followed the great political revolution in France. Schemes of society
were formulated which were to carry this revolution further, and
concentrate effort on industrial rather than political change. Pictures
were presented to the imagination, and the world was invited to realise
them, of societies in which all were workers on equal terms, and groups
of fraternal citizens, separated no longer by the egoisms of the private
home, dwelt together in palaces called "phalansteries," which appear to
have been imaginary anticipations of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Here
lapped in luxury, they were to feast at common tables; and between meals
the men were to work in the fields singing, while a lady accompanied
their voices on a grand piano under a hedge. These pictures, however,
agreeable as they were to the fancy, failed to produce any great effect
on the multitudes; for the multitudes felt instinctively that they were
too good to be true. That such was the case is admitted by socialistic
historians themselves. Socialism during this period was, they say, in
its "Utopian stage." It was not even sufficiently coherent to have
acquired a distinctive name till the word "socialism" was coined in
connection with the views of Owen, which suffered discredit from the
failure of his attempts to put them into practice. Socialism in those
days was a dream, but it was not science; and in a world which was
rapidly coming to look upon science as supreme, nothing could convince
men generally--not even the most ignorant--which had not, or was not
supposed to have, the authority of science at the back of it.

Such being the situation, as the socialists accurately describe it, an
eminent thinker arose who at last supplied what was wanting. He provided
the unorganised aspirations, which by this time were known as socialism,
with a formula which was at once definite, intelligible, and
comprehensive, and had all the air of being rigidly scientific also. By
this means thoughts and feelings, previously vague and fluid, like salts