If a detached spectator-a visitor from some other planet-were to give his attention to the socialistic movement of to-day, what would probably strike him as most curious is the fact that the men by whom this movement is represented are prepared to do anything on behalf of their principles and ideals, except to show that they are practicable by putting them into experimental practice. According to these theorists all economic problems would be solved if only the laborers could be masters of their own capital, and divide amongst themselves, on approximately equal terms, the entire product of their exertions. But, though the working-classes of this country, for example, are known to possess capital to the amount of something like £500,000,000, though it is claimed that socialism finds its chief support, not amongst the population of the slums, but amongst the more prosperous and skilled mechanics, by whom we may naturally assume that a large portion of this sum is owned, no attempts are made by them to employ this capital themselves under their own corporate direction, and in accordance with their own theories. If one-tenth of the upper stratum of the British working-class is socialistic, this body must possess a capital of at least £50,000,000; and if each member of it would venture as much as 42d in the £, a capital of £1,000,000 might be very easily raised, with which to start some model enterprise. But nothing of this kind is attempted. Indeed, one British socialist alone, since the days of Robert Owen, has exhibited anything like business capacity at all. This man was William Morris; and he actually embarked in business in a highly successful way, as an artistic printer, and a

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maker of artistic furniture. But, the moment he did so, he threw his socialism to the winds. He ran his business on strictly capitalistic lines. At the end of each of the beautiful books printed by him, were the words, "Printed by me, William Morris," not "Printed by the laborers known as William Morris and his associates." not only followed the methods of capitalism, but he devoted himself to the production of luxuries which only capitalists could buy-carpets worth a guinea a yard, and books at twelve guineas a volume; and he ended by bequeathing to his heirs a comfortable "bourgeois" fortune in the approved manner of the men whom, theoretically, it was his object to exterminate.

Such is the case in the socialistic world to-day, but it has not been so always. People are apt to regard socialism, with its current ideas and catch-words, as a much newer thing than it is. As a matter of fact it existed, so far as its crucial ideas are concerned, at least fifty years before the word "socialism" was invented, as it was by Owen or his sympathizers, before George III was buried; and the earlier socialists, in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, were in one way distinguished very honorably from their successors, by the fact that they were not content with the mere promulgation of principles, but endeavored to make them prevail by translating them into industrial action. One of the most remarkable of these attempts, and incomparably the most successful, was started nearly twenty years before the French Revolution, and was followed by a series of others for at least a century afterwards. The particular attempts to which I here refer, though they owed their inspiration to Europe, all took place in

America; and, though they do not stand alone, I shall confine myself here to these, because they have the advantage of having been studied systematically by careful and sympathetic observers-MacDonald, Noyes, and Nordhoff, of whom the two latter have devoted voluminous books to the subject. The latest of these books, that of Nordhoff, was published in 1875, almost exactly a century after the first of the experiments in question was inaugurated-namely that of the Shakers, in

1774.

In many respects the ideas at work in these societies were various, some of them being primarily religious, others aggressively secular: but even the societies in which the religious idea was paramount, had their purely material and economic side also: and, in so far as this side is concerned, their ideas and principles, even before the word "socialism" had been heard, were identical with those put forward by socialists at the present day.

In order to make this plain, it will be enough to take the two most important of the earlier of these religious communities-namely the Shakers, established in 1774, and the Rappites, established in 1805.

The founder or foundress of the Shakers was an English woman, Ann Lee, of humble birth, but of very remarkable character, who believed herself to be the recipient of a number of divine revelations, in accordance with which she migrated from England to America, where she succeeded in establishing a society consonant with her conception of the mind of Christ. The principle of this society, on its economic side, was that the members "should have," as she expressed it, "a united interest in all things": that the society, or as socialists would now say, the State, should be primarily the owner of whatever was produced by individuals, and should then dispense

to individuals whatever each might need, at the same time providing each with suitable and socially useful work. The founder of the Rappites was George Rapp, the son of a small farmer in South Germany. He, too, like Ann Lee, developed early in life peculiar religious views; and in the year 1805 he, too, migrated to America taking with him some 300 followers, his object being to found a society in which Christ, when he came, should recognize the realization of his own will. Rapp was a man who, besides being a religious enthusiast, possessed great talent for business and the practical management of men, and the economic principles which were involved in his new society were set forth in a series of Articles of Association, which each member was required to sign. The first of these Articles constituted a deed of gift on the member's part of all property whatsoever possessed by him or her, no matter where situated, to George Rapp, and his heirs or assigns for ever, to be held and administered by him or them on behalf of the members generally, and the said George Rapp covenanted on his part, and on the part of his associates, and their successors, "that they would supply all the members severally with all the necessaries of life," whether in youth or age, whether in sickness or health, together with all such "care and consolation" as their situations might "reasonably demand."

Here we see that, however far the religious ideas of these communities may seem to remove them from the majority of socialists to-day, they are both, on the economic side, animated by the same idea. All private interests, all special connections between work and reward, are to be abolished, or as far as possible minimized; and so long as each man does his best, one man's best is regarded as equal to the best of another. All are to labor with the same good will, and all are to have similar

claims on what would now be called "the social product."

Let us now turn from these pioneer communities to another group, the first of which was established just half a century after the successful establishment of the Shakers, and twenty years after that of the Rappites. Of this second group of experiments the inspirer and initiator was Owen, who hoped to accomplish in the New World, what he had failed to accomplish in the Old. Just as the Shakers and the Rappites were essentially religious, Owen was essentially a secularist, but his purely economic ideas were the same in essence as theirs. They were the same also as those to which forty years later Karl Marx gave what purported to be an exact scientific expression and which are still echoed to-day on a hundred socialistic platforms.

The connection of Owen the secularist with the fanatically Christian Rappites was incidentally of a very dramatic kind. About two years before Owen's arrival in America, the Rappites, who had acquired an estate and built a village in Indiana which they called Harmony, were desirous, for various reasons, of moving to another locality, if they could only find a purchaser for Harmony on sufficiently favorable terms. Such a purchaser they found in Owen. The estate of Harmony, comprising 30,000 acres, together with all the Rappite buildings, he bought outright, and entered into possession of it with nine hundred followers. At a meeting in the old public hall of the Rappites he

enunciated to his followers the principles of the new venture: and it is interesting to note one pregnant sentence, which shows how. far these principles accorded and how far they differed from those of the religious socialists, his predecessors. Mankind, said Owen, has hitherto been "crushed by a Trinity of Oppressors-Private

property, irrational religion, and marriage." With regard to the first, it will be seen that he and his predecessors were at one, and, in a certain sense, they were at one with regard to the third; but here, underlying their unity, there was one fundamental difference. To a certain extent the Rappites condemned marriage; but the Rappites condemned it because it involved sexual passion and relationships; and such they deemed incompatible with the highest human perfection. Owen condemned marriage, not because it involved sexual relationships, but because it embarrassed men by making such relationships sacramental. For the moment, however, we will con-. fine ourselves to the economic side of the matter, and here we shall find that Owen and the apocalyptic visionary were at one. Owen called his society The New Harmony Community of Equality: and the economic basis of it was to consist, he said, of the following principles: "To unite separate interests into one, by doing away with divided money transactions, and by exchanging with one another all products on the basis of labor for equal labor." Here we have almost the words of Marx, uttered forty years before Marx made himself famous.

This was in 1825. Fifteen years later a yet more modern note was struck, that is to say about 1840, when a third class of socialistic experiments began to develop themselves under the influence of the ideas of Fourrier. Fourrier's root principle differed from Owen's in this, that, whereas Owen dwelt almost exclusively on the rights of labor, Fourrier recognized those which arose from the possession of capital; but what he aimed at was so to distribute capital that every laborer should be a shareholder in a joint-stock enterprise, thus becoming, together with every one of his fellows, his own capitalist, in a sense his own employer,

and the recipient of a dividend resulting from his own investment. "The employers of to-day," said one of the leaders of the movement, "who are employers only because they monopolize capital, will thus disappear as individuals distinct from the laborers, .and will reappear divided and multiplied in the persons of the laborers themselves."

I give these brief summaries of the utterances of these three schools of socialists the essentially religious, such as the Shakers and the Rappites; the essentially secular, such as the Owenites; the primarily secular (though not essentially opposed to religion), such as the Fourrierists-in order to show how closely the ideas of the men and women who sought to realize socialism in action a hundred and thirty, eighty-four and seventy years ago, resemble in their likenesses and their differences those which unite and which disunite the socialists of the present day.

