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Victor Considerant — Au Texas (Brussels / Paris, 1855, 2nd edition)

English translation, aligned section-by-section with french_clean.md. Translated from the hand-corrected French transcription of the Internet Archive facsimile (autexas00cons.pdf). Faithful but readable; Considerant's dash-laden, emphatic texture is kept. Period place-names and proper nouns left as he wrote them, with [modern form] only where helpful. Uncertain readings carried over as [?].

Scope: Parts One, Two, and Three (printed pp. 9–170). The preface, Part Four (the SCEAT bases & statutes — see src/sources/sceat-statutes/dossier.md), the conversion and meteorological tables, the Goodrich extract, and the Appendix are not included.

PART ONE — From December 1852 to May 1853

I

My departure for the New Continent was as accidental as it was sudden. I was carried off to America rather than went there. At the moment the decision was taken, I had barely time to exchange a single letter on the subject with our friends in Paris.

Three or four months given over to seeing the New World — that was the whole of my program; and I had so little idea of finding there a new outlet for our higher preoccupations that I carried with me the work of which I have just spoken to you, intending to finish it at sea and send it to Paris shortly after my arrival.

Having left Antwerp on 28 November 1852 and Liverpool on 1 December, I entered, on the evening of the 14th, the splendid bay of New-York, though we had scarcely ceased the whole way to have head winds and very heavy seas. Good crossings, by steam, already take no more than ten or eleven days; it is to be believed that within a few years it will be at most six or seven. The two hemispheres are drawing singularly closer.

We all know more or less, in Europe, the things of American society. Besides the accounts and the newspapers, we have, on the United States, good books. Here, however, the reality is far more striking than the most faithful pictures. Two hours' walk through the streets of New-York penetrated me more deeply than all my reading into the originating principle of American civilization.

This human spontaneity at work on a field without limits; the rapidity and mass of the movement it engenders; the roughness of that movement and its peculiar order; the reaction of the resulting milieu upon the personality itself, which such an atmosphere tempers, magnetizes, arms and equips for its own circumstances; the incredible quantity of social labor flung out by these volcanoes of molecular activity in ceaseless eruption: all the phenomena, in short, of the most rapid and most energetic spontaneous creation that has ever occurred in the history of humanity, appear to you, envelop you in an instant, burst upon your eyes, shout in your ears, tug at you, jostle you — in brief, make themselves vividly understood in every way. Scarcely disembarked, the European recognizes that he has formally set foot on a new world.

The energy of free individualism, the power of personal activity, freed from hindrances, rise up on every side and strike you so hard that one is at first stunned.

No one was expecting me in America. Our friends learned of my arrival from the newspapers, several of which, on this occasion, spoke in kindly terms of our doctrines; and I was, on the part of a monthly gathering of the journalists of New-York, the object of an entirely friendly and sympathetic invitation. — Brisbane, who was at Buffalo, was not slow to rejoin me.

We were entering the heart of winter. I felt the need to disentangle the chaos whirling about me, to make myself some sort of plan, and to learn a little English before venturing into the interior. I had to put myself in a state to see to some profit. Besides, Brisbane, to whom the idea of a tour together suited perfectly, was still detained by business. It was decided that I should first make a residence of some weeks at the North-American-Phalanx, an associative establishment founded in the State of New-Jersey, not far from New-York. I naturally had at heart the study of this establishment, and I was to find there excellent lessons in English. Brisbane led me there before returning to his affairs. A few words on this Association would not be out of place here.

II

We have had many occasions to acquaint the friends of the Associative Doctrine in Europe with the character and progress of its propagation in America. Let us briefly recall the facts. Fourier's conception comprises two general ideas: 1° the idea of Association, an economic and social notion of a cooperative and combined order, opposed to the state of fragmentation and divergence; 2° the idea of the Serial Law, by virtue of which Association is conceived no longer simply as an aggregation of cooperating elements functioning within some system or other, but as a social being endowed with a superior organization, living a full, integral and harmonic life. — The early propagation in America was drawn into concerning itself exclusively with the first of these two ideas. The second was neglected or deferred, and in the end very little brought to light. Such a simplification, by reducing the theory to its elementary degrees, was no doubt made to facilitate and accelerate adhesions; but if it was to carry a danger anywhere, it was in the United States, the American character being already disposed enough of itself to attack things without much preparation. And so, without troubling themselves over those organic conditions of which so little had been said, many of those who welcomed the associative principle imagined quite naturally that it sufficed, in order to engender social harmony, to gather together on some piece of ground, to stipulate there a contract of association, and to go forward. — Go ahead! is the motto of the populations of the Union. So that one saw, at the period of which I speak, Phalanxes spring up in many places. —

This name was given to associations sometimes composed of only four or five families, convinced that they were going, without more ado, to constitute nuclei of harmony whose development would proceed all by itself. — If only all these feeble attempts had at least been combined! But no; and, above all in the circumstances I have just recalled, things were bound to begin so. It is wholly in keeping with the American genius. Whatever may be said of all these ill-calculated trials, the North-American-Phalanx, thanks to capital and a founding personnel somewhat more considerable than those of the other ventures, alone subsists today. The N. A. Phalanx counts, at this hour, ten years of existence. Its personnel, of 120 to 130 members, women and children included, has remained numerically stationary. Such weakness in number, and the absence, among most of the members, of the theoretical knowledge that would have kept alive in the mass an aspiration toward the ideal, a tendency toward the realization of its necessary conditions — notably the increase of population — have not allowed the least sketch of serial organization to be attempted there. A workshop is indeed called a group, a division a series; but the work functions none the less, as in any civilized establishment, in a monotonous and continuous mode, without rivalries or any interlocking diversities whatever. Only, the cooperators are equal, free and associated.

Well! even in this state, for whoever knows the Phalansterian Theory, the N. A. Ph. is already a formal confirmation of it. Indeed, all that is realized of it on this little stage produces there, proportionally, the foreseen consequences, and all that is lacking lets one see, in the results, the corresponding gaps.

