Bellers' essay
Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of All Useful Trades and Husbandry, published in 1695, advocates the establishment of a "College of Industry", a self-sufficient co-operative settlement for the poor – those who depend on their work or on charity for their living. Bellers argued that it was in the responsibility of the rich to take care of the poor and their education. Bellers dedicated the first edition to his fellow Quakers, although the college was to be a civil fellowship rather than a religious one. The first edition of the tract ends with an appeal for funding – "An Epistle to Friends Concerning the education of Children" – in favour of the college, signed by about forty-five leading Quakers. They included
William Penn,
Robert Barclay,
Thomas Ellwood, John Hodgskin,
Leonard Fell and
Charles Marshall. The second edition (1696) was dedicated to Parliament. His influence can be seen in two subsequent establishments set up by the Quakers. The first Quaker workhouse was at Bristol, founded in 1696. The second Quaker workhouse at
Clerkenwell was established in 1702 as a result of his efforts. The combination of agriculture and manufacture would enable self-sufficiency and even profit. Bellers argued that if all "the present idle hands of the poor of this nation" were put to work, it would bring England "as much treasure as the mines give to Spain". The plans for the education of children at the college were ahead of their time. Practice and experience were to be valued over learning through dictation. Bellers created the combination of learning and work as a way of preventing idleness.
Karl Marx mentions Bellers for the first time in Chapter 13 of
Das Kapital, in one of the notes, where Marx consider Bellers "a real phenomenon in the History of Political Economy." Later, in Chapter 25, quoting Bellers' argument that "the labour of the poor is the mines of the rich". Bellers is also quoted in a footnote in Chapter 23 of the book; "Labour is as proper for the body's health as eating is for its living [...] Labour adds oil to the lamp of life when thinking inflames it".
Robert Owen read the proposals in 1817, and in a letter to
The Times acknowledged their resemblance to the community he himself had created at
New Lanark. He had 1,000 copies reprinted that year.
Eduard Bernstein saw Bellers as a precursor of socialism, if not communism, highlighting his argument for valuing goods according to labour, not money. ==
About the Improvement of Physick==