I have already explained that I should not regard this as an experiment in Socialism; but I do think that those who undertook it would have to be in sympathy with the spirit of Socialism, which is the spirit of brotherhood and democracy. Whenever I have mentioned this plan to friends they have always said: “The great difficulty would be to get together a community of congenial people.” It does not seem to me that this would be a difficulty at all. Every member of the community would have his own home, to which he would invite his personal friends as he chose; and the other members of the community he would meet in the same way that he meets acquaintances in business and politics, in theatres, restaurants, and clubs. I myself am the most unsociable of human beings when I am busy, and have no idea of giving up my hermit’s tastes. In a colony of a hundred families there ought to be persons of every kind of inclination, and it would not be in the least necessary for anyone to associate with those who were not congenial. Of course there are people in the world whom we should not want near us at all; but such people, I think, would not care to join our colony. Vulgar and snobbish people get along very well in the world as it is, and do not find it a task to give orders to servants. Those who would be interested in such a plan would be men and women who wished to practise “plain living and high thinking”; and they would naturally wish to get as far as possible from every suggestion of ostentation and conventionality. They would establish the shirt-waist and the short skirt as _en règle_, and would, I trust, allow me in without a dress suit. They would be all hard-working people themselves, and they would not look down upon honest labour. This spirit, if wisely and earnestly cultivated, would solve the “servant problem” for the colony, and solve the health problem for its members as well. I know business and professional men who, when they need exercise, have to go down into the basement and lift weights and pull at rubber straps; and they envy me my farm, where I can hoe the garden, or pitch hay, or pick fruit, and not merely benefit my body, but also put money in my purse. In this community every member would be credited for the time he worked; and it ought to become the custom for the men to help with the harvests, and the women with the preserving of fruit, and the children with the berry picking and the weeding of the gardens. I have no doubt that there are thousands of young men and women in New York City, students of art and music and the professions, who would be glad of a chance to earn their way in a community where class feeling did not make labour degrading. I appreciate the difficulties in the way of such a project; the chances at present are against a coal-heaver’s being a socially possible person, and I am not insisting that the day labourers should share in the privileges of the community. But I do think that this should certainly