have not removed the occasion of the evil you deplore. No matter, if his plain apartments are sufficient for his protection, when only a little lathing and plaster divide them from the gay and elegant and luxuriously furnished apartments of his neighbors; no matter that his dish suffices for his physical necessities, so long as, in the room next to his, his neighbor-a stupid fellow, he may think, not half so good as he sits down to his dinner of twenty dishes. Since all these violent contrasts, all the distinctions of wealth, exist in the Association, and are perpetually under the eye, in the face and nose, of every one, meeting him at every turn he takes, the occasion of the evils exists there in even a greater and a more offensive degree than it does in the present social state; and as long as you do not by the Association remove the occasion, how can you say that by it you can cure the evil? Do not refer us to moral influences which may be operative, for that is to abandon your system, and fall back on that which you condemn and anathematize. Your system is, to correct the internal by the judicious organization of the external; and if you are obliged to appeal from the external to the internal, to supply the defects of the organization, you acknowledge what we are endeavoring to prove, namely, the inadequacy of your means.

Again; the mother evil of our present industrial system, according to the associationists, is COMPETITION. Indeed, to read their writings, one is inclined to believe that they regard competition in business as the cause of nearly all the ills that flesh is heir to. Their grand argument for Association is, that it will entirely do away with competition and its attendant evils. Whether their view of competition is correct or the reverse is not now the question. The question is, Does Association, on their plan, remove it, or, what is the same thing, afford no motive or scope for it? If not, their means are inadequate. Competition results from the inequality of fortune, the freedom and the desire to accumulate. When these three causes coexist, competition is possible and inevitable. Association, then, to remove competition, must take away these causes, at least some one of them. The desire to accumulate can be suppressed by external means only by an organization in which wealth can secure, or aid in securing, to its possessor no personal or social advantage, or what is regarded as an advantage by him or by others. This can never be the case where wealth and luxury are held to be important, essential to the fulfilment

of one's destiny, and where the proprietor has the free use of his property. Grant, then, the desire, and allow the freedom to accumulate, and you have competition, because property is in its nature exclusive.

Now all these conditions of competition must coexist in Association, because the Association is based on individual and not common property. There is inequality of property, and of course the distinctions which always do and always must accompany it. There is freedom to possess and use, and there is freedom to acquire, to hoard, or to display. There are objects forbidden to the poor, and accessible only to the rich. There are, then, all the motives to accumulate, and the same opportunity to acquire individual property, and to purchase pleasure or distinctions by it, which are furnished by existing economical arrangements. What, then, is to hinder competition in the bosom of the phalanx itself?

But pass over this, and consider the phalanx as a copartnership, or a huge business firm. There must be buying and selling between it and other firms; for we do not understand the associationists to propose to stop all exchange, all trade and commerce. What, then, is to hinder competition between phalanx and phalanx, any more than now between one business firm and another? Is competition between firms less injurious than between individuals?— between large firms than between small ones? Indeed, is it not notorious that the rivalry of large bodies is more unprincipled, altogether less scrupulous, than that of individuals? Who needs to be told that a man, sheltering himself under the shield of a corporation, will do, without scruple, what he would recoil from doing in his individual capacity? What, then, under your system, is to prevent perhaps the most ruinous competition the world has ever witnessed? Phalanx may seek to circumvent phalanx in business, and every few days we may hear the crash of one or another, each burying eighteen hundred or two thousand people under its ruins! There is nothing in your system, so far as we can see, to prevent this disastrous result. Men in the Association have the same passions as out of it, and these passions will operate in the same way, if they have the liberty and the occasion.

We are aware that the associationists suppose that they will keep down the spirit of rivalry by the various intellectual, social, domestic and æsthetic influences which they

expect to be operative in Association. But they recognize the spirit of rivalry, or competition. Let this be remembered. True, they count on turning it into other channels. Thus, by making shoeblacks the Legion of Honor, they fancy that the ambition will be to be shoeblacks: just as if the cross of honor will not cease to be an object of ambition the moment it is conferred on the shoeblack! The cross of honor is valued because it is bestowed as the reward of honorable or heroic deeds. It does not confer the honor, it signalizes it; and never will men become shoeblacks for the sake of it. It is impossible, by any artificial methods, to raise menial arts to the rank of the liberal; or menial services to the rank of the heroic, by conferring on them the insignia of the heroic. If you want the liberal and refined to be willing to perform the most menial and disgusting duties, you must propose the cross of Christ, not the cross of the Legion of Honor; the crown of immortal life, not the crown of laurel.

