"The four hundred and twenty members kept together until the autumn of the first year, and then were forced to break up and divide property, having but little to sustain themselves, because our capital was wrongfully tied up, in the hands of trustees: this course having been pursued by advice of certain great lawyers, who, when our legal troubles commenced, appeared in the courts against us. No purchasers could be found to buy the lands in the hands of the trustees; so we had come to a dead lock, and were obliged to break up or down, as the fact may be estimated. The associates did not disagree at all save in one thing, and that was, as to these bad property arrangements, which compelled them to break up. They staid or went by lots cast. Two hundred persons staid on the domain some four months longer, and then, the hope of a legal foundation having entirely died out, the whole matter was necessarily thrown into the court of Chancery, and the lawyers, as usual, took the avails of the hard earnings of the disappointed members. "The regularly organized Association kept together nearly one year. A remnant of the band remained after the court of chancery had adjudged a transfer of the estate back into the hands of the original owners. That remnant tried every little scheme and new contrivance that imagination could devise (except Fourierism), to stick together in a joint-stock capacity for a year longer or so, and then broke and ran all over the world, proclaiming Fourierism a failure. The Heavens may fall, and Fourier's industrial science may fail; but it must be tried first; till then it can not fail. "In short the reason why the attempt at Clarkson failed, and the only reason, was, that the founders missed the entrance door, viz., a legal foundation; by which they would have made friends with the old world, and begun the new in a constructive way, obtaining the right men and plenty of the 'mammon of unrighteousness.' They should have got incorporated under a general law like our manufacturing law, and obtained a suitable domain of at least 5760 acres of land or three miles square, and should have built and furnished a sufficient portion of a phalanstery to accommodate at least 400 persons, at the outset of organization. I boldly pronounce all partial attempts, short of such a beginning, a waste, and worse than a waste, of time and brain, blood and muscle, soul and body. JOHN GREIG." A writer in the _Phalanx_ (July 1844), viewing things from a standpoint a little further off than Mr. Greig's, gave the following more probable account of the Clarkson failure: