The reader will decide, if I have portrayed truly the men and the principles actuating them, that whoever they thus acknowledged as worthy of that sublime place must have been endowed with intellectual, moral and spiritual capacities, and intuitions of the highest order. Should it have been the fortune of any one to come across an occasional allusion to Fourier, it will be apt to be of such a forbidding nature that there will be no strong temptation to follow the subject further; and all through the literature of our country, in the writings of men whose reading, if not their knowledge, should have taught them better, will be found intimations that "Fourierism" was a system of life based on a plane hardly worthy of being rated higher than mere sensualism. Against this accusation I place the record of the man whom especially spiritual minded and liberally educated men like George Ripley, John S. Dwight, William Henry Channing and many others delighted to know and to honor. Charles Fourier was born at Bezancon, France, April 7, 1772. The son of a merchant, he had a collegiate education, and took prizes for French and Latin themes and verses. He was found of geography but more fond of cultivating flowers, and of music. At eighteen years he entered into commercial pursuits. By the siege of Lyons he lost the fortune his father left him, and was forced into the army, where he served two years. This portion of his life was involved in the romance of war and revolution, during which he was doomed to death, but made a fortunate escape from it. He was always noted for the avidity with which he sought knowledge, and his honesty was outraged at an early age, being punished by his father for telling the truth of goods on sale, thereby losing a purchaser. Again his soul revolted when at Marseilles in 1799, where he was employed, for he was selected to superintend a body of men who secretly cast an immense quantity of rice into the sea, which monopolists had allowed to spoil in a time of famine rather than to sell at a reasonable profit. This last action was to him a crime of so deep a nature that he entered with more enthusiasm on his studies for preventing the like. In capacity of agent he travelled in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. He had a prodigious memory, and in his journeys when a building struck his attention, he took the measurement of it with his walking stick, which was notched off in feet and inches; and, one of his biographers says:-- "He was profoundly acquainted with every branch of science, particularly the exact sciences. For forty years he labored with patience and perseverance at the Herculean task of discovering and developing the theory and practical details of the system which he has given to the world." Says a writer in the London _Phalanx_:--