"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Young American" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

that the smallest union would make every man rich; -- and, on the
other side, a multitude of poor men and women seeking work, and who
cannot find enough to pay their board. The science is confident, and
surely the poverty is real. If any means could be found to bring
these two together!

This was one design of the projectors of the Associations which
are now making their first feeble experiments. They were founded in
love, and in labor. They proposed, as you know, that all men should
take a part in the manual toil, and proposed to amend the condition
of men, by substituting harmonious for hostile industry. It was a
noble thought of Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his system,
to distinguish in his Phalanx a class as the Sacred Band, by whom
whatever duties were disagreeable, and likely to be omitted, were to
be assumed.

At least, an economical success seemed certain for the
enterprise, and that agricultural association must, sooner or later,
fix the price of bread, and drive single farmers into association, in
self-defence; as the great commercial and manufacturing companies had
already done. The Community is only the continuation of the same
movement which made the joint-stock companies for manufactures,
mining, insurance, banking, and so forth. It has turned out cheaper
to make calico by companies; and it is proposed to plant corn, and to
bake bread by companies.

Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will be made by these first
adventurers, which will draw ridicule on their schemes. I think, for
example, that they exaggerate the importance of a favorite project of
theirs, that of paying talent and labor at one rate, paying all sorts
of service at one rate, say ten cents the hour. They have paid it
so; but not an instant would a dime remain a dime. In one hand it
became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a copper cent. For
the whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it. One
man buys with it a land-title of an Indian, and makes his posterity
princes; or buys corn enough to feed the world; or pen, ink, and
paper, or a painter's brush, by which he can communicate himself to
the human race as if he were fire; and the other buys barley candy.
Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the
skill of the spender. Whether, too, the objection almost universally
felt by such women in the community as were mothers, to an associate
life, to a common table, and a common nursery, &c., setting a higher
value on the private family with poverty, than on an association with
wealth, will not prove insuperable, remains to be determined.

But the Communities aimed at a higher success in securing to
all their members an equal and thorough education. And on the whole,
one may say, that aims so generous, and so forced on them by the
times, will not be relinquished, even if these attempts fail, but
will be prosecuted until they succeed.