My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

soMY LIFEexpired at the ages of thirteen to fifteen, theycommonly went off to Glasgow or Edinburgh, withno natural guardians, and serving to swell the massof vice and misery in the towns. " The condition ofthe families who had immigrated to the village wasalso very lamentable. The people lived almost withoutcontrol in habits of vice, idleness, poverty, debt,and destitution. Some were drunk for weeks together.Thieving was general, and went on to a ruinousextent. . . . There was also a considerable drawbackto the comfort of the people in the high price and badquality of the commodities supplied in the village."When Owen told his intimate friends who knewall these facts that he hoped to reform these peopleby a system of justice and kindness, and gradually todiscontinue all punishment, they naturally laughed athim for a wild enthusiast ;yet he ultimately succeededto such an extent that hardly any one credited theaccounts of it without personal inspection, and itsfame spread over the whole civilized world. He had,besides the conditions already stated, two other greatdifficulties to overcome. The whole of the workersand overseers were strongly antagonistic to him asbeing an Englishman, whose speech they could hardlyunderstand, and who, they believed, was sent to getmore money for the owners and more work out ofthemselves. They, therefore, opposed all he did byevery means that ingenuity could devise, and thoughhe soon introduced more order and regularity in thework and improved the quality of the yarn produced,they saw in all this nothing but the acts of a tool ofthe mill-owners somewhat cleverer, and thereforemore to be dreaded, than those who had precededhim. An equally fierce opposition was made to anyimprovement in the condition of the houses and streets