Robert Buchanan | Page 3

the
dangerous quicksands of literature. For many years he suffered a
martyrdom from ill health, from the infinite delicacies of an
over-wrought nervous system, thence came isolation, friendlessness,
bitterness, misconception, and despair.
Perhaps no man has been oftener abused, yet no man needed kindness
so much and received so little. He was stabbed again and again, and
scarcely one arm was ever stretched out in his defence; yet he 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 rôle 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