compelled to affirm that the state of Society requires a deeper and more universal Reform than any that has yet been applied. No mere change in the administration of Government, no Legislative amendment of the Laws, no projects for the Alleviation, and not the Prevention, of Pauperism, no schemes of Public Education, no Sabbath-day preachings without work-day realizations, are singly or collectively equal to the removal of the vice under which Society labours. The reason is, that the remedy must be adequate to the disease; and these remedies are local or temporary, while the disease is deep-seated and chronic. This we shall proceed to show.

§ 1. THE DEFECTS OF SOCIETY ARE ORGANIC.

The evils which the benevolent agencies of the day are intended to remove have their origin in no accidental circumstances nor transient cause, but are inherent in the very structure of Society.

Mankind suffers so terribly, even in the most favorable condition in which it is placed, not because there is any absolute want of Intelligence, or Art, or Industry, or Wealth, or Goodness, in the world, but from the fact that the FORM OF SOCIETY is such that the mass of Men cannot avail themselves of the advantages of life, already created, and that the bounties of Heaven are mostly confined to an inconsiderable portion of the race. There are food, clothing, and comfortable habitations enough, in every civilized Nation, to feed, clothe, and protect all its People; there is Knowledge and Love enough in every civilized Nation, could they only be made available, to direct all classes and render them happy; yet the mass of the People, everywhere, are miserable, ill-fed, half-clothed, ignorant, and debased beings, whose bodies are broken and whose souls are ground out of them by hard work. How great soever the general advancement of any Society, one -fact remains permanent-the Poverty and Suffering of the Masses.

This result is sometimes ascribed to the voluntary imprudence or vices of the individuals who feel it; and no doubt it is aggravated by individual delinquencies; but the real cause of it is in the actual form of Society.

The relations instituted among men, by the present form of Society, are those of extreme individual Selfishness, which generates to Indigence, Fraud, Oppression, War, Disease, and False and delusive Doctrines, and the effects of which cannot be prevented by any change short of a thorough social Re-organization.

We might, were this the proper place, go into a thorough demonstration of this proposition; but we must content ourselves for the present with a brief statement of some of the characteristics of our present Social arrangements and a rapid outline of the Remedies we propose. We shall follow the popular Political Economists, in the classification of Social processes under the heads of Production, Distribution, and Consumption, although we hold this classification to be inadequate. We believe that Society, in all these respects, is defective or pernicious. As to its methods of PRODUCTION, it is evident,

1st. That it engenders bodies of men whose functions are either directly destructive of wealth or entirely unproductive—such as Armies,

whose business it is to waste the energies of the People: the various classes of idlers, or drones, who are found in great abundance in every community; officers of justice, magistrates, constables, sheriffs, &c., who, however useful in certain respects, would not be required in a more perfect state of Society, and are therefore a burden upon productive power; officers of the revenue and collectors of taxes, only made necessary by our imperfect arrangements; and the immense number of sophists, philosophers, and controversialists who are a permanent evil, whether we regard the unproductive or the pernicious nature of their vocations.

2d. It gives occasion to a large number of ruinous and demoralizing parasites, who live upon the means of others, by fraud or force, and who are veritable bloodsuckers on the body politic. In this class are included gamblers, sharpers, prostitutes, rumsellers, and a host of other pernicious agents.

3d. It drains away an incalculable source of Social wealth, by means of the general separation which obtains between agriculture, manufactures, science, art, and popular education. Complication and incoherence is carried to an extreme degree in all branches of industry, and there is no systematic and thorough development and employment of all the productive faculties of men. The amount of useful talent that is unused, for the want of means and opportunities for its manifestation, and the amount of capital completely wasted, by unskilful hands or in worthless enterprises, it is beyond the power of the mind to estimate.

4th. It establishes in all industrial relations, under the name of free competition, and in all Social relations, under a thousand different names, a fearful divergency of interests, which leads to flagrant and incessant war between all the individual members of Society respectively, and between individual and general property. Workmen are at war with workmen, capitalists with capitalists, labor is against wealth, and wealth against labor, men against money, and machinery against men, until, in the end, Social existence becomes a mere selfish scramble for gain, over which neither law, nor morality, nor religion, exert any extensive or permanent control.

