_Port Royal_, Va., Jan. 14th, 1856. To A. HOGEBOOM, Esq., Sheds Corners, Madison county, N. Y. DEAR SIR:--Your letter reached this office during my absence from home. I embrace the earliest opportunity of replying to it, because I rejoice that public attention at the North may, by this means, be excited to the subject of my book. I am sure I should not have been honored with your correspondence had you read the book and known its subject. That subject is the "Failure of Free Society." You have only read extracts from it, you say, in the Northern papers. Those papers will be slow to notice the facts, authorities and admissions which it cites, to prove the failure of their form of society. I send you the book and refer you particularly to the preface, to the second and third chapters, and to the "summing up" in the concluding chapter. If this does not satisfy you that free society is a cruel failure, read the history of the English Poor laws, and you will find that the laboring class of England have, every day since the emancipation of the villeins, been in a worse condition, morally and physically, than any slaves ever were. Read, also, two articles, the one in the North British Review, and the other in Blackwood for December, depicting the demoralized and starving condition of the whole laboring class of Great Britain. Read, also, Carlyle's Latter Day Pamphlets. If this does not convince you that the _Little Experiment_, (for it is a very little one, both in time and space,) is a disastrous and cruel failure, look at home! How comes it that your distinguished neighbor, Gerrit Smith, proposes to make land as free for the enjoyment of all as air and water? Confessedly, because the despotism of capital over labor is _intolerable_. Confessedly, because your form of society is found to be a failure in practice! Why does another distinguished abolitionist, Mr. Goodell, of New York, in his book, on the Democracy of Christianity, declare, that wealth now is more cruel, oppressive and _murderous_, than Feudal masters? Why does Mr. Greely advocate the doctrines of Fourier, and propose to subvert your society and reconstruct it from top to bottom, making a sort of common property of women and children, as well as of lands and houses? Why does, much your ablest philosopher, Stephen Pearle Andrews, propose plans of reform still more sweeping? And, why are his doctrines popular with the "higher classes" in New York? Why, in fine, are the larger number of the abolitionists, millenial Christians, in daily expectation of the advent of Christ, who is to divide all property equally, and give to each one his "vine and fig tree." And why are the others, Atheists, like Owen and Fourier, attempting to invent new and better forms of society?