will rise and shake off its lethargy, and every man will be heard saying, "Here, in this life, are so many ways to be happy; why should I walk in only a few of them?" Then let Phrenology go on; she will "kill two birds with one stone," and those birds harpies, too, that lurk about the tables spread with our privileges and our hopes, and steal many a choice morsel from our expecting appetites. Ignorance of what we are, has for ages permitted men to be made into mere things; the one into a smith, or doctor, or teacher; the other into a hopper, or walker, or runner-just as from wood and iron are made hammers, chisels, hoes, etc., each good only for its own peculiar use. If the faculties of such men, not immediately concerned in their vocations, have been exercised at all, it has been when chance, or their own inherent power, called them out; then, indeed, the accidental or instinctive direction has been blindly followed.

What! is the farmer merely a farmer? the teacher merely a teacher? -or any other man merely that operative thing they style him on signboards and business cards? No! Before the laborer, there existed the man; in the laborer is still the man; and, high above the laborer, forever was and still will be the man! That one is a mechanic, another a merchant, etc., is a mere accident; but that every one of them is and has been the possessor of a soul-this is a great fact. Very unfortunately for us, we have lost the fact in the accident: we have lost the conception of what the infinite God made us, in the idea of what the sport of circumstances has seemed to make us but only seemed. What says Nature, then? She says the man is not the "hewer of wood;" no, nor is he the throned monarch, but equally above both. Yet the world has not half got over believing the contrary. "What!" says the farmer, standing among his ploughs and harrows, "send my boy to the academy-and send him there five or six years, too?" Yes, send him: because he is not like your plough, made to do one sort of work-do it in one way-and when it is done, to rot contented. Send him: for, however near you may come to the accomplishment of your unworthy purpose, you cannot make a farmer of him after all; he will be a man, although he may, and must, fall far short of his prerogatives as such. With few exceptions, the laboring classes of the world have lived and died uneducated. Like brutes, they have had their particular drudgery allotted them; to this alone they have been trained, and in the performance of it have worn themselves out. Not that we speak against labor. We would, were it in our power, exalt labor in men's eyes, and the laborer in his own. Labor is healthful, necessary, noble; it is God's ordinance, and one of man's highest inBut what we speak of is the painful fact, that almost all men make themselves slaves to their "trade;" and in their assiduous plying of this, lose the very gist and enjoyment of life itself. Even industry and thrift, in the strictest sense of the terms, and in a much higher sense than that in which they are commonly taken, are possible without a

terests.

slavish and narrow devotion of the powers of human life to a single occupation.

Oh! when will men learn themselves? When learn that it is not all of life to accumulate and dissipate pelf, but that this is a world of things and thoughts, feelings and fancies; forms, colors, sights, and sounds; principles and causes; and, above all else, a world of mysteries; and that in converse with these only can we in any degree approach the true dignity, and grasp the proper delights, of souls immortal?

She

Yet truth is patient-patient as the years of eternity. They come and go, untiring, unending; and on the front of each sits Truth. For ages past, and ages to come, she sits there, waiting to be heard. will be heard at last. Our children will say, "It is a fact, then, that man was not born to make money: he has an inheritance without all this turmoil; he was born to it, and it is as old as the foundations of the world. The world and a soul are his inheritance: to know the former, and exercise the latter that is life."

Why is the day-laborer denied the pleasures arising from the contemplation of science and art? Why is he excluded from the banquet of historical truth, of poetry, painting, and eloquence? Yet so limited and incomplete is the development of mind in this class of men, that with thousands and ten thousands of them, the only faculty called into exercise by the most brilliant displays of these, man's noblest gifts, is wonder —a stupid, brute wonder. Marvelousness stares at such exhibitions, as it does at an exhumed mastodon; or as it would at a revivified Argus, or Briareus, of the olden time; but the god-like faculties addressed are not stirred. Why are they mute? Why do they not leap into action as at the touch of magic? Alas! they have withered and died within the man long before their time. They have been buried in the man, and he now walks about, the living tomb of his own powers and resources!

