buy and sell and advertise
on the lines of the system as it is. If they failed, they failed; if
they succeeded they presently found themselves landlords, employers,
no more and no less than a corporate individualism. I have described
elsewhere[19] the fate of the celebrated Oneida community of New York
State, and how it is now converted into an aggressive, wealthy,
fighting corporation of the most modern type, employing immigrant
labour.

[19] _The Future in America._ (Chapman & Hall, 1906.)

Professed and conscious Socialism in its earliest stages, then, was an
altogether extreme proposition, it was at once imperfect and
over-emphatic, and it was confused with many quite irrelevant and
inconsistent novelties with regard to diet, dress, medicine and
religion. Its first manifest, acknowledged and labelled fruits were a
series of futile "communities"--Noyes' _History of American
Socialisms_ gives their simple history of births and of fatal
infantile ailments--Brook Farm, Fourierite "Phalanges" and the like.
But correlated with these extreme efforts, drawing ideas and
inspiration from them, was the great philanthropic movement for the
amelioration of industrialism, that was, I insist, for all its absence
of a definite Socialist label in many cases, an equally legitimate
factor in the making of the great conception of modern Socialism.
Socialism may be the child of the French Revolution, but it certainly
has one aristocratic Tory grandparent. There can be little dispute of
the close connection of Lord Shaftesbury's Factory Acts, that
commencement of constructive statesmanship in industrialism, with the
work of Owen. The whole Victorian period marks a steady development of
social organization out of the cruel economic anarchy of its
commencement; the beginnings of public education, adulteration acts
and similar checks upon the extremities of private enterprise, the
great successful experiments of co-operative consumers' associations
and the development of what has now become a quasi-official
representation of labour in the State through the Trade Unions. Two
great writers, Carlyle and Ruskin, the latter a professed Socialist,
spent their powers in a relentless campaign against the harsh theories
of the liberty of property, the gloomy superstitions of political
economy that barred the way to any effectual constructive scheme. An
enormous work was done throughout the whole Victorian period by
Socialists and Sociali