It provides a greater variety of employment for each individual, and thus increases the dexterity and broadens the faculties of men. It offers a wider range of wholesome enjoyments, and also greater restraints against debasing pleasures. It gives independence, and inculcates prudence and frugality. It demands self-sacrifice, and restrains selfishness and greed; and thus increases the happiness which comes from the moral side of human nature. Finally, it relieves the individual's life from a great mass of carking cares, from the necessity of over-severe and exhausting toil, from the dread of misfortune or exposure in old age. If the communal life did not offer such or equivalent rewards, no commune could exist. For though in almost all of those I have described a religious thought and theory enter in, it may nevertheless be justly said that all arose out of a deep-seated dissatisfaction with society as it is constituted—a feeling which is well-nigh universal, and affects men and women more the more thoughtful they are; that they continue only because this want of something better is gratified; but that a commune could not long continue whose members had not, in the first place, by adverse circumstances, oppression, or wrong, been made to feel very keenly the need of something better. Hence it is that the German peasant or weaver makes so good a communist; and hence, too, the numerous failures of communistic experiments in this country, begun by people of culture and means, with a sincere desire to live the "better life." J. H. Noyes, the founder of the Perfectionist communes, gives, in his book on "American Socialisms," brief accounts of not less than forty-seven failures, many of them experiments which promised well at first, and whose founders were high-minded, highly cultivated men and women, with sufficient means, one would think, to achieve success.
[Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]
Now, why these successes in the face of so many failures? Certainly there was not among the Shakers, the Rappists, the Baumelers, the Eben-Ezers, the Perfectionists, greater business ability or more powerful leadership? Greater wealth there was not, for most of the successful societies began poor. If education or intellectual culture are important forces, the unsuccessful societies had these, the successful ones had them not.
Mr. Noyes believes that religion must be the base of a successful commune. Mr. Greeley agreed with him. I believe that religion must be the foundation of every human society which is to be orderly, virtuous, and therefore self-denying, and so far I do not doubt that they are right. But if it is meant, as I understand them, that in order to success there must be some peculiar religious faith, fanatically held, I do not believe it at all.
I believe that success depends—together with a general agreement in religious faith, and a real and spiritual religion leavening the mass—upon another sentiment—upon a feeling of the unbearableness of the circumstances in which they find themselves. The general feeling of modern society is blindly right at bottom: communism is a mutiny against society.
Only, whether the communist shall rebel with a bludgeon and a petroleum torch, or with a plow and a church, depends upon whether he has not or has faith in God—whether he is a religious being or not. If priestcraft and tyranny have sapped his faith and debauched his moral sense, then he will attack society as the French commune recently attacked Paris—animated by a furious envy of his more fortunate fellow-creatures, and an undiscriminating hatred toward every thing which reminds him of his oppressors, or of the social system from which he has or imagines he has suffered wrong. If, on the contrary, he believes in God, he finds hope and comfort in the social theory which Jesus propounded; and he will seek another way out, as did the Rappists, the Eben-Ezers, the Jansenists, the Zoarites, and not less the Shakers and the Perfectionists, each giving his own interpretation to that brief narrative of Luke in which he describes the primitive Christian Church:
"And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods; and parted them to all men as every man had need."
These words have had a singular power over men in all ages since they were written. They form the charter of every communistic society of which I have spoken—for even the Icarians recall them.
IV.—CONDITIONS AND POSSIBILITIES OP COMMUNISTIC LIVING.
Reviewing what I have seen and written, these questions occur: