The Communistic Societies of the United States | Page 6

observations I was obliged to travel from Maine in the
northeast to Kentucky in the south, and Oregon in the west. I have

thought it best to give at first an impartial and not unfriendly account of
each commune, or organized system of communes; and in several
concluding chapters I have analyzed and compared their different
customs and practices, and attempted to state what, upon the facts
presented, seem to be the conditions absolutely requisite to the
successful conduct of a communistic society, and also what appear to
be the influences, for good and evil, of such bodies upon their members
and upon their neighbors.
I have added some particulars of the Swedish Commune which lately
existed at Bishop Hill, in Illinois, but which, after a flourishing career
of seven years, has now become extinct; and I did this to show, in a
single example, what are the causes which work against harmony and
success in such a society.
Also I have given some particulars concerning three examples of
colonization, which, though they do not properly belong to my subject,
are yet important, as showing what may be accomplished by
co-operative efforts in agriculture, under prudent management.
It is, I suppose, hardly necessary to say that, while I have given an
impartial and respectful account of the religious faith of each commune,
I am not therefore to be supposed to hold with any of them. For
instance, I thought it interesting to give some space to the very singular
phenomena called "spiritual manifestations" among the Shakers; but I
am not what is commonly called a "Spiritualist."
[Relocated Footnote: Lest I should to some readers appear to use too
strong language, I append here a few passages from a recent English
work, Mr. Thornton's book "On Labor," where he gives an account of
some of the regulations of English Trades-Unions:
"A journeyman is not permitted to teach his own son his own trade, nor,
if the lad managed to learn the trade by stealth, would he be permitted
to practice it. A master, desiring out of charity to take as apprentice one
of the eight destitute orphans of a widowed mother, has been told by
his men that if he did they would strike. A bricklayer's assistant who by
looking on has learned to lay bricks as well as his principal, is generally
doomed, nevertheless, to continue a laborer for life. He will never rise
to the rank of a bricklayer, if those who have already attained that
dignity can help it."
"Some Unions divide the country round them into districts, and will not

permit the products of the trades controlled by them to be used except
within the district in which they have been fabricated.... At Manchester
this combination is particularly effective, preventing any bricks made
beyond a radius of four miles from entering the city. To enforce the
exclusion, paid agents are employed; every cart of bricks coming
toward Manchester is watched, and if the contents be found to have
come from without the prescribed boundary the bricklayers at once
refuse to work.... The vagaries of the Lancashire brick makers are fairly
paralleled by the masons of the same county. Stone, when freshly
quarried, is softer, and can be more easily cut than later: men habitually
employed about any particular quarry better understand the working of
its particular stone than men from a distance; there is great economy,
too, in transporting stone dressed instead of in rough blocks. The
Yorkshire masons, however, will not allow Yorkshire stone to be
brought into their district if worked on more than one side. All the rest
of the working, the edging and jointing, they insist on doing themselves,
though they thereby add thirty-five per cent, to its price.... A Bradford
contractor, requiring for a staircase some steps of hard delf-stone, a
material which Bradford masons so much dislike that they often refuse
employment rather than undertake it, got the steps worked at the quarry.
But when they arrived ready for setting, his masons insisted on their
being worked over again, at an expense of from 5s. to 10s. per step. A
master-mason at Ashton obtained some stone ready polished from a
quarry near Macclesfield. His men, however, in obedience to the rules
of their club, refused to fix it until the polished part had been defaced
and they had polished it again by hand, though not so well as at first....
In one or two of the northern counties, the associated plasterers and
associated plasterers' laborers have come to an understanding,
according to which the latter are to abstain from all plasterers' work
except simple whitewashing; and the plasterers in return are to do
nothing except pure plasterers' work, that the laborers would like to do
for them, insomuch that if a plasterer wants