to enter upon this discipline of happiness. We quit
with haste this enchanted garden, which turns out to be an enormous
piece of clockwork, and embrace with renewed content the old state of
personal freedom, albeit attended with many personal inconveniences.
Whilst reading of Utopian schemes, the idea has very vividly occurred to
us: suppose that some such society as this, where land and wives, money
and children, are all in common, had been for a long time in existence,
and that some clever Utopian had caught an inkling of the old system so
familiar to us, and had made the discovery that it would be possible,
without dissolving society, to have a wife of one's own, a house of
one's own, land and children of one's own. Imagine, after an age of
drowsy clockwork existence, one of these philosophers starting the idea
of a free society, of a social organization based upon individual rights
and individual effort--where property should not only be possessed, but
really _enjoyed_--where men should for the first time stretch their
limbs, and strain their faculties, and strive, and emulate, and endure,
and encounter difficulties, and have friendships. What a commotion there
would be! How would the younger sort, rebelling against the old rotten
machine in which they had been incarcerated, form themselves into
emigrating bands, and start forth to try upon some new soil their great
experiment of a free life! How would they welcome toil in all its
severity--how willingly practise abstinence, and suffer privation, for
the sake of the bold rights which these would purchase!--how willingly
take upon themselves the responsibility of their own fate to enjoy a
fortune of their own shaping! Hope herself would start from the earth
where she had been so long buried, and waving her rekindled torch, would
lead on to the old _race_ of life!

_Charles Fourier_ was the son of a woollen-draper at Besancon. Two
circumstances in his early history appear to have made a strong
impression upon him. When he was a child, he contradicted, in his
father's shop, some customary falsehood of the trade, and with great
simplicity revealed the truth; for this he was severely reprimanded.
Afterwards, when he was of the age of nineteen, and a clerk in a
merchant's house at Marseilles, he was present at a voluntary submersion
of grain, made in order to raise the price in the market. These
circumstances, he used to say, opened his eyes to the nature of human
relati