The Rappites had first used a frame building as a place of worship, but later they erected a large brick meeting-house, carving on the pediment above the main door a wreath and a rose, the date, 1822, and the inscription, “Mich IV, 8; in Memory of the Harmony Society; by George Rapp, 1805.” The colonists were industrious and thrifty. They cleared the land, planted vineyards, manufactured woollen and cotton goods and shoes, and found a ready market for all their products. The original population of the Pennsylvania settlement had been about six hundred persons; and during the community’s life in Indiana accessions of friends from Germany increased the number of members to between seven and eight hundred. In 1824 Rapp again decided to move, and appointed Richard Flower to negotiate a sale. Flower visited Scotland, sought Robert Owen, a manufacturer and social reformer, and sold him the Rappites’ land for $132,000. Subsequently there was an additional sale of live-stock, tools, and merchandise for $50,000, so that the total of Owen’s original investment at New Harmony was $182,000. The Rappites thereupon disappeared from Indiana, returning to Pennsylvania, where they established a new settlement called Economy, and prospered greatly. Robert Owen was born in Wales, March 14, 1771. His father was a saddler, and Robert began his career under no favoring circumstances. He became interested in cotton spinning, for which he showed genius and at which he made a fortune. He married the daughter of David Dale, the owner of extensive cotton mills at New Lanark, on the Clyde, became Dale’s successor, and with growing fortune gave an increasing attention to social and political questions. He was a pioneer in the reform of factory abuses; and in his own establishment at New Lanark he made practical application of his theories. He visited the Continent, where he became acquainted with many persons of note, not the least of these being Pestalozzi and Fellenberg; he was much in London, usually in advocacy of some reform; he acquired skill in writing and speaking, and taken altogether his biography gives the impression of a strong, zealous, and indefatigable nature. He was intense and uncompromising, and, it must be confessed, sadly lacking in humor. He expected to find in the new world larger opportunities for the demonstration of his principles. The New Harmony incident illustrates a curious conflict between the ideal and the practical in Owen. It was quite like him to undertake the planting of a communistic settlement in America, and to invest his own money in it; but a natural business caution checked his generous impulses, and while he extended a sweeping invitation to the industrious and well-disposed of all creeds to join him, he was in no haste to divide his property.