THE ONEIDA COMMUNITY AND AMERICAN SOCIALISM. BY A BYSTANDER. IN N the "History of American Socialisms," by Mr. J. H. Noyes, the founder and father of the Oneida Community, we are presented with an instructive enumeration of the various socialistic experiments made in America, chiefly within the last fifty years.* This enumeration furnishes the basis for an induction. That religious communities succeed, while the non-religious invariably fail, is the inference drawn by Mr. Noyes, whose own community is religious. "The one feature" he says "which distinguishes these (the prosperous) Communities from the transitory sort, is their religion; which in every case is of the earnest kind, which comes by recognized afflatus, and controls all external arrangements." "It seems then," he adds, "to be a fair induction from the facts before us that earnest religion does in some way modify human depravity, so as to make continuous association possible, and insure to it great material success." To the writer the facts suggested a different conclusion; but before embracing it he wished to see the Oneida Community. The Oneida Community is, at all events, not afraid of being seen. The writer was one of some five hundred visitors in the month of September alone. Upon applying for the requisite permission he was received with the most courteous hospitality, and allowed freely to satisfy his curiosity, so far as the shortness of his visit would permit. He came away confirmed in his previous opinion. Community of steady, sober and industri * Mr. Noyes has embodied in his work the researches of Macdonald, an Ex-socialist, who devoted ous workers, held together by a religious bond, or by the influence of a venerated chief, will make money; if they have no separate families there will be no family interests to draw them apart; if they are childless, or have few children, their money will accumulate; their wealth will become a new bond, but will at the same time put a stop to proselytism, so that the extension of the community will be limited by the number of its children, and if it has no children, it will become extinct. A practical assurance of this fact, which might have been taken for granted without any experiment, the writer believes to be the net upshot of the eighty experiments which have been made, many of them on a very costly scale. In other words, he believes that the law of success or failure is not a religious law, but an economical law, and one of the most commonplace kind. The utmost that religion or sentiment of any sort has done is to form the original bond of union, and invest the prophet-chief with the necessary power. If religion could sustain a communistic association, success would have been assured to Hopedale, founded at Milford, Massachusetts, in 1841, by about thirty persons from different parts of that State, under Rev. Adin Ballou. This community was, to use Mr. Noyes' own expression, intensely religious in its ideal. In the words of its founder, it was "a church of Christ, based on a simple declaration of faith in the religion of Jesus Christ, as He taught and exemplified it, according to the Scriptures of the New Testament, and of acknowledged subjection to himself to the preparation of materials for a history of all the moral obligations of that religion.' the movement. No person could be a member of it who did. not cordially assent to that declaration. It was "to afford a beginning, a specimen and a presage of a new and glorious social Christendom-a grand confederation of similar communities--a world ultimately regenerated and Edenized." Nor was a leader wanting, for Mr. Ballou, besides being an ardent enthusiast, was evidently in point of ability no ordinary man. He strove hard for success. He set the example of labour by working, and working hard, with his own hands. We are told that he would sometimes be found exhausted with labour, asleep on the sunny side of a haycock, and that the only recreation he had was occasionally to go out into the neighbourhood and preach a funeral The result, however, was a total failure, which Mr. Ballou ascribes to the lack or the decline of religious enthusiasm, but which, at all events, assumed a decidedly economical form. Mr. Ballou was superseded as President by Mr. Draper, who, being a sharp business man, and in partnership with a brother outside, sacrificed the interests of the community to those of his firm, got threefourths of the stock into his own hands, and ultimately compelled Mr. Ballou to wind up. sermon. It was enough to ruin Hopedale that it accepted, among other Christian principles, that of "connubiality," which must have created separate interests and have prevented the accumulation of money, while industry was probably slackened by want of the full stimulus of competition and by reliance on the community. Mr. Draper would not have found it so easy to operate on the stock of the Oneida Community or the Rappites. There are two great groups of experiments, all failures, which Mr. Noyes characterizes respectively as