was listened to with
profound attention. At Washington he was the guest of the President, and
on invitation addressed a joint session of the Senate and the House,
setting forth his arguments for Socialism.

The Moravians at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had founded their colony as
early as Seventeen Hundred Twenty. The Zoarites, the Economites, the
Separatists, the Shakers and the Rappites had been in existence and
maintained successful communities for a score of years.

Robert Owen visited these various colonies and saw that they were all
prosperous. There was neither sickness, vice, poverty, drunkenness nor
disease to be found among them. He became more and more convinced that
the demands of an advancing civilization would certainly be co-operative
in nature. Chance might unhorse the individual, but with a community the
element of chance was eliminated. He laid it down as a maxim, evolved
from his study, observation and experience, that the community that
exists for three years is a success. That no industrial community had
ever endured for three years, save as it was founded on a religious
concept, was a fact that he overlooked. Also, he failed to see that the
second generation of communists did not coalesce, and as a result that
thirty-three years was the age limit for even a successful community;
and that, if it still survived, it was because it was reorganized under
a strong and dominant leadership.

Communists or Socialists are of two classes: those who wish to give and
those who wish to get. When fifty-one per cent of the people in a
community are filled with a desire to give, Socialism will be a success.

Perhaps the most successful social experiment in America was the Oneida
Community, but next to this was the Harmonyites, founded by George Rapp.
The Harmonyites founded Harmony, Indiana, in Eighteen Hundred Fourteen.
They moved from Pennsylvania and had been located at their present site
for eleven years. They owned thirty thousand acres of splendid land at
the junction of the Wabash and Ohio Rivers. They had built more than a
hundred houses, and had barns, stores, a church, a hall, a sawmill, a
hotel and a woolen-factory.

Now when Owen went to Pittsburgh, he floated down the Ohio to Cincinnati
and then on to Harmony. He was graciously received and was delighted
with all he saw and heard.

Owen saw the success of the woolen-mill, and declared that to bring
cotton up by steamboat from the South would be easy