CHAPTER V.
INQUEST ON NEW HARMONY.[ToC]
The only laudable object any one can have in rehearsing and studying the histories of the socialistic failures, is that of learning from them practical lessons for guidance in present and future experiments. With this in view, the great experiment at New Harmony is well worth faithful consideration. It was, as we have said, the first and most notable of the entire series of non-religious Communities. It had for its antecedent the vast reputation that Owen had gained by his success at New Lanark. He came to this country with the prestige of a reformer who had the confidence and patronage of Lords, Dukes and Sovereigns in the old world. His lectures were received with attention by large assemblies in our principal cities. At Washington he was accommodated by the Speaker and President with the Hall of Representatives, in which he delivered several lectures before the President, the President elect, all the judges of the Supreme Court, and a great number of members of Congress. He afterwards presented to the Government an expensive and elaborate model, with interior and working drawings, elevations, &c., of one of the magnificent communal edifices which he had projected. He had a large private fortune, and drew into his schemes other capitalists, so that his experiment had the advantage of unlimited wealth. That wealth, as we have seen, placed at his command unlimited land and a ready-made village. These attractions brought him men in unlimited numbers.
How stupendous the revolution was that he contemplated as the result of his great gathering, is best seen in the famous words which he uttered in the public hall at New Harmony on the 4th of July, 1826. We have already quoted from this speech a paragraph (underscored and double-scored by Macdonald) about the awful Trinity of man's oppressors—"Private property, Irrational Religion, and Marriage." In the same vein he went on to say:
"For nearly forty years have I been employed, heart and soul, day by day, almost without ceasing, in preparing the means and arranging the circumstances, to enable me to give the death-blow to the tyranny which, for unnumbered ages, has held the human mind spellbound in chains of such mysterious forms that no mortal has dared approach to set the suffering prisoner free! Nor has the fullness of time for the accomplishment of this great event, been completed until within this hour! Such has been the extraordinary course of events, that the Declaration of Political Independence in 1776, has produced its counterpart, the Declaration of Mental Independence in 1826; the latter just half a century from the former. * * *
"In furtherance of our great object we are preparing the means to bring up our children with industrious and useful habits, with national and of course rational ideas and views, with sincerity in all their proceedings; and to give them kind and affectionate feelings for each other, and charity, in the most extensive sense of the term, for all their fellow creatures.
"By doing this, uniting our separate interests into one, by doing away with divided money transactions, by exchanging with each other our articles of produce on the basis of labor for equal labor, by looking forward to apply our surplus wealth to assist others to attain similar advantages, and by the abandonment of the use of spiritous liquors, we shall in a peculiar manner promote the object of every wise government and all really enlightened men.
"And here we now are, as near perhaps as we can be in the center of the United States, even, as it were, like the little grain of mustard seed! But with these Great Truths before us, with the practice of the social system, as soon as it shall be well understood among us, our principles will, I trust, spread from Community to Community, from State to State, from Continent to Continent, until this system and these truths shall overshadow the whole earth, shedding fragrance and abundance, intelligence and happiness, upon all the sons of men!"