Greeley, the Newspaper; Garrison, a free Platform; Phillips, a free Convention; Beecher, a free Pulpit; Emerson, the Lecture? The Conversation awaits being added to the list. AGE OF IRON AND BRONZE. FRIDAY, 9. Ours can hardly claim to be the Golden Age, but of Bronze and Iron rather. If ideas are in the ascendant, still mind is fettered by mechanism. We scale the heavens to grade the spaces. Messrs. Capital & Co. transact our business for us the globe over. Was it in the Empire News that I read the company's advertisement for supplying mankind with gas at a penny _per diem_ annually? And then, proceeding to say, "that considering the old-time monopoly in the heavenly luminary, the corporation has constructed at fabulous cost their Brazen Cope to shut down upon the horizon at day-break punctually, and so graduate to each customer's tube his just allowance, else darkness for delinquents the year round." Certainly a splendid conception for distributing sunbeams by the Globe Corporation if the solar partner consent to the speculation. Had Hesiod the enterprise in mind when he sung,-- "Seek virtue first, and after virtue, coin"? Or St. Paul, when writing concerning labor and capital: "For I would not," he says, "that other men should be eased and you burdened, but by an equality that now at the time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance may also be a supply for your want, that there may be an equality, as it is written, He that had gathered much, had nothing over, and he that had gathered little, had no lack. If any man will not work, neither should he eat." Any attempt to simplify and supply one's wants by abstinence and self-help is in the most hopeful direction, and serviceable to the individual whether his experiment succeed or not, the practice of most, from the beginning, having been to multiply rather than diminish one's natural wants, and thus to become poor at the cost of becoming rich. "Who has the fewest wants," said Socrates, "is most like God." "Who wishes, wants, and whoso wants is poor." Our "Fruitlands" was an adventure undertaken in good faith for planting a Family Order here in New England, in hopes of enjoying a pastoral life with a few devoted men and women, smitten with sentiments of the old heroism and love of holiness and of humanity. But none of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed. So we fell apart, some returning to the established ways, some soured by the trial, others postponing the fulfilment of his dream to a more propitious future.[11] [Footnote 11: "FRUITLANDS. "We have received a communication from Messrs. Alcott and Lane, dated from their farm, _Fruitlands_, in Harvard, Massachusetts, from which we make the following extract:--