John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[135]

The great practical difficulty in these experiments has been to secure a due sense of responsibility, and a due vigilance for the common good. The immediate spur of self-interest not being directly felt as in the ordinary mode of life, and the needful amount of food and clothing being tolerably certain, the mass of the members have not been impelled to work so diligently or to save so carefully as if everything depended upon the economy of the day, or as if an employer were overlooking them. Thus a thriftless and careless way of going on has too often grown up in the association, and while a few have borne more than their share of the toil and care, others have borne less. The truth is indisputable that in the association pinching economy can less easily be practised than in isolated life. Keep people apart and they can bear privation and want, if not with facility, without complaint, but bring them into genial and natural relations, and what was before luxury becomes necessity. They require to be better fed and better housed, and to have much more leisure for the social pleasures and opportunities of culture put within their reach. Between association and poverty there is a natural contradiction, and we suspect that the former can never be completely realized until the progress of science, invention, and industry has endowed society with an abundance of wealth of every kind, such as we now scarcely imagine.

That so lofty and satisfying an ideal of social life will one day be attained, it would be impossible to doubt. Indeed, it is intimated in all tradition and foretold in all prophecies. It is the dictate of common-sense, the essence of democracy, the promise of religion. Everything which increases the power of man over nature is a step towards it; everything which expands his intellect, or stirs a noble emotion in his heart, is a pledge of its final advent; and it would be as rational to deny that the earth revolves, or that the seasons succeed each other, as that civilized society grows towards a new condition immensely superior to any that the history of the past or the experience of the present can disclose.