ring the patronage of the court, dying in extreme
poverty--Charles Fourier refusing all entrance into commerce that would
implicate him with a vicious system, and pursuing to the end, amidst
want and ridicule, the labours of social regeneration--our own Robert
Owen quitting ease and fortune, and crossing the Atlantic for the New
World, there to try, upon a virgin soil, his bold experiment of a new
society;--these men rise before us endowed with a certain courage and
devotion which ought to command our admiration. We see them in the light
of martyrs to a faith which no one shares with them--sacrificing all,
enduring all, for a hope which _is_ of this world, for schemes which
they will never see realized, for a heaven which they may prophesy, but
which they cannot enter; manifesting, in short, the same obstinacy of
idea, and the same renouncement of self, which distinguish the founders
of new religions. And indeed we are not disposed to deny, that in their
character they may bear a comparison, in many points, with religious
impostors. There is this striking difference, however, in the effect of
their teaching: the religious impostor has often promised a paradise of
merely voluptuous enjoyment, but he has promised it as the reward of
certain self-denying virtues to be practised here on earth; whilst the
socialist insists upon bringing his sensual ill-ordered paradise,
wherein all virtue is dispensed with as superfluous, here, at once, upon
this earth we have to live and toil in.

The first volume of the work contains an account of the life and
writings of St Simon, Fourier, and Owen. The second is very
miscellaneous. We encounter, to our surprise, the name of Jeremy Bentham
in the category of socialists, and are still more startled to learn that
the Utilitarians derive their origin from Robert Owen! It is a jumble of
all sects, religious and political, in which even our Quakers are
included in the list of social reformers--our excellent _Friends_, who
assuredly have no wish whatever to disturb the world, but seek merely to
live in it as it is, with the additional advantage of being themselves
particularly quiet and comfortable. But we are so accustomed to the
haste of negligence of the majority of French writers whenever they
leave their own soil, (unless the literature or concerns of a foreign
country be their special subject,) that we are not disposed to pass any
very severe censure on M. Reybaud; and still less should we