Even before the days of Lord Shaftesbury he had inaugurated a campaign in favour of limiting the hours of children working in factories. In 1819 the first Factory Act was passed, fixing the minimum age at which children might be employed at nine years, although Owen himself would have put it at ten. Discouraged by the little support which he obtained for his projects, and having satisfied himself as to the impotence both of patronage and legislation as forces of social progress, he turned his attention to a third possibility, namely, association. Association, he imagined, would create that new environment without which no solution of the social question was ever possible. 1. THE CREATION OF THE _MILIEU_ The creation of a social _milieu_ was the one impelling force that inspired all Owen’s various experiments. This was his one desire, whether he asked it of the masters, the State, or of the workers themselves. He has thus some claim to be regarded as the father of etiology—etiology being the title given by sociologists to that part of their subject which treats of the subordination and adaptation of man to his environment. His theory concerning the possibility of transforming the organism by influencing its surroundings occupies the same position in economics as Lamarck’s theory does in biology. By nature man is neither good nor bad. He is just what his environment has made him, and if at the present moment he is on the whole rather bad, it is simply because his environment is so detestable. Scarcely any stress is laid upon the natural environment which seemed of such supreme importance to writers like Le Play. Owen’s interest was in the social environment, the product of education and legislation or of deliberate individual action.[516] Change the environment and the individual would be changed. He failed to see that this meant begging the whole question. If man is simply the product of his environment, how can he possibly change that environment? It is like asking a man to raise himself by the hair of his head. But the futility of such criticism will be readily appreciated if we remind ourselves that it is to such insignificant beginnings as these that we owe the conception of the garden city. It was Owen’s concern for the worker and his great desire to provide him with a home where some degree of comfort and some measure of beauty might be obtainable that gave the earliest impetus to that movement. From a moral point of view this deterministic conception resulted in the absolute denial of all individual responsibility.[517] Every noble or ignoble deed, every act, whether deserving of praise or blame, of reward or punishment, reflects neither credit nor discredit upon its author, for the individual can never be other than he actually is.