The Executive officers issued a pamphlet soon after the commencement of operations, from which we extract the following:
"This Association was formed early in 1843, by a few citizens of New York, mainly mechanics, who, deeply impressed with the present defective, vice-engendering and ruinous system of society, with the wasteful complication of its isolated households, its destructive competition and anarchy in industry, its constraint of millions to idleness and consequent dependence or famine for want of employment, and its failure to secure education and development to the children growing up all around and among us in ignorance and vice, were impelled to immediate and energetic action in resistance to these manifold and mighty evils. Having earnestly studied the system of industrial organization and social reform propounded by Charles Fourier, and been led to recognize in it a beneficent, expensive and practical plan for the melioration of the condition of man and his moral and intellectual elevation, they most heartily adopted that system as the basis and guide of their operations. Holding meetings from time to time, and through the press informing the public of their enterprise and its objects, their numbers steadily increased; their organization was perfected; explorations with a view to the selection of a domain were directed and made; and in the last week of April a location was finally determined on and its purchase effected. During the first week in May, a pioneer division of some forty persons entered upon the possession and improvement of the land. Their number has since been increased to nearly sixty, of whom over forty are men, generally young or in the prime of life, and all recognizing labor as the true and noble destiny on earth. The Sylvania Association is the first attempt in North America to realize in practice the vast economies, intellectual advantages and such enjoyments resulting from Fourier's system.
"Any person may become a stockholder by subscribing for not less than one share ($25); but the council, having as yet its head-quarters in New York, is necessarily entrusted with power to determine at what time and in what order subscribers and their families can be admitted to resident membership on the domain. Those who are judged best calculated to facilitate the progress of the enterprise must be preferred; those with large families unable to labor must await the construction of buildings for their proper accommodation; while such as shall, on critical inquiry, be found of unfit moral character or debasing habits, can not be admitted at all. This, however, will nowise interfere with their ownership in the domain; they will be promptly paid the dividends on their stock, whenever declared, the same as resident members.
"The enterprise here undertaken, however humble in its origin, commends itself to the respect of the skeptical and the generous coöperation of the philanthropic. Its consequences, should success (as we can not doubt it will) crown our exertions, must be far-reaching, beneficent, unbounded. It aims at no aggrandizement of individuals, no upbuilding or overthrow of sect or party, but at the founding of a new, more trustful, more benignant relationship between capital and labor, removing discord, jealousy and hatred, and replacing them by concord, confidence and mutual advantage. The end aimed at is the emancipation of the mass; of the depressed toiling millions, the slaves of necessity and wretchedness, of hunger and constrained idleness, of ignorance, drunkenness and vice; and their elevation to independence, moral and intellectual development; in short, to a true and hopeful manhood. This enterprise now appeals to the lovers of the human race for aid; not for praises, votes or alms, but for coöperation in rendering its triumph signal and speedy. It asks of the opulent and the generous, subscriptions to its stock, in order that its lands may be promptly cleared and improved, its buildings erected, &c.; as they must be far more slowly, if the resident members must devote their energies at once and henceforth to the providing, under the most unfavorable circumstances, of the entire means of their own subsistence. Subscriptions are solicited, at the office of the Association, 25 Pine street, third story.
"Thos. W. Whitley, President; J.D. Pierson, Vice President; Horace Greeley, Treasurer; J.T.S. Smith, Secretary."
After this discourse, the pamphlet presents a constitution, by-laws, bill of rights, &c., which are not essentially different from scores of joint-stock documents which we find, not only in the records of the Fourier epoch, but scattered all along back through the times of Owenism. The truth is, the paper constitutions of nearly all the American experiments, show that the experimenters fell to work, only under the impulse, not under the instructions, of the European masters. Yankee tinkering is visible in all of them. They all are shy, on the one hand, of Owen's flat Communism (as indeed Owen himself was,) and on the other, of Fourier's impracticable account-keeping and venturesome theories of "passional equilibrium." The result is, that they are all very much alike, and may all be classed together as attempts to solve the problem, How to construct a home on the joint-stock principle; which is much like the problem, How to eat your cake and keep it too.
For the shady side, Macdonald gives us a Dialogue which, he says, was written by a gentleman who was a member of the Sylvania Association from beginning to end. It is not very artistic, but shrewd and interesting. We print it without important alteration. The curious reader will find entertainment in comparing its descriptions of the Sylvania domain with those given in the official documents above. In this case as in many others, views taken before and after trial, are as different as summer and winter landscapes.
TALK ABOUT THE SYLVANIA ASSOCIATION.
B.—Good morning, Mr. A. I perceive you are busy among your papers. I hope we do not disturb you?
A.—Not in the least, sir. I am much pleased to meet you.