Thus: absolute gap as to the special effects of the serial Organism, this being totally absent; but production of all the phenomena proper to Association, in the proportion of the things and numbers to which it is applied. Life, animation, the attraction to labor are totally lacking. Individual spontaneity, that powerful characteristic of the American populations, which the serial Organism alone can maintain and develop within an association, tends visibly here to weaken. The association vegetates rather than lives abundantly. It seems more bored and somnolent than alert, gay, active and impassioned at its work. This answers clearly to the absence of the nervous exciter, the serial Organism. Science teaches, in fact, that for want of this apparatus, association merely aggregates individuals and tends to drown the personality in the collective substance. But on the other hand, the relations of master and worker, of proprietor and proletarian, of omnipotent chief and dependent employee, salaried domestic service, the degradation of repugnant functions, the conflicts and discords of anarchic competition, the depreciation of wages, the inferiority of women's industrial condition, etc., etc. — all those phenomena that fragmentation fatally engenders have disappeared, replaced by the equality of persons and of the sexes, the honorableness of all kinds of work, the dignity of a practical, free and consented subordination, and collective accord in the common interest. The economic advantages of Association reveal themselves, moreover, in proportion to the numbers. The fact of their progressive acceleration with number is set in full evidence. Inferior and rudimentary as its organization and its mode of life may be, the N. A. Ph. presents none the less, already peremptorily realized, the solutions of several social problems of the first value, through the practice — still so reduced — of the single principle of Association. The Phalansterian schooled in the doctrine feels a scientific enjoyment, mingled with a certain sadness that the enormity of the gaps explains, at the sight of these results so exactly proportional to the quantity of theory realized; and the civilized visitor, even unable to account for it, himself feels at the contact of these transformations an unknown satisfaction. It is not, indeed, without a wholly new kind of charm that he finds himself, from his very first meal, served by young girls, young men and ladies, who are the children and the wives of the masters of the establishment, and who soon after have for their servants, in their turn, a part of those at whose orders they were a moment before. For what he has before his eyes is nothing less than a great social emancipation realized, accomplished. An associative function, worthy and decent, replaces all about him the domestic service of the black slave, or that of a whole class of the pariahs of free poverty.

He is witness to an effective, analogous rehabilitation of all the other kinds of labor more or less debased in our fragmented societies. This rehabilitation is, moreover, so natural to associative practice that many visitors may well receive an impression of it without quite knowing how to account for the causes producing it in them. The young girls and the ladies earn their living without difficulty. At a given age, the women take active part in the meetings where the interests of the Association are decided, freely express their opinions and vote like the men. The industrial and social equality of the sexes finds itself thus established as though of itself; and here again the novelty appears a thing so simple and so natural that, without any doubt, most of the civilized would not even dream, in face of the fact, that they have before them a whole great historical evolution accomplished. The hours not employed in the service of the Association give rise, it goes without saying, to no remuneration; but no work is obligatory; everyone excuses himself, when it pleases him, from his task: nevertheless, all the necessary work is performed regularly. One feels at the N. A. Ph. no domination, no constraint; there does not exist there the shadow of an authority with capacity to enjoin, repress, punish; all things, nevertheless, go on quite suitably; nowhere would one meet with more honorable and more decent manners. So I imagine that so many good people who can picture the practice of Association only as the abomination of desolation would be far more surprised still at what they would not find there than at what they might see. An effect of this kind has been produced on the neighboring civilized folk. These, at the time of the founding, were stirred up: they dreaded a hotbed of pestilence. They were not slow to reassure themselves and to live with the Association in good understanding. Every living being is an Association. Variety, the richness of the integrant elements and the degree of organization make the differences. In this sense, the little phalanx of New-Jersey is an associative zoophyte. It would need a radical reform there — consequently an impulse and a settled resolve toward progress, difficult after ten years of existence — for it to be able to rise to a higher order. However that may be, its founders will have acquired incontestable rights in the history of the origins of the Associative Order. It possesses, as I have summarily indicated, a precious value of study and demonstration, if not for the civilized, at least for the Phalansterians versed in the science whose data it confirms, in the positive and the negative, in the most formal manner. It proves besides a fact that may have great importance for the practice of the transition. This fact, which we had already admitted and stated on Brisbane's report, is that the American character lends itself fairly easily even to the most rudimentary degrees of association. In Europe, with our southern populations above all, an association like that one would not last a fortnight. It would burst into dissensions of every sort. The cold, reserved nature, and the sociability more reasonable than impassioned, of the Americans of the North, bears transitory states to which it would be rash to subject pure European elements. The examination of this phenomenon had no less right than many others to my full attention.

III

I left my excellent hosts of the N. A. Ph., after six weeks spent in useful studies of associative practice; and, though still incapable of speaking English, at least prepared to receive with profit the lessons of usage. From there, at the end of April, while waiting for Brisbane to be free, the time I did not spend at New-York was given to visiting Boston and the devoted friends our cause counts there; the establishments of Lowel and Lawrence (1), creations as colossal as they are fabulously rapid, of American practical genius and industrialism; an extremely interesting Community for us, of the Perfectionists, in the county of Oneïda, whose doctrines I regret not having time to set out here; finally, the north of the State of New-York, the shores of Lake Erie and of Niagara, not far from Batavia, where I rejoined Brisbane. There would be much to say about what I saw during these three months; but that is not our object.

Although I had landed in America without preconceived ideas of any sort, my mind in a state of blank slate, and although at first I concerned myself only with seeing, inquiring, learning a little of the United States and thus widening my horizon, it could not but be that I should soon examine this immense and new field from the point of view of our cause. There were two reasons for this: the first, that, like every serious Phalansterian, I carry this cause everywhere with me; the second, that I was meeting in America friends who had themselves long worked there at the propagation of the common faith. The discussion of a Realization on their ground was therefore naturally, between them and me, the order of the day. It is in my plan, as I told you, to initiate you into the work that went on in my mind on this subject.

(1) One will get an idea of the rapidity of these creations from the following figures. — Population in 1820 — 1830 — 1840 — 1850: of Lowel, 6,474 — 20,796 — 32,964 [...]; of Lawrence, [...] — 18,341. — Lawrence above all presents an array of buildings of which nothing in Europe can give any idea; they are veritable manufacturing palaces. All this rose out of the ground in a few years.

What particular facilities would America offer to the realization of our views? What better could be conceived there for that end? — Such, then, soon became the object — still wholly hypothetical, it is true — of my thoughts, and the text of my conversations with our friends, above all with Brisbane. — Brisbane will have the glory of having imported the liberating Word into America and of never having ceased to keep in view there the great affair of social Reform. — He came fairly often to see me during the first three months of my stay, and we passed long hours in discussion.

The roles were thus divided. Brisbane naturally showed a great faith in America; it was his ground, it was there alone that he thought of acting. America, on the contrary, was long for me only a hypothesis. On the other hand, he inclined rather strongly to transitions, to intermediate reforms, while I always brought back to the foreground the idea of a serial experiment, of an integral solution and of a rapid march upon full Harmony. We shall see how we were bound to reach agreement easily.

Having no fixed idea, I questioned Brisbane. His projects made up the matter of our first conversations. He had cherished several of them, still rather vague it is true.

First, it was the creation of a great newspaper and of a propaganda mounted on a large scale. Without denying that the liberties of the country and the dispositions of minds opened considerable spaces on this path in America, I thought that the times for a work of this kind were past; that today it was rather a question of gathering, upon practical realities, the elements already won to the Idea of social transformation, than of confining oneself to the task of laboriously conquering new ones; I insisted that a definite Project of application be first conceived and presented; that Propaganda, whatever it might be, be subordinated to it, and that it be carried on by free publications and lectures (oral expositions), rather than by a daily organ too enslaving and too absorbing. We were thus brought back to the question of practical projects.

