sh paper was the first to
use the word in print, the date being August 24, 1833.[5] Since that
time an investigation of a commendably thorough nature has been made by
three students of the University of Wisconsin,[6] with the result that
they have been unable to find any earlier use of the word. It is
somewhat disappointing that after thus tracing the word back to what may
well be its first appearance in print, it should be impossible to
identify its creator.

The letter in which the term is first used is signed "A Socialist," and
it is quite evident that the writer uses it as a synonym for the
commonly used term "Owenite," by which the disciples of Robert Owen were
known. It is most probable that Owen himself had used the word, and, to
some extent, made it popular; and that the writer of the letter had
heard "our dear social father," as Owen was called, use it, either in
some of his speeches or in conversation. This is the more likely as Owen
was fond of inventing new words. At any rate, one of Owen's associates,
now dead, told the present writer that Owen often specifically claimed
to have used the word at least ten years before it was adopted by any
other writer.

The word gradually became more familiar in England. Throughout the years
1835-1836, in the pages of Owen's paper, _The New Moral World_, there
are many instances of the word occurring. The French writer, Reybaud, in
his "Reformateurs Modernes," published in 1840, made the term equally
familiar to the reading public of Continental Europe. By him it was
used to designate the teachings not merely of Owen and his followers,
but those of all social reformers and visionaries--Saint-Simon, Charles
Fourier, Louis Blanc, and others. By an easy transition, it soon came
into general use as designating all altruistic visions, theories, and
experiments, from the "Republic" of Plato onward through the centuries.

In this way much confusion arose. The word became too vague and
indefinite to be distinctive. It was applied--frequently as an
epithet--indiscriminately to persons of widely differing, and often
conflicting, views. Every one who complained of social inequalities,
every dreamer of social Utopias, was called a Socialist. The
enthusiastic Christian, pleading for a return to the faith and practices
of primitive Christianity, and the aggressive atheist, proclaiming
religion to be the bulwark of the world's wrongs; the State worshiper,
who would extol Law, and spre