His success at Manchester was very rapid. When only nineteen years of age he became manager of a cotton-mill, in which five hundred people were employed, and by his administrative intelligence, energy, industry, and steadiness, soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory Owen used the first bags of American Sea-Island cotton ever imported into the country; it was the first cotton obtained from the Southern States of America. Owen also made remarkable improvement in the quality of the cotton spun. Indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade, as he had found the mill in no well-ordered condition and was left to organise it entirely on his own responsibility. Owen had become manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton Twist Company at Manchester, when he made his first acquaintance with the scene of his future philanthropic efforts at New Lanark. During a visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with the daughter of the proprietor of the New Lanark mills, Mr. Dale. Owen induced his partners to purchase New Lanark; and after his marriage with Miss Dale he settled there, in 1800, as manager and part owner of the mills. Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton-factories in Manchester, he had already formed the intention of conducting New Lanark on higher principles than the current commercial ones. The factory of New Lanark had been started in 1784 by Dale and Arkwright, the water-power afforded by the falls of the Clyde being the great attraction. Connected with the mills were about two thousand people, five hundred of whom were children, brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children especially had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory. Many of them were the lowest of the population, the respectable country-people refusing to submit to the long hours and demoralising drudgery of the factories. Theft, drunkenness, and other vices were common; education and sanitation were alike neglected; most families lived only in one room.