Brisbane was thinking, when I arrived, of an acquisition of a few square leagues of land in the West (Ohio, Illinois, or one of the neighboring States), where one would set up large-scale farming operations with machines and agricultural squads put in rivalry like the firemen companies (pompiers) in the great cities of the East, which present fine effects of emulative activity. This idea and its accessories were soon abandoned.

At one time it was a question between us of the use that might be made of the N. A. Ph. under various hypotheses. At another it was the question of an establishment of integral education, on bases more or less akin to our old European Project. Another time we busied ourselves with the half-associative system in view at a new establishment in course of execution at Raritan-Bay, a system conceived by former members of the N. A. Ph. who had withdrawn from it, finding there insufficient outlets for individual initiative; or again with the mode by which other friends of Association propose to arrive at it progressively, starting from a state of absolute and absolutely free individualism, in Long-Island; etc.

IV

Although they yielded us no definite project, the conversations we frequently resumed during the first months, on these themes, were far from being without value. Our ideas had developed, we had eliminated the dross and we had agreed on general points.

First, the thought of a practical work, whatever it might be, had decidedly taken a pivotal rank in our speculations.

We had perfectly understood each other on the incontestable advantages that a mixture of American and European population would offer to an associative work, whatever its plan might be; no hesitation was permitted on this point.

We agreed that the States of the North, of the East, and the territories of the upper West must be excluded as a field of execution, for several decisive reasons. The length and rigor of the winters there close off agricultural life and the theater of nature far too long; during five, six or seven months of the year, winter would impose — according to the system adopted for the period of transition — either an isolation or an inner condensation of the population's elements, both offering serious drawbacks. The heats, moreover, often show themselves excessive in those regions during the summer; the best lands there are already taken up and held at considerable prices. The great valleys of the West, where one would be led to seek cheaper land and less extreme climates, are rarely salubrious to the first occupants, etc., etc.

We had been struck by a considerable and quite recent fact: I mean the so remarkable and so prompt development of the Mormons. With a baggage of retrograde and absurd ideas, a bizarre mixture of Mahometanism, patriarchy and biblical theocracy, but thanks to a certain dose of truly socialist solidarity, the Mormons have realized in a few years an incredible prosperity. They are on the eve of constituting a new State west of the Rocky Mountains. — And the thirty-two States and the Territories of which the American Federation today consists — have they not also an origin entirely recent and truly marvelous? This great people, of 25 millions of souls, began scarcely more than 200 years ago, with the emigration of a few pilgrims — they gave themselves this name — who came to seek on the wild lands of the new continent liberty for their ideas hindered or persecuted in the old!

These facts inclined Brisbane to the idea of laying somewhere the bases of a guarantist State, whose growth could not fail to be rapid. "If we cannot found social Harmony," he often repeated, "let us at least found Justice." Thereupon we debated, he maintaining that it was easier today to found justice than harmony; I holding that one would realize the first far more easily through the second than by pursuing it in isolation. Agreement came easily in a general formula: — "Creation of a social milieu freely open to all progressive ideas, where the Phalansterians of full faith would particularly propose to themselves the organization of integral serial harmony."

V

I often brought back an idea that had come to me at the very outset of these hypotheses of which America was the field. There exist, I had said to myself, on the immense soil of the Union, quantities still unlimited, so to speak, of desert and unappropriated lands. It is known, moreover, that these lands take on values very rapidly proportional to the population that carries itself there. The faculty of bringing people onto a determined zone is therefore the equivalent of a creation of value.

What does this mean, if not that the Phalansterian Idea possesses an enormous virtual capital in the community of faith that would gather, upon given spaces, a concourse of persons devoted to the object of the collective conviction? This faith would therefore be here a very serious financial power, and of a kind, if it bestirred itself and acted resolutely, to furnish to a practical work ample conditions of development.

On the hypothesis, indeed, that a more or less considerable quantity of our Phalansterian elements of the two worlds had resolved on their condensation, the mere reasonably intelligent fixing of this nucleus of population upon unoccupied lands would immediately realize a creation of territorial added-values growing with the number — values which would be from that moment financial forces, positive, certain values, independent even of the plan of colonization, and which, partly discounted, partly reserved for the work, would contribute as usefully to its founding as to its later developments.

This idea, naturally deduced from our own data, appeared to me from the outset as claiming its place at the base of any hypothesis of Realization special to America. It opened a wholly new outlet to the conception of the ways and means appropriate to the things of the New-World, and I felt that it alone could permit the construction of a Project capable of determining the gathering of the capital and the wills indispensable, both of them, to a great enterprise.

VI

We were thus arriving little by little, through the study and discussion of things, at disengaging general views and at giving a less vague character to the aim of a journey that we had resolved upon in principle, but without yet quite knowing either what we should ask of it or where it was to lead us. These preliminaries served us first to direct our inquiries toward the countries to be explored. Where should we go? This question was evidently a function of these others: What are we seeking? what do we propose to ourselves? what would we attempt?

At the outset, the absolute indeterminacy of our ideas inclined us to a near-complete traversal of the States and Territories of the Union this side of the Rockies. We had soon eliminated, as I have said, the rough and extreme climates of the North. These climates are made for Civilization and suited to its developments. The rigor of nature there, creating imperious needs, imposes labor, violently subdues its repugnances, and forcibly bends the free proletarian to its yoke. On a more favored earth and beneath a more favored sky, the proletarian inclines naturally to inaction. The beautiful climates thus escape Civilization, which can attack them only by amalgamating itself with Barbarism — that is to say, by Slavery. They have therefore remained in great part reserves of Harmony, predestined cradles of attractive and impassioned labor. — The winters of the north, the burning summers and the unhealthiness of the great valleys of the west and of the low shores of the south, considerably limited the field of our researches. — As for the territories of the former Spanish possessions, nature there offers, no doubt, magnificent data; but although we put for an instant in question a visit to the river of the Amazons, reasons too powerful argued for a field comprised within the regular sphere, so incomparably flourishing and free, of the government of the American Union. In short, circumstantial information owed to the kindness of Captain Marcy, who had directed various reconnaissances toward the frontiers of Mexico, fixed us upon points less distant from the Gulf than those of which Brisbane had thought. — We had in fact counted at first on heading straight for Santa-Fé, in New-Mexico, and exploring the countries situated at the height of the 35th and 36th degrees of latitude, around the sources of the Goo-al-Pah or Canadian River and of the Rio Pecos.