5th. It renders labor itself, which is the source of all wealth, repugnant, monotonous, dishonorable, and degrading, so that it becomes desirable for all men who are able, to escape from work, by which means the power of production is vastly diminished, and poverty, distress, and public embarrassment proportionably increased.

As to its methods of DISTRIBUTION, Society, under its present form, makes use of incoherent Commerce, which

1st. Converts the Merchant, from what he should be, as the mere intermediate agent between the producer and consumer, into the despotic master of both. The true function of Commerce is to distribute the products of industry, and is therefore subordinate in rank to the other branches of industry; and as it is unproductive in itself, adding nothing to the quantity or quality of the materials which pass through its hands, it should be executed by the fewest possible agents. But under the existing incoherent arrangements of society, it is the controller of indus

try, employing an innumerable band of factors and agents, and giving laws to mankind. Thus,

2d. Incoherent Commerce robs the community at large, by the stupendous tax which it lays upon both consumers and producers-a tax which is extravagantly disproportioned to the services it renders—which services themselves might be performed by a twentieth part of the agents now engaged in their execution.

3d. It robs the community by the adulteration of commodities, which is a vice carried to an enormous excess in all civilized nations, and springs immediately from the avaricious and hot competition to which all traders and shopkeepers are compelled to resort. Instances, indeed, are not wanting in this city, in which the unbridled cupidity of dealers has led them to expose for sale products which they knew to be poisonous.

4th. It robs the community by gluts and stagnations, which accumulate vast quantities of goods in one place while the people are starving for them in another, and which offer such provocatives to fraud and speculation, as to corrupt the morals and undermine the prosperity of entire nations. Witness unhappy Ireland.

5th. It robs the community by unlimited exactions in the form of usury; for the merchant, upon a small basis of capital, operates with a fictitious capital in the form of credits and bills, fifty or an hundred times greater in amount than all his real property. He receives the highest rate of interest on the whole, and thus renders the entire class of consumers and producers tributary to his aggrandisement.

6th. It robs the community by periodical bankruptcies, which spread poverty and devastation throughout the ramifications of trade, and even involve the strongest Governments on earth in the embarrassment and guilt of their fatal results. In all these disruptions and financial explosions, the loss must ultimately fall upon the body of producers or consumers, because commerce, employing little property of its own, derives its materials from other sources.

7th. It robs the community by the facilities it possesses for buying when the producer is forced to sell, and selling when the consumer is forced to buy; so that it can regulate prices, and plunder at once both the producer and consumer.

8th. It robs the community by the hordes of stock-jobbers and speculators which it creates, who withdraw capital from productive industry, to employ it in practices engendered by a feverish and dishonest love of exorbitant gain and gambling enterprise.

9th. It robs the community by instituting monopolies, which are among the most monstrous and gigantic evils of the whole brood of commercial vices, aggravating every defect and extending every baneful influence of incoherence and antagonism.

Let it be understood, however, that we are here speaking, not of individuals engaged in commerce, but of the system.

In its methods of CONSUMPTION, the present form of Society

1st. Is characterized, negatively, by the absence of vast and important economies, because its families dwell in isolated habitations, into which it is impossible to introduce those modes of saving in fuel, light, cellar

age, and domestic labors generally, which would be easy in combined and unitary mansions. The presence and industry of more than onehalf of the members of a community-women and servants are rendered perpetually necessary to take care of the households of the remainder. And,

2d. For the same reason, it is characterized, positively, by an enormous expenditure of time and money, utterly remediless, under present arrangements, although it forces seven-eighths of the people of civilized nations to wear out the greater portion of their lives in accumulating the mere materials of living. The large majority of men are placed under the suicidal necessity of destroying their energies in order to keep themselves in comfortable existence.

