is quaint attempts to reduce
society to a common denominator, it is certain that his arrival in
America, at a time when people's minds were open to all sorts of
economic suggestions, had a stimulating effect upon labor reforms and
led, in the course of time, to the founding of some forty communistic
colonies, most of them in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. "We are all
a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform," wrote
Emerson to Thomas Carlyle; "not a reading man but has the draft of a
new community in his waistcoat pocket." One of these experiments, at Red
Bank, New Jersey, lasted for thirteen years, and another, in Wisconsin,
for six years. But most of them after a year or two gave up the
struggle.

Of these failures, the best known is Brook Farm, an intellectual
community founded in 1841 by George Ripley at West Roxbury,
Massachusetts. Six years later the project was abandoned and is now
remembered as an example of the futility of trying to leaven a world
of realism by means of an atom of transcendental idealism. In a sense,
however, Brook Farm typifies this period of transition. It was a time of
vagaries and longings. People seemed to be conscious of the fact that
a new social solidarity was dawning. It is not strange, therefore,
that--while the railroads were feeling their way from town to town and
across the prairies, while water-power and steam-power were multiplying
man's productivity, indicating that the old days were gone forever--many
curious dreams of a new order of things should be dreamed, nor that
among them some should be ridiculous, some fantastic, and some unworthy,
nor that, as the futility of a universal social reform forced itself
upon the dreamers, they merged the greater in the lesser, the general in
the particular, and sought an outlet in espousing some specific cause or
attacking some particular evil.

Those movements which had their inspiration in a genuine humanitarianism
achieved great good. Now for the first time the blind, the deaf, the
dumb, and the insane were made the object of social solicitude and
communal care. The criminal, too, and the jail in which he was confined
remained no longer utterly neglected. Men of the debtor class were freed
from that medieval barbarism which gave the creditor the right to levy
on the person of his debtor. Even the public schools were dragged out
of their lethargy. When Horace Mann was appointed secretary of the newly
created Massac