VII

I have had more than one occasion, in the last twenty years, to explain myself on the question of colonization in connection with that of our social experiment. I used to say that, each of the two operations offering separately considerable difficulties, in joining them one multiplied, the one by the other, the adverse chances. Although this referred to the manner in which we had had to conceive, in Europe, our experimental work, the idea of the difficulties peculiar to colonization, and of the danger of associating them with those of an associative trial, was far from having left me in America. The aspect under which the colonizing work first presented itself to me was scarcely such as to modify my fears favorably. I saw it, in the North, in all its harshness. There, it is the virgin forest, dense, deep and often marshy, that the pioneer attacks by iron and by fire. Fences (rough barricades) surrounding fellings of great trees; the plow laboriously breaking up half-cleared spaces where there rise, very often twenty years still after the beginnings, stumps whose extraction is so difficult that one resigns oneself to letting the roots rot slowly in the ground; flat, bare and dreary landscapes; plank cabins rising here and there in the snow, in deep mud, or in heaps of dust of which the wind makes a scourge, amid the savage disorder of this struggle against a nature so little easy to vanquish: none of that, it must be admitted, was too encouraging.

And what should we find in the South? Would not the nature of the South show itself more hostile still? The heats, the fevers, the murderous emanations of the soil; the attenuation of one's forces by the climate; the forest more rebellious and more inextricable still; the neighborhood of unsubdued, predatory Indian hordes: in short, all the legions guarding the treasures of the gardens of the sun — would they not offer, to the first generations who should wish to seize upon those treasures, a battlefield cumulating, with dangers of a new kind, fundamental difficulties graver still? Note besides that, among the information we had sought out on every hand, frightening reports had not been wanting. There were moments when Brisbane himself, despite his American faith, no longer regarded our journey except as a matter of curiosity and a discharge of conscience. As for me, at the moment of our departure, I was more than skeptical about America, at least as a hearth of attractive force sufficient to determine any somewhat serious movement of our European elements. And yet for five months I had been under the impression of a profound, irresistible sentiment: I was living on a free soil. I breathed liberty through every pore — a full, entire liberty, as complete as one can dream it for Civilization; a liberty that the condensation of populations upon a soil everywhere appropriated and too disputed will never permit politics alone to realize in Europe, and which, until the advent of social Harmony, will there remain a chimera. I had saluted this liberty; I enjoyed it with sad and bitter returns of feeling, which you must understand only too well. I enjoyed it profoundly. I enjoyed the good it does to the soul, the dignity it pours upon a people, the immense outlets it opens to human activity, the fertile creations it arouses and lavishes. I saw it at work in every form: at work for the conquest of Nature, at work in the spontaneous productions of a gigantic industry, at work for a prodigious commercial movement, at work for the theoretical or practical enterprises of ideas, doctrines, inventions or sects. Everything was free — the air, the forest, the field, movement, speech, thought, the press, associations, the individual or collective personality: all is free and open.

And this liberty is not only a general fact in the country, it is moreover the doctrine of the country. Liberty is the life, the soul, the honor, the conquest and even the reason for being and the condition of existence of the American people. This people feels that it represents today Liberty in the world and that it has charge of it for the collective future of humanity. And the activity that results from this liberty is not only a right, it is moreover an honor. The American is naturally well-disposed toward all that innovating activity engenders. There, far from new things being hindered, if they are inoffensive, because they are new, they are welcomed, encouraged; and — a most remarkable symptom — setbacks, even falls, do not prejudge against them. In America, a fall proves that one has walked, that is all, and there they love whoever walks. Go ahead! is the motto. Nothing that falls honorably is crushed. America is at present, in the world, the Fatherland of Realizations. It is essentially titled in spirit of diversity, of movement, of enterprise, in love of inventions and experiments, even of adventures. It is absolutely the inverse of our old Europe — timorous, routine-bound even in its progressive aspects, despotic even in its parties of liberty. O my friends, what a beautiful and great and powerful thing is Liberty! How fortifying is its air, and what a healthy enjoyment merely to feed upon it! — Ah! I cried, drawing it in with full lungs, if Europe offered us conditions like these, or else if our European elements were in America!... how promptly our great aim would be attained! But these two hypotheses — the latter even were it limited to a transplantation, even a limited one, of those elements — appeared to me, I confess, as chimerical the one as the other. How, indeed, to communicate by speech — not even by speech, by cold writing — that sentiment which one must have lived to comprehend in its fullness and its omnipotence? How to break ingrained habits, vanquish an inertia all the more resistant for being more natural, shake off the torpors, triumph over prejudices, over the fear of the far-off, arouse at last a collective determination so considerable, decide upon a like temerity! I did not even dream of so much as toying with the idea of such an enterprise. — I describe to you faithfully the state of my mind, the dispositions of my soul, and you know, summarily, where I stood at the moment of departure.

VIII

On 30 April, Brisbane being free at last, we left the shores of the Erie, where there still floated banks of ice several leagues in length. The branches of the shrubs did not even let appear that faint greenish tint, forerunner of the first buds. We were going to Texas, which we were to approach by the northern frontier on the Red River, after descending the Ohio, the Mississippi and ascending part of the Arkansas. We marched the first day southwest upon Cleveland, skirting the shores of the Erie, and the next day, southeast, in the direction of Wellsville on the Ohio. On 30 April we had left winter at Buffalo; the next day, at noon, on entering Canton, where we were to visit one of our friends, by two degrees only farther south, we were already in the full beginning of spring. A beautiful sun, a vivifying temperature, the countryside green and adorned, the gardens radiant with flowers, the birds in an ardor of work and of love such as I had never witnessed to a like degree in Europe: I shall never forget the charm of this transformation-scene of nature. Here already the work of colonization had been less harsh. One had had to deal more often with the prairie than with the primitive forest. The soil no longer stretched in monotonous plains. The undulations of the terrain, the variety of crops, the woods crowning the heights, the streams and lakes that bathe the feet of the great trees, gave the landscape a smiling and happy air that communicated to me new and delicious impressions. Virgin or cultivated, the splendid verdure of the great vegetation of the New World was henceforth never to leave us, and on 2 May, in the afternoon, we reached, by a rich and picturesque coal valley of one of the foothills of the Alleghanies, the magnificent banks of the Ohio.

We had excellent friends of the Cause to visit at Cincinnati and at Patriot. They were expecting us and received us with open arms, energetically approving the idea of going to seek a field of great Realization out of civilization, beyond civilization. And they did not confine themselves to wishes for success; I still hear the brave Allen saying to us: "Find what suits; in a week I sell my properties, settle my affairs, and we are ready."

I was also to find again, at the gate of Cincinnati, our good old friend Ginger, in a little house he built in a week with his two sons, on a hillock among the trees, on the bank of the Ohio, and which I baptized with the exact name of Ginger-Box. Disgusted with Europe, Ginger had left it toward the end of 1849 with his family; and, like the immense majority of the Europeans I have met in America, he was inexhaustible in blessings on the inspiration that had led him there. "Decide," he often repeated to me, "decide all our friends to come to America: here we can do, and we shall easily do, great things." His three children were promptly and very well settled. It is true that all three already spoke, before arriving, the language of the country.

At Cincinnati, a great city active and prosperous like so many of those daughters of the Union born but yesterday (1), one of my ideas was modified: I mean the question of the material difficulties of colonization.

(1) Progressive population of Cincinnati. — Years: 1800 — 1810 — 1820 — 1830 — 1840 — 1850. Population: 740 — 2,540 — 9,644 — 24,831 — 46,338 — 116,180.

