From detailing and accounting for the evils which exist under
our present institutions, he usually proceeded to delineate some
scheme of Utopian felicity, where the empire of reason should
supplant that of force: where justice should be universally
understood and practised; where the interest of the whole and of
the individual should be seen by all to be the same; where the
public good should be the scope of all activity; where the tasks of
all should be the same, and the means of subsistence equally
distributed.

No one could contemplate his pictures without rapture. By
their comprehensiveness and amplitude they filled the imagination.
I was unwilling to believe that in no region of the world, or at no
period could these ideas be realized. It was plain that the
nations of Europe were tending to greater depravity, and would be
the prey of perpetual vicissitude. All individual attempts at
their reformation would be fruitless. He therefore who desired the
diffusion of right principles, to make a just system be adopted by
a whole community, must pursue some extraordinary method.

In this state of mind I recollected my native country, where
a few colonists from Britain had sown the germe of populous and
mighty empires. Attended, as they were, into their new abode, by
all their prejudices, yet such had been the influence of new
circumstances, of consulting for their own happiness, of adopting
simple forms of government, and excluding nobles and kings from
their system, that they enjoyed a degree of happiness far superior
to their parent state.