Shall not the minister of the Gospel be allowed to exercise at least a moiety of the organs which his fellows may, and which he, of course, possesses in common with them? If the "love of Christ constrains him" to sacrifice what he feels to be the minor gratifications of life, he has the best right so to do, and no one should complain. But what right have religious societies, and the world, to watch and criticise his conduct more than that of any other man? What right has any man to condemn the minister for thought, word, or deed, which he would hold blameless in another? May he not relate anecdotes at the social board? Is his ministerial vow an abjuration of his Eventuality and Individuality? If so, God, who made those faculties in his infinite wisdom, and for purposes infinitely wise, gave them, in greater or less degree, to every human being, never required him to take such a vow. May he not be jocose and merry? Is his clerical gown the pall of his Mirthfulness? If so, the great God who made his Mirthfulness, and conferred it on him as one

among the rich capabilities of a human life, would never have him put it on. No! Away with the gown, if it sacrifice the man! Mirthfulness will answer for itself, to its own Maker, in the "last great day." Shall not the Gospel minister make bargains and keep secrets, sing and play, hear and see, when and wherein he chooses? All this he may do, for he has God's permit stamped in letters of fire on his inner soul. "Let God be true and every man a liar." True, there should be a unity and con sistency in the minister's character, and that unity should spring from a constant realization of his high mission, and from a ruling Benevolence within him but all this may exist and be, in its operation on mankind, a thousand times more successful, without the sacrifice of one original faculty of the soul, simply by their proper subordination and subserviency.

Perhaps, while innocently, and according to our poor ability, pleading the cause of the ministry, we are earning but meagre thanks from some of them. Well, be it so. We know there are professed ministers of Christ, and many of them, who consider that they would positively lose their influence and destroy their usefulness, by acknowledging themselves equal, every way equal, and only equal to their fellow-men. But when they will show us in what their superiority, or their exclusive dignity or worth consists-except in the mere accident of having chosen a more responsible and honorable station (so that the dignity still consists in the station assumed, and not in the man or character assuming it)—when they will so satisfy us, we will retract our words, and leave them in full fruition the prerogative they claim, which is that of being but very imperfect men, and possessing but a small share of the faculties, sensibilities, and powers, which go to make up that noblest, sublimest, proudest of all God's works, A MAN.

Most men think so constantly of what they will make themselves, and are making themselves, and labor so constantly to make themselves what they have resolved to be, that they lose sight of what they really are; or rather, we ought to say, of what nature designed them to be, and what they had begun to be before they took the direction and training of their powers into their own hands. This is lamentable, and it is worth our thought. A man, entering on the stage of life, resolves to be a certain character and play a certain part, according to his conceptions of that character and part; and henceforth all his thoughts and energies centre on this; judgment is constantly on the rack to discern and properly fill up the assumed part, and Cautiousness to guard him from every thing that may be, or appear to be, inconsistent with it; and before the man is aware, he has completely metamorphosed himself by his own voluntary efforts, and is not, nor probably ever will be, the being nature designed and fitted him for at first. He is now narrow, partial, and bigoted. He cannot help it, for he has made himself so; nor yet can he see it, for, as

his whole labor of life has been to warp himself to a certain model, his mental vision has become warped and distorted with the rest. Let every man often ask himself, "What am I?" And when, after long study, he is enabled to trace out the answer in the lines and lineaments of his own soul, let him say, "What God has made me, I will be. I will exert, at the bidding of reason, every faculty and desire he has given me, thanking him for its possession, and fearless of what man may say of my conduct."

ASSOCIATION.

ARTICLE LII.

BY A CORRESPONDENT.

WITH NOTES BY THE EDITOR.

WE give place to the following, partly by way of discussing that most important subject, the relations of capital and labor, and partly as furnishing texts by means of which to present some important suggestions in the form of notes:

For the American Phrenological Journal.

Of Fourierism, however purged, I nearly despair; and in looking about for a substitute, I see nothing but the Shaker system, adopted by Rap, at Economy, in Pennsylvania, and Bimeler, in Ohio; and we cannot dispute its permanency wherever practiced, nor its having created superfluous wealth at Economy and Zoar in less than thirty years, with very small means to commence with. Is this, then, the true system? Must the race become extinct with the first generation after isolation ceases to furnish members for Association? Must knowledge be confined to writing and a little arithmetic, as soon as men get leisure to pursue it with renewed vigor? And must Associations be based upon a little religious superstition? These are the conditions of membership with the Shakers, at Economy and at Zoar. I need not say that all this is a violation of man's nature, and that Phrenology requires the legitimate exercise of all his faculties.