I had before my eyes one of the arsenals of inland colonization. As an army on campaign has, on its bases of operations, its great war depots, so the conquest of nature has organized, in America, its great warehouses and stores. Everything there is prepared and mounted for the work. The operations it involves are so practiced and so common that all the details are foreseen and all the necessities provided for. Colonization has passed, in America, into the state of a current industry. Its tooling, its setting-up and its execution are so well determined, its procedures so usual, that one may say it is manufactured there as one makes, in establishments ad hoc, cloth, planks or hats. The spontaneous creations, of which I had by then already seen such great spaces covered; the so prompt transfiguration of so many lands lately virgin and wild into flourishing cultures, into populous cities; the ease with which there settle these hundreds of thousands of destitute Europeans, cast each year by emigration upon this generous land, which absorbs the rising flood of our misery like a fertilizing rain and transforms it so quickly, through labor, into ease and wealth; all these phenomena peculiar to the social formation I was studying had demonstrated to me, clear as day, that if elsewhere the problem of colonization is often bristling with great difficulties, practice has decidedly solved it here beyond reply. It is true that this is here a purely molecular operation which has now only to continue.

But this point gained, many other objections subsisted in my mind, and already even we recognized that the appropriation, the price and the fragmentation of the lands, no less than various other local considerations, were little fitted to encourage the ideas with which Brisbane had lulled himself, some months before, regarding those western regions about which we were now acquiring very positive notions.

IX

We took leave, at Patriot, of the last friends we were to meet on our route, carrying off now only our saddles and the strict equipage of a journey on horseback across the forests and prairies of the Indian Territory and of Texas. As we descended the Ohio, we were disengaging ourselves from the last branches of the chain of the Alleghanies; the banks lowered and we reached at last the limitless plains of the basin of the Mississippi. What spaces! — We had left behind us, on quitting Patriot, the State of Ohio, skirted on our right the States of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and on our left those of Kentuky, Tenessee and Mississippi. What spaces, great God! and what a future is reserved, secured, to that great Federation which turns them over, these spaces, and sows them with cities, as the laborer turns over his field and sows his grain, and where this seed of flourishing cities springs up and grows from one sun to the next... Increase and multiply, States of the Union! you are already the great fatherland of Democracy, of labor, of the integrant elements of the modern world; you will soon be, whatever may happen, the asylum-field of its most progressive ideas and of their realizations. We went on day and night, descending at full steam the Mississippi, the father of waters, that river of more than a thousand leagues, whose aspect, by sheer grandeur, reproduces the impression of infinity given by the Ocean. We were shut in between the blue sky, the ash-gray waters of the river that ceaselessly carries to the sea fleets of great trees torn from the banks of its tributaries, and the two ramparts of dense verdure, regularly tiered and massive, that flank its banks out of sight, without interruption. — We reached at last the mouth of the Arkansas, which it was now necessary to ascend as far as Little-Rock, at the center of the State to which this river of 900 leagues has given its name. We arrived there, saturated with horizontal space and happy to see again at last a scrap of rock, the first sign of a region beginning to emerge from the waters and to grow broken.

We were, according to the information of Captain Marcy, which dated from barely a year before, to buy horses at Little-Rock and, from there, to reach, across lands almost virgin, Preston, the last inhabited point of Texas on the Red River. We learned that a stagecoach already made this run regularly three times a week! On the other hand, a steamboat was getting up steam to ascend the river as far as Fort Smith, the extreme frontier of the civilized States, where the Arkansas enters the Indian Territory. As far as the foot of the Rockies, the river sees on its banks now only savage tribes. We had only time to deliberate an instant and to embark anew.

The country rose little by little along our banks. Wooded mountains surged up on the horizon. At Van Buren, where we halted a few hours, we were already meeting redskins and examined with interest a group of Osages, one of the finest specimens of the indigenous races that we were to encounter. Civilization was ending; Indian America drew rapidly nearer at every turn of the wheel; we were touching the phase where the journey was going to become a sort of expedition. At last, having taken our final information and bought mounts at Fort Smith, on 19 May in the afternoon we entered, crossing the Poteau River on a ferry of tree-trunks, into the territory of the Choctaws. The name of this river recalls that French adventurers, drawn by the hunt, were the first whites who appeared on its banks.

It is impossible to cross three social periods more abruptly. At two o'clock we were still in the smiling city that rises at the foot of Fort Smith: there were white houses or houses of pink brick, surrounded by verandas all verdant, separated by gardens in flower; wide and perfectly aligned streets; shops of every kind; ladies in muslin dresses; children coquettishly adorned playing with their parasols; lawyers, doctors, goldsmiths, watchmakers, etc., and three or four great steamboats at the quay on the Arkansas: a whole civilization young, alert and prosperous. — Less than two hours later, our horses extricated themselves only with great difficulty from the mire, the dead branches, the half-rotten tree-trunks, through which we painfully followed a kind of path in the primitive forest, whose thick vaults made for us an anticipated night over the marshy bottom of the Poteau. It was savage nature in its purity; the dark, silent, virgin solitude, and its harsh perfumes; the luxuriant and compact vegetation of the arborescent masses and the gigantic lianas that grip the great trees and interlace them in inextricable networks; vegetal generations rising, without interruption of time or space, upon the age-old debris of the dying, dead, heaped-up generations. We were alone, and for the first time in the bosom of these untamed energies of natura naturans. It was superb! It was full night when we arrived at Choctaws-Agency, an Indian village where we supped, served by a negro slavewoman, on steaming maize paste, raw onions, and a dish which I took at first, with some surprise, for over-grilled cutlets, and which we soon recognized to be composed of pieces of fish perfectly carbonized on the outside, but, by way of compensation, perfectly raw within. Azaïs would have found nothing to object to in it. We had, moreover, met in the forest only a few half-wild pigs and three Indian horsemen, drunk on brandy. Until the neighborhood of the other frontier of the Indian-Territory, on the Texas side, this village was the only one we were to have on our route. It offered us a page of the great social history: the difficult transition from Savagery to Civilization. Slavery here defrays the cost of it. The negro slave is the educator of the redskins, whom he initiates into agriculture, the elementary industries, and to whom he teaches the violin. We heard some of it, here and there, all evening in the log-houses (houses of tree-trunks) of the neighborhood — sounds so strange that, had we not been told, I confess we could never have known from what instrument they could come. We saw there, then, slavery in its historical place in the movement of ascending Subversion, and we recognized its function. Here again I regret not entertaining you with subjects very interesting to us all from the point of view of science; but, no more than before, must I forget my aim, and I will not stop on the road. Only a word on an incident that nearly made us turn back. Having set out the next morning from Choctaws-Agency, we reached early the dwelling of an Indian of mixed blood, pointed out to us as a good station. Although the day was not over, we had to halt there. I felt not only very tired, but really unwell. I soon recognized that I had a fairly high fever. The night was bad; the fever did not leave me. The next day, I had barely the strength to rise and felt a great prostration. Three American horsemen who came up told us they had met rivers swollen by the storms, and had had to swim them, they and their horses. I had heard, in the North, fairly grim stories about the fevers and maladies of the South-West regions. These stories came back to me, and I saw, naturally enough, in my state, the effect of an action of those influences, so powerful and so prompt that I feared being delivered, without possible resistance from my European constitution, to a hostile atmosphere. I had not yet felt dawn in me the least gleam of a serious faith in the social aim of our journey; nothing sustained me and I experienced a few hours of moral discouragement as well as of physical dejection. I asked myself whether it was not absurd, out of mere curiosity and a puerile self-love, to pursue an enterprise beginning so badly. I saw myself soon seriously taken hold of by illness, able to advance no more than to retreat, and deprived of all aid, in some corner of the desert: we had not even a guide with us. Happily Brisbane was in good health; his American faith reacted: he suspected that the abrupt change of regimen and the fatigue of the horse — of which I had for twenty years lost all habit — might well be the sole causes of my state, and he proposed to me the trial of a new stage forward. Brisbane had guessed right. The horse acts, it appears, homeopathically; for, after this rest of twenty-four hours, we had no sooner done a few miles than I felt restored. In the evening, we supped with an Indian who had just killed a wild turkey, three or four pieces of which, eaten with appetite, gave me back all my strength. From then on, I found myself perfectly well. — I have mentioned this incident first to show that, if one may have to undergo, at the beginning of a like change of regimen and country, a small ordeal, one must not exaggerate its importance; and next, because it reminds me clearly, of myself, that, already entered upon the Indian Territory, I still had no faith in the usefulness of this expedition from the point of view of our Cause, and that it marks the time when a transformation, in some sort sudden, was on the eve of taking place on this subject in my mind.

