Port Royal, Va., Jan. 14th, 1856.
To A. Hogeboom, Esq., Sheds Corners, Madison county, N. Y.
Dear Sir:—Your letter reached this office during my absence from home. I embrace the earliest opportunity of replying to it, because I rejoice that public attention at the North may, by this means, be excited to the subject of my book. I am sure I should not have been honored with your correspondence had you read the book and known its subject. That subject is the "Failure of Free Society." You have only read extracts from it, you say, in the Northern papers. Those papers will be slow to notice the facts, authorities and admissions which it cites, to prove the failure of their form of society. I send you the book and refer you particularly to the preface, to the second and third chapters, and to the "summing up" in the concluding chapter.
If this does not satisfy you that free society is a cruel failure, read the history of the English Poor laws, and you will find that the laboring class of England have, every day since the emancipation of the villeins, been in a worse condition, morally and physically, than any slaves ever were. Read, also, two articles, the one in the North British Review, and the other in Blackwood for December, depicting the demoralized and starving condition of the whole laboring class of Great Britain. Read, also, Carlyle's Latter Day Pamphlets. If this does not convince you that the Little Experiment, (for it is a very little one, both in time and space,) is a disastrous and cruel failure, look at home! How comes it that your distinguished neighbor, Gerrit Smith, proposes to make land as free for the enjoyment of all as air and water? Confessedly, because the despotism of capital over labor is intolerable. Confessedly, because your form of society is found to be a failure in practice! Why does another distinguished abolitionist, Mr. Goodell, of New York, in his book, on the Democracy of Christianity, declare, that wealth now is more cruel, oppressive and murderous, than Feudal masters? Why does Mr. Greely advocate the doctrines of Fourier, and propose to subvert your society and reconstruct it from top to bottom, making a sort of common property of women and children, as well as of lands and houses? Why does, much your ablest philosopher, Stephen Pearle Andrews, propose plans of reform still more sweeping? And, why are his doctrines popular with the "higher classes" in New York? Why, in fine, are the larger number of the abolitionists, millenial Christians, in daily expectation of the advent of Christ, who is to divide all property equally, and give to each one his "vine and fig tree." And why are the others, Atheists, like Owen and Fourier, attempting to invent new and better forms of society?
Why have you Bloomer's and Women's Right's men, and strong-minded women, and Mormons, and anti-renters, and "vote myself a farm" men, Millerites, and Spiritual Rappers, and Shakers, and Widow Wakemanites, and Agrarians, and Grahamites, and a thousand other superstitious and infidel isms at the North? Why is there faith in nothing, speculation about everything? Why is this unsettled, half demented state of the human mind co-extensive in time and space, with free society? Why is Western Europe now starving? and why has it been fighting and starving for seventy years? Why all this, except that free society is a failure? Slave society needs no defence till some other permanently practicable form of society has been discovered. None such has been discovered. Nobody at the North who reads my book will attempt to reply to it; for all the learned abolitionists had unconsciously discovered and proclaimed the failure of free society long before I did.
I am indebted for the honor of your correspondence, to your ignorance of what my book contains. I reply through the Press, because I intend to use your letter merely as an occasion to challenge the North, to dispute or deny my assertion that "free society is a failure!"
In conclusion, I propose to you, and through you to the whole North, these questions.
Do not the past history and present condition of Free Society in Western Europe (where alone the experiment has been fully tried,) prove that it is attended with greater evils, moral and physical, than Slave Society?
Do not the late writers on society in Western Europe, and in our free States, generally admit that those evils are intolerable, and that Free Society requires total subversion and re-organization?
Should you not, therefore, abolish your form of society, and adopt ours, until Mr. Greely, or Brigham Young, or Mr. Andrews, or Mr. Goodell, or some other socialist of Europe or America, invents and puts into successful practice, a social organization better than either, or until the millenium does actually arrive?