upon hearing of any enormity, to level our
indignation against the perpetrator; it is now the mode, to direct it
against that culpable abstraction, society. Society is, indeed, the sole
culprit. When the novelist has detailed some horrible assassination, or
gross adultery, he exclaims, Behold what society has done! The criminal
himself passes scathless; if, indeed, he may not put in a claim to our
especial sympathy, as having been peculiarly ill-used by that society,
whose duty it manifestly was to make him wise, and humane, and happy.
Man, in his individual capacity, is not to be severely criticised; the
censure falls only upon man in his aggregate and corporate capacity.
Polite, at all events. No one can possibly take offence at reproofs
leveled at that invisible entity, the social body; or suppose for a
moment that he is included in the censure. It used to be thought that
the aggregate was made up of individuals, and that, in order to
constitute a well-ordered community, there must be virtuous and
well-ordered men. The reverse is now discovered to be the truth.
_First_, have a well-ordered and divinely happy community, and then the
individual may do as he likes; as our comedian says, "his duties will be
pleasures."

It is a perilous habit to fall into at the best--that of regarding the
present condition of society as something doomed to destruction. But the
evil is unmistakeable and most pernicious, when it is proclaimed, that
in the new and expected order of things, the old morality will be
entirely superfluous, a mere folly, an infliction on ourselves and
others. Why take care of the old furniture, that will be worse than an
incumbrance in the new premises? Why not begin at once the work of
battery and destruction?

The influence which these speculations exert in unsettling men's notions
upon the duties of government, on the first principles of political or
social economy, is less glaring, but not, on this account, the less
prejudicial. Men, who are far from embracing entirely any one of the
schemes of these socialists, fall into the habit of looking for the
relief and amelioration of society to some legislative invention, some
violent interference with the free and spontaneous course of human
industry. The _organization of industry_ is the phrase now in high
repute; repeated, it is true, with every variety of meaning, but always
with the understanding, that government is to interfere more or less in
the distribu