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 relations. Falsehood and selfishness, systematic falsehood and selfishness without a shadow of scruple, were at the basis of all our commercial dealings. It was time, he thought, that a new order of things should arise, founded upon veracity and a harmony of interests. For himself, his part was taken. He became the man of one idea. "We might rather say of him," writes M. Reybaud, "that he traversed the world, than that he lived in it." He refused to enter into any commercial dealings that might implicate him in the existing system, and warp his feelings in favour of it; and exercised to the last, for a bare subsistence, the mere mechanical employment of a copying clerk. He never understood the art of making for himself two separate existences: one in the domain of fiction or of thought; the other in the land of reality. He passed all that might be called his life in the ideal world of his own creating. According to Fourier, there is but one deep and all-pervading cause of the miseries of man: it is, that he does not comprehend the ways of God, or, in other words, the laws of his own being. If humanity does not _work well_, and with the same harmony that the planetary system exhibits, it is because he is determined to impress upon it other movements than those the Creator designed. Between the creature and the Creator there has been, as he expresses it, a misunderstanding for these five thousand years past.