Rowland Hill was, indeed, a man, to use Gibbon’s words, “whom nature had designed to think as he pleased, and to speak as he thought.” Such freedom as this is only enjoyed in its fullest extent by those who have secured “independence, that first earthly blessing.” But independence, if it is chiefly enjoyed by men of ample means, is, nevertheless, within the reach of those who have but simple wants. Yet after all there was not a little truth in what their old father wrote on hearing of this scheme of his sons: “My dear son Rowland. You and your brothers are the last men to make monks of.” Such a scheme as this has a strong outward resemblance to the Pantisocracy of Southey and Coleridge; but the differences between the two schemes are far greater than the resemblances. The two poets were as young as they were unversed in the ways of the world, when the delightful prospect of happiness opened before their view to live with their friends in the most agreeable and most honourable employment, to eat the fruits they had raised, and see every face happy around them.[79] The band of friends whom they had gathered round them were, perhaps, not more experienced than themselves. But the planners of the other scheme were men who had spent many years in hard work, and in habits of strict economy. They did not, like the two poets, look upon money as a huge evil with which, happily, they should not long have to contend. They had learnt its value. They knew how to buy and how to sell. They had a certain amount of capital at their command. Two of them, moreover, were skilful in the use of tools, and fertile in mechanical inventions. They had long tried in their family union the plan of a Social Community, and were entering upon their undertaking with a clear insight into the difficulties which awaited them. They were fully alive, moreover, to the dangers that Owen had brought upon himself by his indiscriminate admission of all comers. They only proposed to invite men to join them with whose characters they had first become thoroughly acquainted. In a list of “members apparently qualified,” I find the names of Dr. Southwood Smith and Mr. Roebuck. “I formed an intimate acquaintance with Mr. Roebuck,” Sir Rowland Hill has recorded, “about the year 1830. In 1832 (I think) my wife nursed him through a long illness at Bruce Castle.” Their _Social Community_ was not so much an end in itself as a means towards other and far higher ends. They had schemes for moving the earth; but they wanted a fulcrum. They had no leisure. What Rowland Hill could do when he was free from his school, he showed in the next four years of his life. In the spare time that a man could command who was Secretary to a new and active Commission, he invented, as will be seen, a printing-press, and devised his great scheme of Postal Reform. In like manner his youngest surviving brother, who, a year or two after the Social Community was planned, was made the First Inspector of Prisons in