While the land, machines, tools, implements of production and the produce of man's toil are exclusively in possession of the do-nothings, and labour is the sole possession of the wealth producers—a marketable commodity, bought up and directed by wealthy idlers, never-ending misery must be their (sic) inevitable lot. Robert Owen's system, if rightly understood and faithfully carried out, rectifies all these anomalies. It makes man the proprietor of his own labour and of the elements of production: it places him in a condition to enjoy the entire fruits of his labour, and surrounds him with circumstances which will make him intelligent, rational, and happy.[1]
A powerful testimony indeed to the inspiration and influence of Robert Owen. Hetherington shared the prevalent view of his circle that Owen's system could not be carried into practice until the working classes were enfranchised.[2]
James Watson was a year older than Lovett, having been born in Malton in 1799. When eighteen years old he went to Leeds as a drysalter's apprentice. There he came into contact with the struggling radicals of the Carlile-Bamford period, when radicalism was almost equivalent to high treason. As a result he volunteered to keep open Richard Carlile's shop whilst the radical champion was in Dorchester Gaol, and so reached London in 1822. In the following year he was visited with the usual penalties and found himself in gaol also, where he improved his mind with Gibbon, Hume, and other anticlerical historians. In 1825 he came into contact with the generous Julian Hibbert, a scholar and a gentleman of republican ideas, who dragged Watson through a serious illness and bequeathed to him a sum sufficient to set him up as a printer and publisher. He took a prominent part, with Lovett, Hetherington, and others, in the various Owenite ventures from 1828 onwards, and also in the campaign against the newspaper taxes. In 1834 he was imprisoned for publishing blasphemous writings. A letter he wrote from Clerkenwell Gaol to his wife, to whom he was but newly married, shows the same melancholy outlook which we have already observed in Lovett.
Do not let my staidness disconcert you or make you think I am unhappy. Remember, my dear Ellen, what a school of adversity I have been trained in, the obstacles I have had to encounter, the struggles I have had to make; to which add that my studies, by choice I admit, have been of a painful kind. The study of the cause and remedy of human woe has engrossed all my thoughts.
- ↑ G. J. Holyoake (edited by), Life and Character of H. Hetherington, etc., 1849.
- ↑ Additional MSS. 27,819, p. 263.