Owenite and Fourierist, the Owenite Utopias being founded on the principle of Communism, the Fourierist on that of Joint-Stock Association, though the two principles are apt to run into each other, and it is difficult to say exactly to which class any particular experiment belongs. The two fits of national enthusiasm, however, seen clearly marked. The first commenced with the visit of Robert Owen to the United States, in 1824, the second was brought on twenty years later through the dissemination of Fourierism by Brisbane in Horace Greeley's paper, the New York Tribune. "Robert Owen is a remarkable character. In years nearly seventy-five; in knowledge and experience superabundant; in benevolence of heart transcendental; in honesty without disguise; in philanthropy unlimited; in religion a sceptic; in theology a Pantheist; in metaphysics a necessarian circumstantialist; in morals a universal excusionist; in general conduct a philosophic non-resistant; in socialism a communist; in hope a terrestrial elysianist; in practical business a methodist ; in deportment an unequivocal gentleman." Such is the portrait, drawn by the sympathizing hand of a fellow visionary, of the great Social Reformer who was to deliver the world from the monstrous Trinity of man's oppressors-Private or Individual Property, Irrational Religion, and their concomitant, Marriage. Owen had tried organized philanthropy in Scotland; but for Communism he sought a more fitting cradle amidst the wild lands and crude ideas of the new world. He was received with enthusiasm ; the Hall of the Representatives at Washington was assigned him as a lecture room, and the President, the President elect, all the Judges of the Supreme Court and a number of the Members of Congress were among his hearers, while the large private fortune which, while he included. private property in the trinity of evil, he had not scrupled to retain, furnished him with the means of trying his experiment on the largest and most costly scale. He purchased a fine property of 30,000 acres at Harmony, in Indiana, just vacated by the Rappites, who left behind them good buildings and well cultivated fields, so that "terrestrial elysianism" here escaped the hard the scheme in bringing on the final catastrophe. Owen complained that he got the wrong sort of people-the dishonest, the intemperate, the idle, the apathetic, the selfish, instead of the honest, the temperate, the industrious, the active-minded and the selfsacrificing. But we should say he got the right sort of people for the purpose of a social reformer who undertakes by the application of his regimen to purge human nature of its vices and transform society. The inventor of a patent medicine might as well complain that he got the sick and not the healthy to operate on. One of the qualifications prescribed by Owen for the members of his community was a conviction of the fact that the character of man is formed for, and not by, himself. The people of New Harmony showed practically that they were fully possessed of this qualification. ships which have proved fatal at once to with the fundamental impracticability of Utopias founded in the wilderness. Some 800 people were drawn together by the prospect of unbounded happiness. In the course of eighteen months New Harmony had seven successive constitutions. About a year after the foundation, "in consequence of a variety of troubles and disagreements, chiefly relating to the disposal of the property, a great meeting of the whole population was held, and it was decided to form four separate societies, each signing its own contract for such part of the property as it shall purchase, and each managing its own affairs; but to trade with each other by paper money." Mr. Owen had not shown sufficient confidence in his own theory to give up his hold either on the land or on the power. We are told that he was now beginning to make sharp bargains with the independent Communists. "He had lost money, and no doubt he tried to regain some of it, and used such means as he thought would prevent further loss." Yet he chose this time for a solemn re-promulgation of his communistic creed under the title of the Declaration of Mental Independence. "Disagreements and jealousies." "Many persons leaving. The Gazette shows how impossible it is for a community of common property to exist, unless the members comprising it have acquired the genuine community character." "Although there was an appearance of increased order and happiness, yet matters were drawing to a close. Owen was selling property to individuals; the greater part of the town was now resolved into individual lots; a grocery was established opposite the tavern; painted sign boards began to be stuck up on the buildings, pointing out places of manufacture and trade; a sort of wax-figure-and-puppet-show was opened at one end of the boarding-house; and everything was getting into the old style." It is useless, as Mr. Noyes says, to follow this wreck further. The destructive forces of roguery and whisky seem to