But when he had had two years of this sort of toil the Whigs elected a President, and Hawthorne was dropped from the civil service. The project of an ideal community just then presented itself, and from Boston he went to Brook Farm, close by in Roxbury. The era of Transcendentalism had arrived, and Dr. George Ripley, an enthusiastic student of philosophy and a man of wide information, sought to give the new tendencies a practical turn in the establishment of a modified socialistic community. The Industrial Association which he proposed to plant at West Roxbury was wisely planned with reference to the conditions of American life; it had no affinity with the erratic views of Enfantin or St. Simon, nor did it in the least partake of the errors of Robert Owen regarding the relation of the sexes; although it agreed with Fourier and Owen both, if I understand the aim rightly, in respect of labor. Dr. Ripley's simple object was to distribute labor in such a way as to give all men time for culture, and to free their minds from the debasing influence of a merely selfish competition. "A few men of like views and feelings," one of his sympathizers has said, "grouped themselves around him, not as their master, but as their friend and brother, and the community at Brook Farm was instituted." Charles A. Dana and Minot Pratt were leading spirits in the enterprise; the young Brownson, George William Curtis, and Horace Sumner (a younger brother of Charles) were also engaged in it, at various times. The place was a kind of granary of true grit. Hawthorne has characterized the community in that remark which he applied to Blithedale: "They were mostly individuals who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come." Miss E. P. Peabody had at that time left Salem and begun a publishing business in Boston, being one of the first women of our time to embark in an occupation thought to appertain exclusively to men; and at her rooms some of the preliminary meetings of the new association were held. Thus it happened that the scheme was speedily brought to Hawthorne's notice. When his accession to the ranks was announced, Dr. Ripley, as he said to the present writer, felt as if a miracle had occurred, "or as if the heavens would presently be opened and we should see Jacob's Ladder before us. But we never came any nearer to having _that_, than our old ladder in the barn, from floor to hayloft." Besides his belief in the theory of an improved condition of society, and his desire to forward its accomplishment, Hawthorne had two objects in joining the community: one of which was to secure a suitable and economical home after marriage; the other, to hit upon a mode of life which should equalize the sum of his exertions between body and brain. Many persons went thither in just the same frame of mind.