And now, from the principles of these experimenters, let us turn to their practical policy, which was eminently reasonable. They all aimed at securing the triumph of socialism by means similar to those which resulted in the triumph of capitalism. Modern capitalism developed itself, and has spread itself throughout the civilized world because, wherever it was tried, it was found to work. Each factory successfully managed by a capitalistic employer gave birth to other factories: and the general triumph of the system was the multiplication of individual successes. The practical socialists with whom we are now dealing proposed to establish socialism in precisely the same way. Just as the units of success which have made up the general triumph of capitalism have been individual businesses managed by capitalistic employers and their partners, so these practical socialists proposed to secure the triumph of socialism through corresponding units of success, but

units of a different kind. Instead of establishing successful businesses, they aimed at establishing successful communities: and the difference between a business and a community was understood by them to be this. In an ordinary business, employer and employed alike work for the benefit of themselves and their individual families. In a socialistic community all would be one family. As matters stand, they argued, within the family circle economic advantages are shared, not divided. Wife, husband, children, all alike regard the common home as their own. They participate in the same meals. They have common rights in the hearth and the joint living-rooms. No one member of the family competes against any other. The gain of each is the gain of all. Each family group, in fact, is a miniature socialism in itself. In order, therefore, that socialism might be developed into a social system, the first thing to be done was, according to them, to enlarge the socialism of the family, so that a considerable number of men, women and children, might be welded together into a family of a larger kind, united, not by blood-relationship, but by a sense of human brotherhood. They very rightly recognized that an extension of these intimate bonds must have its limitations; and the idea common to all of them was to begin with an extended family, comprising from a few hundred up to, perhaps, a thousand persons. As soon as such a group has been once successfully established, their intention was that other groups should be established on the same principles, and in fraternal connection with it, so that these socialistic units would in time cover the earth. At all events, they realized that if an effective socialistic sentiment could not extend itself to a community of some hundreds of persons, it was hopeless to expect that it would extend

itself to the world at large, or even to an entire nation.

And now let us consider how these experiments worked. Those described by the writers I have mentioned are seventy-five in number, covering a period of almost exactly a hundred years. To examine all these in detail would be impossible, and it is unnecessary; for the fortunes of many were almost exactly similar. Some two-thirds came to nothing in the course of a few years or even sooner. Of the remaining third, all showed more vitality; and, though even of these the larger part were failures, they had so many elements of success in them that their failure is exceptionally interesting; whilst the comparative success and persistent life of nine possess for us, by the way of contrast, an interest which is still greater.

We will, therefore, select for special consideration those which have met with a success which, even if partial, was permanent, and those which, though failing ultimately, lasted for an exceptional time.

Of the permanently successful communities two of the most important were the earliest, the Shakers and the Rappites-both essentially religious. Both were flourishing in 1824, when Owen arrived in America as the first pioneer of socialism on a secular basis, or of the kind of socialism which to-day would be called scientific. Under the influence of Owen's principles ten communities or associations were started. Eight out of ten failed within two years. Only two lasted longer. One of these consisted of only fifteen persons, it is not a very instructive example. The other-and this alone is important -was the community of New Harmony, which had at one time a membership of nine hundred, which was equipped with a large capital, and organized by Owen himself. Of the amended class of experiments which

followed on the failure of the Owenite, and which were based on the principles of Fourrier-principles fundamentally secular though capable of being associated with religion-the number was much greater, amounting to nearly fifty. Several of these lasted so long as four years. One lasted for five, another for six, another for twelve years. These three last mentioned communities, or as they were called, Phalanxes, are all that we need consider now. They are the Brook Farm Phalanx; the Wisconsin Phalanx, and the North American Phalanx. Of the semi-successful failures, then, we have four cases to consider-these three, animated by the scientific but permissively religious principles of Fourrier; and their predecessor, New Harmony, animated by the scientific and aggressively secular principles of Owen.

Owen's great experiment started, in many respects, under exceptionally favorable auspices. Owen himself, unlike the majority of most sincere socialists, was a practical business man. He had, indeed, made a fortune as a mill owner; and he was able to put into the undertaking some £30.000 of capital. He purchased, as has been seen, a large estate with a commodious village ready-made on it, and in a few months he had collected a population of many hundred persons, all eager to escape from the constraints and other evils of the capitalistic system, and to enjoy a world transformed by the magical wand of socialism. Beside providing land, houses, and capital, he provided the community also with a definite economic constitution. The management of all industry was vested in a "Preliminary Committee," which started a variety of manufacturers, and other businesses, the products of which were to be shared without charge amongst all. An apothecary distributed drugs gratis to all who needed them. A general store supplied "all necessaries to