Brownson's _Convert_ than we know of elsewhere. Brownson was for a
time actively interested in it, and in 1829 established a journal in
support of its principles somewhere in Western New York. From him we
learn that it was started in 1828 by Robert Dale Owen, Robert L.
Jennings, George H. Evans, Fanny Wright, and a few other
doctrinaires, foreign-born without exception, in the hope of getting
control of political power so as to use it for establishing purely
secular schools. Their advocacy of anti-Christian and free-love
doctrines had so signally failed among adult Americans that the
slower but surer method of educating the children of the country
without religion had dawned upon them as more certain to succeed.

"We hoped," writes Dr. Brownson, "by linking our cause with the
ultra-democratic sentiment of the country, which had had from the
time of Jefferson and Tom Paine something of an anti-Christian
character; by professing ourselves the bold and uncompromising
champions of equality; by expressing a great love for the people and
a deep sympathy with the laborer, whom we represented as defrauded
and oppressed by his employer; by denouncing all proprietors as
aristocrats, and by keeping the more unpopular features of our plan
as far in the background as possible, to enlist the majority of the
American people under the banner of the Workingman's party; nothing
doubting that, if we could once raise that party to power, we could
use it to secure the adoption of our educational system."

This party, however, both as an engine in politics and as a fitting
embodiment of his private views, Dr. Brownson soon abandoned. He was
not truly radical, in the evil sense of that word, at any period of
his career, and the theories of the leaders soon became insupportable
to his moral sense. But he remained true to the cause of the