The causes of Owen’s failure in establishing his communities are obvious enough. Apart from the difficulties inherent in socialism, he injured the social cause by going out of his way to attack the historic religions and the accepted views on marriage, by his tediousness, quixotry, and over-confidence, by refusing to see that for the mass of men measures of transition from an old to a new system must be adopted. If he had been truer to his earlier methods and retained the autocratic guidance of his experiments, the chances of success would have been greater. Above all, Owen had too great faith in human nature, and he did not understand the laws of social evolution. His great doctrine of the influence of circumstances in the formation of character was only a very crude way of expressing the law of social continuity so much emphasised by recent socialism. He thought that he could break the chain of continuity, and as by magic create a new set of circumstances, which would forthwith produce a new generation of rational and unselfish men. The time was too strong for him, and the current of English history swept past him. Even a very brief account of Owen, however, would be incomplete without indicating his relation to Malthus. Against Malthus he showed that the wealth of the country had, in consequence of mechanical improvement, increased out of all proportion to the population. The problem, therefore, was not to restrict population, but to institute rational social arrangements and to secure a fair distribution of wealth. Whenever the number of inhabitants in any of his communities increased beyond the maximum, new ones should be created, until they should extend over the whole world. There would be no fear of over-population for a long time to come. Its evils were then felt in Ireland and other countries; but that condition of things was owing to the total want of the most ordinary common sense on the part of the blinded authorities of the world. The period would probably never arrive when the earth would be full; but, if it should, the human race would be good, intelligent, and rational, and would know much better than the present irrational generation how to provide for the occurrence. Such was Owen’s socialistic treatment of the population problem.