But, not to dwell upon these points, let us ask if in view of this disorder and waste, it is any wonder, that poverty is so general in all civilized nations: that the few only are in possession of the goods of life, while the many are trampled in the dust; that the demands for benevolent exertions are every year increasing; that the vices of violence are spreading in the lower classes while the vices of licentiousness more and more infect the higher classes; that the faces of all men are feverish with anxieties; that discord, jealousy, and hatred prevail among different ranks; that neither politicians nor preachers discover an outlet to the overwhelming floods of social distress; that some sink into stupid indifference in regard to their fate, and others run into the madness of extravagant dreams; that all political and religious contests, being contests of opposing interests, become so embittered with vindictive passions; or that so many look to Revolution and Bloodshed as the only means of rectifying the abuses of the past? Need we wonder? No! Society is constituted on a wrong principle, and so long as it is, it must suffer the fearful consequences which God has attached to error.

Were an individual to prove himself as utterly destitute of a regulating principle as society is; were he to leave his affairs at such loose ends, each to take care of itself and no one to look after the whole; indulge in all manner of waste, and despise the most palpable economies, spend his whole time in pampering the belly or the head, while the limbs and other organs were neglected; were he to live in the foulest atmospheres and in the filthiest hovels, utterly regardless of all the laws of health or morality, would he not inevitably fall into disease and misery? Now society as a whole, which is only a larger Human Being, does all this and more than this, and must expect the inexorable effects. It has no head, no concert of action; its members, running where they please, are exposed to every variety of accident and evil; they war with each other; they are subjected to diseases; they lie in idleness and filth; they are covered with sores; and the whole body must suffer.

§ II. THE NATURE OF THE REMEDY.

The question, then, arises, how Society can place itself in its true state? We reply, that if the representations we have just given be correct-if there be this inherent defect in the very structure of society, the evil is not to be removed by any kind of action upon the individual. The great and fatal error of the philanthropists of the day is, that they

look almost exclusively to the reform of individual men. Only reform the individual, they say-only infuse good Christian principles into the hearts of all men, and you will have reformed Society! Granted! and then comes the rub. How are you to reach the individual? How are you to bring the appliances and means of Christian instruction to operate upon the vast mass, who labor from morning to night, and who have neither time nor opportunity to listen to your prelections and preachments? How can you expect while they are steeped in misery to the mouth, that they will keep their ears open to your counsels? How are you to remove them from constant temptation? How can you prevent the inevitable laws of social movement from keeping them down in the mire and filthiness of degraded and brutifying poverty? Can any amount of individual reform prevent the waste, the competition, the antagonism, the selfishness, the falsehood, and evil passions, which are the direct and unavoidable result of the workings of our badly organized or rather unorganized societies? It is not enough, to exhort them from your pulpits-be good, be temperate, be wise; you must place them in circumstances to be all these. The very form of society, we say, generates a larger part of the vices under which it labors, and the only reform that is adequate to meet the evil is one that shall reach its source. Your appeals to the Individual are in themselves good: they proceed from noble sympathies, and are the manifestations of a holy desire; we do not ask you to relax in any benevolent exertion; but at the same time, we assert that they are partial and must of necessity be inefficient. They do not penetrate to the heart of the matter; they play round the surface, at the best; they operate over small spheres only; they cannot thoroughly regenerate Humanity.

On the same grounds, we affirm that the measures of our political parties can have only an inconsiderable and temporary effect for good. Statesmen and jurists, taking it for granted that the actual form of society is only superficially defective, employ themselves only in superficial meliorations. All that they propose, in the way of reform, relates exclusively to the correction of administrative abuses or the alleviation of local evils. Even those among them (and how few are they!) who are actuated by the higher motives of philanthropy see no practicable modes for the accomplishment of their desires, or fritter away their time and intellects on petty projects and abortive schemes? What party, or what leader, is prepared to meet the real and alarming difficulties which we have shown to exist in the bosom of all modern nations? What guaranties do they propose against the increasing miseries of the poor; against the dangers to life and property through revolutionary convulsion; against the oppression of all classes, by fraud and violence; against the evils of internal war; against the mischievous influences of individual competition and the adulteration of alimentary substances; against the increasing immorality of the inferior classes; against the selfishness of individuals, and general distrust? None! They know of none; they scarcely dream of any. As to the majority of politicians, indeed, ab sorbed in the contemptible squabbles of self-seeking parties, they have no sympathy with the mass of the people, and are destitute of a right method of assisting them if they had.