The associationists, whatever influences or arrangements they may depend upon, must allow the individual the dominion of himself, and the freedom to follow the bent of his genius. They must allow the former, or they reduce man to complete slavery, and make the phalanx the grave of the individual; and the latter, or deny their grand principle of attractions proportional to destiny, and also their other principle of attractive labor, since no labor or employment against one's natural bent is or can be attractive. They do allow the first, otherwise individual property would be a mockery; they allow the second, otherwise their distribution of the phalanx into groups and series would be an absurdity. Allow a man freedom to follow his natural bent, that is, the passion or group of passions which are naturally predominant in him, and that passion or group will grow by indulgence, and soon gain the complete mastery over all the rest, and subordinate them to itself. Besides, the whole tendency of the Association is to this result. Its grand principle is, to follow the natural order and the natural attraction. The harmonious development our friends speak of is not a precisely similar development in every individual, but the harmonious development of each individual in accordance with his naturally predominant tendency or tendencies. To understand it in any other sense would be to make them inconsistent with themselves. Consequently, whatever influences they may bring to bear on the individual, they must

tend to harmonize all in him with his naturally predominant passion. If then, we suppose one whose strong natural tendency is to acquire property, his whole nature will be subordinated to this tendency, and he will follow it to the full extent of his freedom and capacity. If we suppose two such, we have competition.

As for social influences, these, in a community which starts with the assumption that wealth and luxury are absolutely indispensable to the fulfilment of our destiny, will not be likely to check or discourage the efforts without which wealth and luxury are not to be had. The domestic influences will be no less favorable to the accumulation of wealth than now; for the father bequeathes his property to his children, and where there are inequalities of fortune, wealth will confer distinction. The aesthetic influences are of no account for good. All the world are not artists, and it is by no means certain that every phalanx will be a school of art; and if it should be, it must be borne in mind that its art will be purely secular, and purely secular art leads to nothing better than effeminacy and licentiousness. It would, then, check the tendency to accumulate, if at all, only by producing no less an evil of another sort. It would be well for modern rhapsodists to recollect that the artistic epochwe speak not of religious art-follows, but has never yet been known to precede or accompany, an heroic epoch. It marks a decline, and usually is or ushers in an age of corruption. The shrine of natural beauty stands always in the vestibule of the temple of Venus, when not in the temple itself. Avarice, again, is no unnatural pendant to voluptuousness. We place no confidence, therefore, in your æsthetic influences, even to restrain competition, especially, since wealth will be needed as the minister of voluptuousness.

It is unnecessary to pursue further this branch of the subject. All our primitive tendencies are exclusive, and mutually repellant. They almost always exist in excess, and every one of them grows by indulgence. Philosophy and experience alike testify that their harmonious action is never possible, unless by their subjection to reason. But this subjection is contrary to the principles of the associationists; for they allow us reason and free will, not to control our passions and keep them in subjection to the law, but as their servants or instruments. The passions give the law; reason and free will provide for its fulfilment. Consequently, the harmony of the passions is impossible, on the principles of

the associationists; and without such harmony, their means are obviously inadequate.

3. Whoever reads the works of the associationists must perceive that they place great reliance for the success of their scheme on the mutual love and good-will of the members of the phalanx. There is to be there no pride of birth, no haughtiness of rank, no insolence of wealth. Gentlemen and simplemen, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, are all to meet as brothers; and no bickerings, no jars, no envyings, no jealousies, no aversions, rancors, or heartburnings, are ever to find admittance into the harmonic paradise. No serpent will ever find his way into the new garden of Eden. Every one will be courteous, affable, gentle, affectionate, forbearing, and eager to oblige; and men will say, "See how these phalansterians love one another!" Undoubtedly, without this, the association will be torn by internal dissensions, and soon prove only a monument to the folly of its founders.

But by what right do associationists count on this universal and never-failing mutual love and good-will? They propose no radical change and no supernatural elevation of human nature. Men enter Association with all the essential passions, and with all the diversity of character, taste, and temperament which they now have, and must exhibit in Association the same phenomena as out of it, so far as the occasion is not removed. There is no removal of the occasion; and there must be, as we have shown, just as much occasion for the exercise of all the bitter and mischievous passions of our nature in Association as in the present order. Whence, then, is to come this anticipated result, so widely different from our present experience? From the moral causes operative there? What are they? Nay, you cannot appeal to moral causes, for your system is to reach and modify the moral through the physical.

But pass over this. How is the degree of love necessary to set the machinery of Association in operation to be obtained prior to Association itself? It requires a greater degree of love to introduce than it does to preserve after introduction. If any thing is certain in philosophy, it is that the effect cannot exceed the cause. Hence, universal experience proves that the founders of human institutions are always superior to those who are formed under those institutions. The progress under human institutionsis always downwards; the purest and noblest characters.