Christ's disciples united in Association, no doubt in pursuance of his instructions. “They had all things in common, and every one received as he had need." But of the minutiae of their organization we know nothing, except that he who would not work, neither should he eat; that they loved each other as themselves, and did to others as they wished to be done by; and this, I am fully persuaded, is an indispensable pre-requisite to success in any Association. But this article belongs neither to the religion, which is now exclusively theoretical, nor to the morals of the present day; indeed, not one among a million practices it; and the present organization of civil society dictates any thing rather than its exercise. How can man's selfishness be reconciled with, and concentrated upon, his duty? Or must we wait till selfishness has killed itself by over action? When will that be? If so, you will hardly participate in the joys of your expected renovation of society, seeing selfishness is on the increase every hour. But you will, of course, cover the whole ground when you get ready.

I am well persuaded that no Association whose members come together to gratify their acquisitiveness, which swallows up every nobler feeling, can long remain united; for stockholders will have a stock vote, consider themselves entitled to rule, and will rule, in spite of all constitutional provisions to the contrary; sell to consumers at the highest possible prices; force upon them the

refuse, and sell the rest to increase their dividend; and, finally, raise a quarrel with all who oppose their schemes, and drive away those who are unprofitable. The lovers of peace may yield inch after inch; avarice increases with every concession-it never can be satisfied. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." All this have I witnessed year after year. And why should capital receive a dividend, or vote? That it should have neither, appears to me evident from the following considerations.

1. Capital can be created only by labor, done either by the person who possessed it or by others. If the possessor has created it by his own labor, he has, of course, received his pay when he earned it, and there is not the shadow of a reason why he and his children should continue to receive part of the earnings of others, to all eternity, simply because he has laid up a part of his; and surely, if he or his ancestors have accumulated wealth by extorting it from others, which is most generally the case, there is much less reason for this spunging system. This custom had its origin in an age when custom gave to the stronger, either in money, mind, or body, the right to enslave the weaker; and the greater part of the value of the labor of the latter going to the capital which employs them, is the sole cause of the suffering of the laboring classes, in this and other countries. In civil society, where the possession of capital is extremely uncertain, the present system of interest may, perhaps, be justified; but in Association, where every thing is made permanent, this reason vanishes altogether; and if any difference in securing the product of past and present labor should be made, it should only be giving the former the preference in the division, in case of dissolution, without any increase. But Fourier and his followers have adopted a system much worse than that of civil society-a system which all civilized nations have repudiated on account of its absurdity; because experience has demonstrated the fact, that production can never keep pace with a compound ratio of the increase of capital, without giving it a fictitious value. This assertion will be explained by what follows.

In those Associations which give one third, one fourth, or one fifth, or any other proportion of the value of the labor done by members, to capital, annually, to be invested annually in stock, the capital will double itself in 11.9 years, at six per cent.; in 14.2 years, at five per cent.; in 17.67 years, at four per cent.; etc. The consequence is, that capital invested in the commencement, after twelve, fourteen, seventeen, etc., years (according as the dividend will be small or large), will draw double the dividend that capital invested at the expiration of that time will draw; because dividends are declared on dividends invested the year before and from this cause the per-centage of the dividend will diminish very rapidly, and investments to be made by any money-prudent man (and to money-prudence Fourierists principally appeal), need not be expected by any Association after it has been in operation fifteen or twenty years; for the decrease of per-centage on dividends must evidently advance pari passu with the increase of capital created by this kind of investments, in a ratio greater than the increase of dividend advances; because dividend is declared on all the provision and clothing the members consume, and the income of the Association can only increase in proportion to the net income, above all consumption, invested in improvements which give facility of production. Thus the devotion of Fourierists at the shrine of mammon defeats itself; the sole object of the dividend system on capital, being to induce capitalists to invest.

But this is not the worst feature of this dividend system. The repairs of tools and machinery, as well as the taxes, insurance, etc., are deducted before any dividend is declared; but this dividend is made on the food and clothing consumed by members who pay, accordingly, one third, a fourth, or a fifth, etc., of the value of what they consume, to capital, besides paying two thirds, three fourths, four fifths, etc., of the repairs of tools, machinery, taxes, etc.; and as the reward of so doing, get a capital invested from mercenary motives, accompanied by all the tyranny which it now exercises in civil society, except that of denying them employment and spunging them of their earnings beyond