Page:May Walden - Woman and Socialism (1909).pdf/4

4 was guillotined for the part he took in the struggle. St. Simon and Fourier, both Frenchmen, who were born in the latter part of the eighteenth century, taught that all men should, regard each other as brothers, and they tried to establish a brotherhood and make practical their ideas of such a society. The Brook Farm Association, established near Boston in 1840, was an outgrowth of Fourierism. Here Alcott, the father of the much loved author of "Little Women," lived with Hawthorne and other famous co-operators, and tried to found an ideal community. Robert Owen, another Englishman, a philanthropist and reformer, tried to improve the conditions of factory workers and lost the good opinion of his middle class friends when he took up the colony ideal in 1823.

Bellamy, whose book, "Looking Backward," did much twenty years ago to arouse the interest of people in a better state of society, is still credited with depicting an example of Socialism. The Ruskin colony of almost forgotten memory and other communities scattered here and there that have been abandoned,—all of these experiments have been labeled Socialism, and ridiculed for their failure.

The reason they have failed was because the founders had no idea of the changes that have taken and are taking place in the industrial life of the world.

Scientific Socialists, as we call ourselves, do take account of these changes, and we realize