I. On what terms, if at all, could a carefully selected and homogeneous company of men and women hope to establish themselves as a commune?
II. Would they improve their lives and condition?
III. Have the existing societies brought communal life to its highest point; or is a higher and more intellectual life compatible with that degree of pecuniary success and harmonious living which is absolutely indispensable?
I. I doubt if men and women in good circumstances, or given to an intellectual life, can hope to succeed in such an experiment. In the beginning, the members of a commune must expect to work hard; and, to be successful, they ought always to retain the frugal habits, the early hours, and the patient industry and contentment with manual labor which belong to what we call the working class. Men cannot play at communism. It is not amateur work. It requires patience, submission; self-sacrifice, often in little matters where self-sacrifice is peculiarly irksome; faith in a leader; pleasure in plain living and healthful hours and occupations.
"Do you have no grumblers?" I asked Elder Frederick Evans at Mount
Lebanon; and he replied, "Yes, of course—and they grumble at the elder.
That is what he is for. It is necessary to have some one man to grumble
at, for that avoids confusion."
"Do you have no scandal?" I asked at Aurora, and they said, "Oh yes—women will talk; but we have learned not to mind it."
"Are you not troubled sometimes with disagreeable members?" I asked at Oneida; and they answered, "Yes; but what we cannot criticize out of them we bear with. That is part of our life."
"Bear ye one another's burdens" might well be written over the gates of every commune.
Some things the communist must surrender; and the most precious of these is solitude.
The man to whom at intervals the faces and voices of his kind become hateful, whose bitterest need it is to be sometimes alone—this man need not try communism. For in a well-ordered commune there is hardly the possibility of privacy. You are part of a great family, all whose interests and all whose life must necessarily be in common. At Oneida, when a man leaves the house he sticks a peg in a board, to tell all his little world where he is to be found. In a Shaker family, the elder is expected to know where every man is at all hours of the day. Moses, wandering over the desert with his great commune, occasionally went up into a mountain; but he never returned to the dead level of his Israelites without finding his heart fill with rage and despair. Nor is this surprising; for in the commune there must be absolute equality; there can be no special privileges; and when the great Leader, resting his spirit on the mountain, and enjoying the luxury of solitude and retirement from the hateful sight and sounds of human kind, "delayed to come down," his fellow-communists began at once to murmur, "As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him."