Poverty shall be abolished; deformity, stupidity, and crime
shall be no more. Genius, grace, art, shall abound, and it is not to
be doubted but that, in the reign of "Attractive Industry," all men
will speak in blank verse.
Certainly we listened with great pleasure to such gay and
magnificent pictures. The ability and earnestness of the advocate
and his friends, the comprehensiveness of their theory, its apparent
directness of proceeding to the end they would secure, the
indignation they felt and uttered at all other speculation in the
presence of so much social misery, commanded our attention and
respect. It contained so much truth, and promised in the attempts
that shall be made to realize it so much valuable instruction, that
we are engaged to observe every step of its progress. Yet in spite
of the assurances of its friends, that it was new and widely
discriminated from all other plans for the regeneration of society,
we could not exempt it from the criticism which we apply to so many
projects for reform with which the brain of the age teems. Our
feeling was, that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life.
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