than is the slavery in
the West Indies to the poor negroes; for deeply as I am interested in
the cotton manufacture, highly as I value the extended political power
of my country, yet knowing as I do, from long experience both here and
in England, the miseries which this trade, as it is now conducted,
inflicts on those to whom it gives employment, I do not hesitate to say:
_Perish the cotton trade, perish even the political superiority of our
country, if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than that they shall
be upheld by the sacrifice of everything valuable in life._"[29]

This conference doubtless had much to do with Owen's acceptance of a
communistic ideal approaching that of modern Socialism in many important
respects. It certainly intensified the hatred and fear of those
manufacturers whose interests he had so courageously attacked. In 1817
we find him proposing to the British government the establishment of
communistic villages, as the best means of remedying the terrible
distress which prevailed at that time. From this time onward his
interest in mere surface reforms such as he had been carrying on at New
Lanark seemed to wane. He became at this juncture an apostle of
Communism, or as he later preferred to say, Socialism. His ideal was a
cooeperative world, with perfect equality between the sexes. He had
completely demonstrated to his own mind that private property was
incompatible with social well-being. Every month of his experience at
New Lanark had deeply impressed him with the conviction that to make it
possible for all people to live equally happy and moral lives they must
have equal material resources and conditions of life, and he could not
understand why it had never occurred to others before him