X

Toward the middle of the fourth day, in effect, everything changed about us as if by enchantment. Although I have very present the impression I felt at the sight of the scenes that spread out almost all at once before our eyes, I give up transmitting it to you in its charm, its freshness and its striking power. Until then, we had scarcely seen yet anything but savage and harsh nature, the impenetrable forest, rivers sunk between banks of muddy earth, a hemmed-in horizon. The soil, no doubt, was fertile, its products betrayed even a very energetic fecundity, but what rude labors would its conquest not require! All at once, the fourth day, after four or five hours' march, the horizon widens, the forest opens, and we emerge upon the head of a valley of such an aspect that we were tempted to believe in faery. This valley, which we overlooked, stretched before us in the direction of its length. To right and left, rich prairies rising in elegant undulations reached up to lines of wooded mountains, whose summits, tiered on several planes, verdant near us and turning blue in the distances, framed the landscape. From the bottom of the dells up to mid-slope, the prairie spread superb velvety carpets of grasses and flowers; along the skirts of the forest, where the sheets of the prairie came to die away, the darker verdure of the woods drew capes, isthmuses and gulfs of the most broken contours. Clumps of great oaks, elms, walnuts, hickories rose here and there like islands on the slopes of the hillocks; while, in the hollows, the sinuosities of a vegetation more varied in species and tints than that of the heights betrayed the courses of the streams that water them. The landscape was classical and charming: but what surprised us beyond all expression was its character. I have seen nothing in all civilized and cultivated America, nothing so neat, so trim, I was going to say so prepared — one must say so finished — as those solitudes by which we were emerging into the upper basin of the Red River. Brisbane and I were struck by the same idea: we seemed to see, transported into the rich climate and beneath the magnificent sky of the 34th degree, the most beautiful parks created and maintained at such great cost by the high aristocracy of England. Whoever has visited the parks of Richmond and Windsor has but to drive off their fogs, illumine them with a radiant sun, bathe them in an atmosphere already southern and yet temperate; and he will see, at least as to the ordering of the details, what we almost never ceased to have before our eyes for some sixty miles. To such a point that, riding and dreaming during the silences of the road, it happened to me ten times to forget the desert entirely and to seek with my eye the villa, the château, the residences of luxury or of high agriculture, whose images associate themselves imperiously with those aspects of orchards, those pastures broken by fresh groves, those curtains of great trees that shade the exposures and the slopes of the prairie.

Nature has done everything. All is ready; all is arranged; there is only to raise those buildings that the eye is astonished not to find. And nothing is appropriated or fragmented; nothing hinders. What fields of action! what theaters of maneuver for a great colonization operating in combined and collective mode! what Reserves for the cradle of Harmony, and how powerful and prompt would be its developments, if the living and volitive elements of the world of the Future were transported there! A horizon of new ideas, of new sentiments and hopes opened as if by magic before me. Brisbane was confirmed in his American faith; I, baptized.

The aspect of this nature so manifestly friendly, this gentle and majestic invitation made to social man by the primitive earth, these betrothals so magnificently prepared between her and free, combined and harmonized labor, acted upon us like a sudden revelation of Destiny. Evoke these spectacles, this climate, this sky, this fecundity of the soil, these spaces, this munificence of things, and liberty! And think of the state of the old world, which we evoked ourselves — that old world appropriated by fragmentation, gangrened, possessed by civilizations in decadence, worked by every vice, torn by every sordid interest, doomed to every misery, to every despotism, to wars, to revolutions... And say whether, in presence of these marvelous gifts, remained to this day intact under the guard of the primitive tribes and of the desert, the idea of the Reserves set apart for the progressive Thought of humanity by the general Providence of things ought not to break in upon our souls! For myself, I had seen the light of the Burning Bush. From these last days of our crossing, my eyes opened to a study henceforth mingled with hope, and strongly sharpened, this time, by a superior and social interest. I held back a little, nevertheless, the expression of these sentiments. Brisbane needed no stimulant in this order, and my reason wished to be edified on all its faces before receiving, without reserve, the faith that asked only to invade it.

