from my tutor and friend, the late John Henderson, (one of the most
extraordinary of men) some little taste for literature, I found myself,
during that period, generally surrounded by men of cultivated minds.[1]
With these preliminary remarks I shall commence the narrative.

At the close of the year 1794, a clever young man, of the Society of
Friends, of the name of Robert Lovell, who had married a Miss Fricker,
informed me that a few friends of his from Oxford and Cambridge, with
himself, were about to sail to America, and, on the banks of the
Susquehannah, to form a Social Colony, in which there was to be a
community of property, and where all that was selfish was to be
proscribed. None, he said, were to be admitted into their number, but
tried and incorruptible characters; and he felt quite assured that he and
his friends would be able to realize a state of society free from the
evils and turmoils that then agitated the world, and to present an
example of the eminence to which men might arrive under the unrestrained
influence of sound principles. He now paid me the compliment of saying
that he would be happy to include _me_ in this select assemblage who,
under a state which he called PANTISOCRACY, were, he hoped, to regenerate
the whole complexion of society; and that, not by establishing formal
laws, but by excluding all the little deteriorating passions; injustice,
"wrath, anger, clamour, and evil speaking," and thereby setting an
example of "Human Perfectibility."

Young as I was, I suspected there was an old and intractable leaven in
human nature that would effectually frustrate these airy schemes of
happiness, which had been projected in every age, and always with the
same result. At first the disclosure so confounded my understanding, that
I almost fancied myself transported to some new state of things, while
images of patriarchal and pristine felicity stood thick around, decked in