"If, in spite of their ignorance, their mistakes, their imperfections, and their despotisms, the worst of these societies, which have adopted, with more or less favor, unitary principles, have succeeded in accumulating immeasurable wealth, what might have been done by a Community having a right principle of organization and composed of intellectual and upright men? Accordingly the discovery of such a principle has become an object of earnest investigation on the part of some of the most acute and disinterested men the world ever saw. This inquiry has given rise to our third division, called theoretico-practical architects of society." The great facts of modern Socialism are these: From 1776--the era of our national Revolution--the Shakers have been established in this country; first at two places in New York; then at four places in Massachusetts; at two in New Hampshire; two in Maine; one in Connecticut; and finally at two in Kentucky, and two in Ohio. In all these places prosperous religious Communism has been modestly and yet loudly preaching to the nation and the world. New England and New York and the great West have had actual Phalanxes before their eyes for nearly a century. And in all this time what has been acted on our American stage, has had England, France and Germany for its audience. The example of the Shakers has demonstrated, not merely that successful Communism is subjectively possible, but that this nation is free enough to let it grow. Who can doubt that this demonstration was known and watched in Germany from the beginning; and that it helped the successive experiments and emigrations of the Rappites, the Zoarites and the Ebenezers? These experiments, we have seen, were echoes of Shakerism, growing fainter and fainter, as the time-distance increased. Then the Shaker movement with its echoes was sounding also in England, when Robert Owen undertook to convert the world to Communism; and it is evident enough that he was really a far-off follower of the Rappites. France also had heard of Shakerism, before St. Simon or Fourier began to meditate and write Socialism. These men were nearly contemporaneous with Owen, and all three evidently obeyed a common impulse. That impulse was the sequel and certainly in part the effect of Shakerism. Thus it is no more than bare justice to say, that we are indebted to the Shakers more than to any or all other Social Architects of modern times. Their success has been the solid capital that has upheld all the paper theories, and counteracted the failures, of the French and English schools. It is very doubtful whether Owenism or Fourierism would have ever existed, or if they had, whether they would have ever moved the practical American nation, if the facts of Shakerism had not existed before them, and gone along with them.