Robert Buchanan | Page 3

bore his burthen with cheerfulness and infinite hope, and now, in reviewing his life, I can truly say that it was honest even in its utmost blindness; unselfish in its one lingering aspiration to be truthful, and not to fear the truth. He was never an ambitious man; he reaped what he sowed, and it was a blessed harvest; for, in spite of many trials and temptations, he never lost the deep poetic heart which he brought with him into the world as his only birthright.
As far back as the year 1891, when giving some account of his early experiences, he wrote:--
"At the time when the benign Don Quixote of modern Socialism, Robert Owen, was issuing his propaganda of a New Moral World, and when his Words of promise sounded like a trumpet-note to so many youthful sons of toil, one of the first to respond was a poor journeyman tailor in Ayrshire, who, throwing down goose and scissors, straightway aspired to the r?le of Socialist reformer; was soon welcomed and appreciated for his keen Scottish intelligence, his wide, if uninstructed reading, and his rugged eloquence on the platform; in due time became one of Owen's most valued Missionaries; and before many years had elapsed was famous among his own people, and infamous among the orthodox, as Robert Buchanan, poet and iconoclast. That man was my father.
"Sometimes stumping the country as a controversialist on the side of Free-Thought, sometimes travelling from town to town with a magic lantern (one of his great feats being the exposure of the popular theory of 'ghosts,' through the production of a mystic Skeleton which he sent dancing among his affrighted audience), sometimes following his gentle Leader into perilous places where the new gospel was hateful or unknown, he laboured pertinaciously in the good cause till, in or about 1840, well known to Socialists as the Communistic Year, he married Miss Margaret Williams, daughter of a well-known solicitor (of Socialistic leanings) in Stoke-upon-Trent. Robert Owen himself honoured the civil ceremony before the Registrar, and gave Miss Williams away. About a year afterwards I was born--if not in the odour of sanctity, at least in the full and increasing daylight of the New Moral World.
"It was, as the reader is doubtless aware, a stirring time. The wave of the great Revolution had not yet spent itself, and every day some doomed structure was subsiding into the waste of troubled waters. Many failures had not yet daunted the apostles of Liberty and Co-operation. Instead of the stagnant pessimism which now covers the green fields of Democracy with loathsome pools, an ardent optimism was everywhere at work. Owen's clear call to arms had been heard all over the land, bringing recruits from the tailor's shop, the smithy, the cobbler's bench, the manufactory, the plough-tail, from every place indeed, where the poor sons of toil had learned to read and think. Many of these men, my father among the number, had splendid gifts; all had the courage of their opinions.
"Those who had the happiness to know Robert Owen knew him as the most benign of men, in whom the enthusiasm of humanity was combined with the most extraordinary powers of practical business. In the words of Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, 'Mr. Owen looked for nothing less than to renovate the world, to extirpate all evil, to banish all punishment, to create like views and like wants, and to guard against all conflicts and all hostilities.' His benevolence, however, was entirely scientific--he was, in fact, the father and founder of modern social science. His success, for a time at least, was phenomenal. In a letter to the Times newspaper in 1834 he said, addressing his friend Lord Brougham: 'I believe it is known to your lordship that from every point of view no experiment was ever so successful as the one I conducted at New Lanark, although it was commenced and continued in opposition to all the oldest and strongest prejudices of mankind. For twenty-nine years we did without the necessity for magistrates or lawyers; without a single legal punishment; without any known poor's-rate, without intemperance or religious animosities. We reduced the hours of labour, well educated all the children from infancy, greatly improved the condition of the adults, diminished their daily hours of labour, paid interest on capital, and cleared upwards of ��300,000 of profit!' So far his mission had been practical, and had succeeded; but in 1837 he delivered a formula which made him thenceforth the avowed enemy of all who held orthodox opinions.
"'ALL THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD,' he said, 'ARE WRONG!' From that time forth the influential classes entirely deserted him. He became at once an apostle and a martyr. Personally a Theist, he preached universal toleration, a form of toleration which is, and always has