have mingled Mr. Owen afterwards became a Spiritualist and a believer in Special Providence. If he had been so before, Mr. Noyes seems to think, the result of the experiment at New Harmony would have been different. We will touch on this point hereafter. Here it is important to notice that, whatever may have been his theory, Owen did not attempt any practical innovation on the subject of marriage; at least he did not attempt to annihilate the separate family or to check the propagation of children. Another great experiment on Mr. Owen's principles was made at Yellow Springs, in Ohio, the present site of Antioch College, the co-educational university, so that there seems to be something radical in the soil. This community consisted of about a hundred families, and included professional men, teachers, merchants, mechanics, tarmers, and a few common labourers. "In the first few weeks all entered into the new system with a will. Service was the order of the day. Men who seldom or never before laboured with their hands, devoted themselves to agriculture and the mechanic arts with a zeal which was always commendable, silence, but we may be sure that the course though not always according to knowledge. of events was essentially the same. It is Ministers of the Gospel guided the plough; sad to think of the waste of earnest, called the swine to their corn instead of sin- perhaps heroic effort, and of the disappointners to repentance; and let patience have ment of generous hopes. Owen had his her perfect work over an unruly yoke of qualities, but to call him a genius of the first oxen. Merchants exchanged the yard-stick order is preposterous. Genius in art profor the rake or pitchfork. All appeared to duces high works of imagination; but genius labour cheerfully and for the common weal. in action does not indulge in impracticable Among the women there was even more ap- reveries, and cover the world with the wrecks parent self-sacrifice. Ladies who had seldom of schemes the failure of which common seen the inside of their own kitchens went sense might have foreseen. into that of the common eating-house (formerly a hotel) and made themselves useful among pots and kettles; and refined young ladies, who had all their lives been waited upon, took their turn in waiting upon others at the table. And several times a week all parties who chose, mingled in the social dance in the great dining hall." This continued for three months. Then-" the industrious, the skilful, and the strong saw the products of their labour enjoyed by the ignorant, the unskilled and the improvident; and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of musicians insisted that their brassy harmony was as necessary to the common happiness as bread and meat; and declined to enter the harvest-field or the workshop. A lecturer upon natural science insisted upon talking only, while others worked. Mechanics, whose day's labour brought two dollars into the common stock, insisted that they should in justice work only half as long as the agriculturist, whose day's work brought but one." It is strange that these words should have been written by one who is himself a Communist. That anybody out of Bedlam should have followed Fourier, has always seemed to us one of the most curious facts in the history of opinion. This visionary believed that the grand mistake, and the source of all disorder and misery, was the habit of attempting to restrain our passions, and that by letting them all loose, and giving free play to every kind of propensity and idiosyncrasy, we should produce complete equilibrium and perfect harmony in society. His dream of material felicity included the conversion of the sea-water into lemonade, and the peopling of the ocean with a new race of creatures serviceable to sailors and fishermen, while the lot of landsmen was to be equally improved by a boreal crown. To match this he had a philosophy of history than which wilder nonsense never was penned, even on that seductive theme. Nevertheless, he possessed some sort of electricity which called into activity the Utopian tendencies of other men. About twenty years after the appearance of Owen, the conditions of soil and atmosphere in the United States being then favourable to fungoid growths, a crop of Fourierist Phalanxes sprung up like mushrooms, and, like mushrooms, died. The ecoabortive at-nomical reasons of their death are such as common sense would at once suggest, and are disclosed with almost ludicrous distinctness. With New Harmony and Yellow Springs, went to "that limbo near the moon" the ghosts of a number of other tempts of the Owenite epoch. The history of the failure in some cases is traced, and it is clear that the result was due to the irre-"The transition," says Mr. Noyes, always sistible action of the economic laws which the projectors had undertaken to supersede; in other cases the end is shrouded in pathetic clearsighted, except with regard to his own peculiar phase of the illusion, "from the compulsory industry of civilization to the volun |