What strikes us when we put together the fragments of Fourier’s utopia--as one might put together a jigsaw puzzle--is the fact that he faces the variety and inequality of human nature. Instead of erecting a standard for men to live up to, and rejecting mankind as unfit for utopia because the standard is far beyond its height, the standard itself is founded upon the utmost capacity which a community might be able to exhibit. Fourier meets human nature half-way: he endeavors to project a society which will give regular channels to all its divergent impulses, and prevent them from spilling unsocially all over the landscape. In his statement of this aim there are plenty of weaknesses and absurdities; and I confess that it is hard to take this pathetic little man seriously; but when one has grappled with Fourier’s thought one discovers that there is something to take. Fourier died without persuading anyone to give a trial to his scheme of association; and yet his work was not without its practical influence. The Brook Farm experiment in America was a fumbling attempt to plant a phalanstery without paying any attention to the conditions which Fourier would have rigorously imposed; and the “familistere” of the great steel works of Godin at Guise, in France, is another direct result of Fourier’s inspiration. He remains, I believe, the first man who had a plan for colonizing the wilderness of industrial barbarism that existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and redeeming that wilderness to civilization. 5 The name of Robert Owen is usually associated with utopianism; but his work belongs more to the “real” world than to the idola of utopia; and I pass over him with the briefest mention, for his projects for a model industrial town have more of the flavor of a poor colony than that of a productive human society. Let us grant him good intentions, organizing ability, and moral fervor: without doubt he is a noble figure, even when his attitude is strained and his tone strident. The series of essays he wrote on love and marriage are marked by fine sympathy and common sense; and it is to be regretted that they are not as widely known as his plans for a new moral world. If this little note can repair the neglect, I have done Owen ample justice: as an active figure in English and American public life he is properly a subject for the social historian. With Owen I must also dismiss John Ruskin, who began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to develop plans for a “Guild of St. George.” This guild was to form a little island of honest labor and sound education in the midst of the turbid sea of industrialism; but it did not embrace the whole of society, and it was utopian only in the sense that the Oneida Community, let us say, was utopian. While they are full of pregnant suggestions, the plans for the Guild are as fragmentary as the New Atlantis. 6 One of the neglected utopias of the mid-nineteenth century is that of James Buckingham.