With the President there had arrived in Eden Vale three members of the executive committee; five others followed a few days after with the first waggon-caravan from Mombasa; so that, including Ney, Johnston, and Demestre (the last of whom had been co-opted at the suggestion of the two former), twelve were now in Freeland. As hie committee at that time consisted of fifteen members, there still remained three at a distance, of whom one was in London, another at Trieste, and the third at Mombasa, at which places they were for the present to act as the committee's authorised agents in the foreign affairs of the Society. Their duty was to receive fresh members, to collect and provisionally to have charge of the funds, and to superintend the emigrations to Eden Vale. Their instructions respecting applications for membership were to receive every applicant who was not a relapsed criminal, and who could read and write. The former condition needs no justification. We had an unqualified confidence in the ennobling influence of our social reforms, because those reforms removed the motive that impelled to most vices; we were perfectly satisfied that Freeland would produce no criminals, and would even, if it were not beyond the bounds of possibility, wean from vice those who had been previously made criminals by misery and ignorance; but we wished, in the beginning, to avoid being swamped by bad elements, and, in view of the excusable attempts of certain States to rid themselves in some way or another of their relapsed criminals, we were compelled to exercise caution. It may seem a greater hardship that the perfectly illiterate were excluded. But this was a necessary requirement of our programme. We wished to transfer the right of the absolute free self-control of the individual to the domain of labour from that of the relation of servitude which had existed for thousands of years. We wished to transform the worker who had been dependent upon his employer for his bread into the independent producer acting at his own risk in free association with free colleagues. It follows, as a matter of course, that in this our work we could use only such workers as were raised above at least the lowest stage of brutality and ignorance. That we thus excluded the most miserable of the miserable, is true; but, apart from the fact that generally the ignorant man lacks a clear consciousness of his misfortune and degradation, and his sufferings are therefore, as a rule, rather of a physical than of a moral nature, we could not allow ourselves to be so led astray by pity as to endanger the success of our work. The ignorant man _must_ be under authority; and as it was not our purpose to educate our members gradually to become free producers, but to introduce them immediately to a system of free production, we were compelled to protect ourselves against ignorance as well as against crime.