XI

First, in the present state of things, the Indian Territory was not to be thought of. It is reserved — and that is at least justice — to the primitive races. Whites can establish themselves there only by allying with the indigenous blood: such is the federal law. On that condition, it is true, one takes there all the land one wants. The erection of the simplest enclosure is the sole formula of legal and definitive appropriation. — The question was to know whether Texas would offer conditions as fine, and to study closely all the data capable of favoring or of thwarting there the developments of a great colonization, whose idea now appeared to us in a clearer light and in much more real and positive forms. I will therefore say nothing more of the Indian Territory, save that the meeting of a German, established there for seven years, furnished us with much information on the excellence of the climate, the richness of the soil and the salubrity of the region. For the rest, his fields, his herds, his garden and his orchards showed us what an isolated man, arrived there with nothing — that was his original capital — had been able to do in a few years in this country. The oasis of cultivation with which the Peutcher family had surrounded itself proved to us peremptorily that a colonization at all provided for would obtain from nature there, beyond even the promises of its first aspect. — But what would Texas be? On approaching the Red River, we were beginning to make less rare encounters, and we inquired about Texas. The replies were unanimous. It was only with a relative contempt that they spoke to us of the Indian Territory. "What is this beside Texas? Texas is quite another thing!" Despite the agreement of the reports, we were not without distrust. I feared, for my part, to see fall the scaffolding of great possible things that had risen in my mind. I felt, indeed, that for these magnificent possibilities to have a chance of becoming realities, there was needed such a condensation of formal and certain elements of prosperity, such a gathering of decisive conditions, such a hearth of attraction, to say all, that its sphere should extend as far as Europe, as far as to you, and be strong enough to seize you, to stir you, to set you in vibration and draw you into a collective gravitation of converging wills. On the eighth day from the one on which we had quitted Fort Smith, at a moment when we were not without some uncertainty about our way, we perceived, through the gaps of a high and thick verdure, horizontal and shining patches, of a red tending toward liquid chrome-yellow. A few minutes later we had before us Preston, and at our feet the Red River. This time at least the geographical name was justified. — Texas was on the other side of the river. Up to here, my friends, I have, though by a very summary narrative, led you along our route, because it seemed to me useful to make you witness the succession of my impressions and the development of the ideas bearing on the conclusions at which we shall arrive later. Now that we are in Texas, the order of the route becomes useless and would slow this Report too much. It is therefore better to mass the results and to give you by chapters the substance of an exploration that lasted from 27 May to 10 July. During these six weeks, we visited the regions situated below the Red River, around the Trinity and the Brazos; we descended to the South upon the Colorado, which we met at Austin-City; then, marching southeast and recrossing the Brazos, we found again, in the bay of Galveston where we arrived by the San-Jacynto, the waters of the Trinity mingled with the blue and diaphanous waves that so remarkably characterize the gulf sea and the great current (Gulf-stream) that escapes from it by the strait of Bahama. — I shall have completed the summary of my journey by adding that, detained a fortnight at New-Orleans by the yellow fever that had just broken out there when we arrived, I returned on 5 August to New-York, after touching at Havana. On 29 August, I disembarked at Ostend, nine months after having left Antwerp. — That said, let us occupy ourselves with Texas.

PART TWO — In Texas

I

The surface area of the State of Texas is, very nearly, the same as that of France. It is 200,000 square miles, or about 52 million hectares (1). This State extends along the Gulf of Mexico, from the mouth of the Rio-Grande-del-Norte to that of the Sabine. To the West, a chain of the Rockies separates it from New-Mexico. The Red River forms its frontier to the North and North-East.

The regions bordering the gulf form only one immense low plain. They are alluvial lands barely disengaged from the waters. But for the magnificent vegetation that covers them, they would seem a mere prolongation of the sea. Bays, lagoons, sand islands stretching parallel to the sea mark the limits of the two elements.

Beginning from this long maritime and horizontal strip, fifteen to thirty leagues wide, the whole country rises gradually on an inclined plane that climbs from South-East to North-West, reaching high plateaus in the north and leaning in the west on the first foothills of the Mexican Alps, or Guadalupe mountains.

(1) This estimate is below that of the latest maps of Texas I have received. — The American mile is 1,609 meters; the square league, of 1,600 hectares, therefore contains about 6 square miles.

No country is more happily or more regularly watered than Texas. The inspection of its watercourses, on a somewhat detailed map, makes one grasp at a glance the general configuration I have just sketched. The principal rivers all descend, indeed, almost parallel to one another, from North-West to South-East, marking thus the opening of the great valleys in this common direction; while the multitude of branches and offshoots traced by their tributaries indicate in their turn the transverse slopes of the undulations that break up these valleys in their descent to the sea.

As one moves away from the low plains, the upliftings of the ground that separate the great valleys rise higher, and these latter cut deeper, though always remaining very widely open. Once one has left the lower zone, one meets with no more plains properly speaking: the surface of the ground undulates in the manner of the great waves of the ocean, after heavy weather, when the wind has dropped. It goes without saying that this comparison applies to the form and not to the dimensions. At the height of the sources of the Trinity, below the Red River, the average elevation of the country is already, we were assured, 800 to 900 meters above sea level. I do not know whether this measure is not a little exaggerated. They call Cross-Timbers an immense forest that extends over little-known regions to the north-east of the Red River. It crosses the river, and several of its branches descend to the South-West toward Mexico, covering more generally, it seemed to us, the crests of uplift that separate the basins. The rolling prairies (Rolling prairies), enclosed between these branches, are divided lengthwise by lines of woodland that follow the rivers without interruption, and cut transversely by other lines, these secondary, which border the course of the tributaries and always accompany even the smallest streams. The forest vegetation of the heights is very distinct from that of the bottoms. The latter borrows from the superior richness of the valley soil and from the proximity of the watercourses an energy and a luxuriance we scarcely know in Europe. The other, set on a drier and sometimes stony soil, is often composed only of a species of very hard oaks (post-oak), through which one can ordinarily penetrate on horseback without too much difficulty. Each year these tracts of woodland are cleaned by the fire that burns the young shoots of the other species: the post-oak almost alone has the privilege of resisting. In the neighborhood of the waters the forest does not readily let itself be breached by fire, and the most varied species there grow pell-mell in full exuberance.

I do not know what strange idea I had formed of the prairie. I expected something unknown, savage — coarse grasses of an inordinate height, who knows what? I have already told you how gracefully I was disabused at the first samples we had met with in the Indian Territory. The prairie does not always present itself, in Texas, with accessories so picturesque; it is even often very monotonous in the middle region; but nothing is changed in its nature. Only, the soil of Texas being of a superior richness, it offers almost everywhere pastures of the first order. It abounds in grasses of every sort. We sometimes met with considerable spaces occupied by wild wheat, by barley or by oats, wild also, but which had none the less all the appearance of cultivated fields. The stalks were as close-set and the ears as large as those of our fallow-lands of middling yield. I lost, on the return, the samples I had gathered of them.

The prairie lands are therefore generally of a high fertility, and, as I was saying a moment ago, each year, when the tall grasses have been dried out by winter, fire visits them, kindled by a thousand causes, and drives across them its immense sheets of flame and smoke, hurled sometimes across the plain faster than a horse at the gallop.

Fire is the ally of the prairie in the eternal combat of the two vegetations. Without it the prairie would be invaded by the forest. One sees the latter gain ground where the arrival of agricultural populations, regularizing the fire, governs it so as to favor the extension of the woodland. You know the general configuration of the country and the three principal forms of vegetation that share the middle and upper regions, where the rolling prairies show themselves enclosed between the branches of the post-oak forests, and cut by the numerous lines of woodland that border the watercourses over more or less considerable widths. Add to this, toward the east, the increasingly broken region of the mountains, and you will have the whole of the aspects Texas offered us before the encounter with the southern plains and their quasi-tropical vegetation. We did no more than skirt the region where the system of peaks and mountains properly speaking begins; we none the less recognized, on the borders, countries very rich, very picturesque and still absolutely deserted. The Indian tribes were recently removed from them; the whites are not yet there. During the first eleven days of the exploration we made of them with a detachment of the little garrison of Fort Worth, we did not perceive a trace of habitation nor meet a human face. Herds of wild turkeys, of antelopes and of deer are at present the sole proprietors of these places, and we had no cause to complain of them: they furnished us abundantly with excellent food.

