Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WILLIAM THOMPSON, ROBERT OWEN, AND RALAHINE None of the acknowledged leaders of the people in the 'twenties and 'thirties of the nineteenth century showed the least democratic spirit or any understanding of the Gaelic sense of co-operation. It is strange to find the light and leading in those dismal decades coming from the Irish landlord class on the one hand and from a sympathetic Briton or two on the other. Of this light and leading, Ireland as a whole took little notice. Yet one theorist and one practical experiment showed the way to a supreme Labor movement, one of priceless worth to the nation as a whole. One day in the early 'twenties, at a meeting of a literary society in the city of Cork an individual noted locally for his skill in debates on political economy descanted eloquently on the blessings of the unequal distribution of wealth. A man of large estates and possessions in the county, who had used his senses to some purpose, repudiated the arguments and conclusions at the time, and sethimself to prepare for delivery before the society an address or essay dealing with the whole question in detail. As he worked at the problem he soon outgrew the limits of an essay for a society, and ? for the landlord was William Thompson ? the result was the now historic volume, published in London in 1824, bearing the long title, An Inquiry Into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness, Applied to the newly-proposed System of the Voluntary Equality of Wealth. The latter clause suggests his friend Robert Owen, who had come over to preach his famous doctrines in Dublin a couple of years before, and had interested a certain number of the wealthy in the idea of general co-operation and colonization. He had submitted calculations sh...