We were not long in Texas without being reassured as to the fears we had had trouble shaking off in the Indian Territory: far from being inferior to the latter from the point of view of a great colonization, Texas is manifestly preferable. Our eyes, our information and the study of the country's resources were not slow to convince us of it. —

You will soon be enlightened on this subject, for we are now going to occupy ourselves exclusively with the natural data and the economic and social facts that constitute the present state of things in Texas. Let us speak first of the soil.

II

The earlier testimonies had not deceived us. The Indian Territory, despite the proofs of fertility it had often offered us, cannot compete in this respect with the great valleys of Texas. It is established, besides, that none of the thirty-two States of the Union presents a proportion as considerable as this one of lands of high fertility (1). Yet I must say that the lands reputed of lesser fertility, in Texas, are often, if you will allow me the expression, misunderstood lands. Most of them would make, in fact, excellent vineyards. The Americans, who so far understand nothing of the cultivation of the vine and have barely sketched it in the rich, heavy lands of the West, do not know that good vineyards require slopes more or less stony, and have only contempt for everything unsuited to cereals, cotton or sugar-cane.

Yet, upon these tracts of land reputed bad, nature has written her intentions. We met there, in great abundance, a vine of very good augury, fairly low, and much less carried away in wood and foliage than the species that garnishes the bottoms. This latter throws out gigantic branches on every side, and climbs to the top of the greatest trees, swinging from one to another its tendrils and its black clusters. We gathered on these lianas grapes already ripe in June. Wild as they are, the berries, loosely set, reach the size of a medium cherry and are eatable. One of our compatriots established at Dallas — who is none other than the brave Gouhénans, the leader of M. Cabet's first Icarian advance-guard, of whom there had been no news, and whom we discovered, that is the word, at the junction of the forks of the Trinity — began, last year, to gather some of them to press them. The wine he obtained was snapped up, straight from the press, at a dollar (5 fr.) the bottle, although it came from those vines of the bottoms, of the large species, and though I hold it very probable that the other is of a superior quality. — However that may be, I regard it as beyond doubt that one will be able to create, on the stony slopes of the high country, vineyards of the first order. So much for the bad lands.

(1) See the notice of Mr. Goodrich, on Texas, at the end of the volume.

As for the arable and alluvial soils, which cover the greatest spaces and fill the valleys, they are divided, in the high country, into four classes: the black sandy, or black sand; the red sandy, red sand; the mulatto, a mixture of the first two; and the black sticky, the black, rich and heavy lands generally met with in the depressed parts of the prairie or in the bottoms of the watercourses. All four are of a great fecundity. The last, the black sticky, richer still than the other three and more suited to the cultivation of cotton, is of less easy working. For the first three classes, and sometimes also for the last, clearing consists of a simple plowing. One puts the plow to the prairie, and the earth having remained some time open to the action of the atmosphere, one sows maize and gives a stroke of the harrow. On this first plowing, the maize rises 2 to 3½ meters in height, and produces a considerable harvest. After this first operation the clearing is done — that is to say, the prairie has become a field over which the plow runs very easily thenceforth, and where all that one cares to sow will come up at will. Wheat yields 25, 30, 40 and up to 45 grains for one. We saw, on clearings of two years, and on a soil that was not of the first quality for the country, beetroots of which some reached up to 82 centimeters in circumference. I laughingly proposed to Brisbane to bring one back, after the manner of the two Hebrew emissaries represented, in the biblical engravings, laden with the famous grape-cluster of the Promised Land.

Now, note this: such harvests are obtained by a labor of the easiest and without manure.

Manure, which is the great affair of our European agriculture, to which it is subordinated, and which, while doubling the work, commands and limits it, is perfectly unknown out there. You might speak of manuring the lands to the settlers of Texas, and most of them would not even understand what you mean by those words. For a long time, nature here has provided for the fertilizing of the soil. The layer of humus measures sometimes up to five meters deep in the bottoms, and, even where the humus seems to be lacking, such is the richness of the mineral elements of which these alluvial soils are composed that the vegetation there still shows itself extremely active and vigorous. For the rest, I record the facts as I saw them, and do not always take it upon myself to explain them.

You now know with what ease the prairie transforms itself into a field and lends itself to the improvisation of large-scale farming. Gardens are made no less easily. It is the affair of a few months to obtain superb ones.

We saw at Fort Worth and at Fort Graham tracts of prairie, of the less good, chosen solely because they adjoined the dwellings, which, after being turned over by the soldiers, had soon after produced the finest gardens. All our European vegetables, even the most delicate, grow there beside those of the southern lands. Beans of every sort, peas, melons, sweet potatoes, and twenty other species of edible plants which we did not all know, succeed there perfectly. The tomatoes, of which there is enormous consumption in America, threw out runners 4 to 6 meters long. And all this came up without watering, without weeding, without care of any kind! We could not believe it.

It was indeed natural enough to think that in such a soil, and in the neighborhood of the prairie, one would have much to do with weeds. Explain it as one will, once the garden is made, the weeds respect it. It was in June; not a weed had been pulled in the great gardens of the forts; they were none the less very clean. — Were I not speaking to friends who know me, there are things I ought to guard against saying; they have the air of tales. But we saw what I report, and not only did we see, we also gathered on each subject numerous pieces of information. We repeated a hundred times the same questions; we addressed them to all sorts of people — to cultivators established in the country, to soldiers who were only camped there, to their officers, to itinerant traders, to travelers, sometimes to Indians. We neglected nothing to arrive at the reality in every order. The harvests are finished by 25 May; when they go to the first days of June, it is a delayed year. — "You make two harvests," we said to the country folk. — "One could easily," they answered us, "but we have plenty with a single one, and do not give ourselves the trouble of preparing a second." I think I have said enough on the qualities of the soil and the general conditions of agriculture. Such traits suffice; more circumstantial details would add nothing. Let us only record that the lands are always deep and of a sedimentary nature in the great valleys, and the rocks, on the flanks of these latter, most often calcareous; sometimes, however, one encounters sandstone.

We found coal at the surface of the rock in the Indian Territory, and at the surface of the ground in upper Texas. Iron abounds; pelagic shell-debris often shows itself in considerable quantities. One finds gigantic ammonites, belemnites, polyparies, etc. The regions of the West are reputed to contain rich metallic deposits of various kinds. I recognized, on our passage, banks of gypsum like that of the quarries of Paris. Whole basins rest, moreover, on a layer of very aluminous marl, very soft as it comes from the ground, which lets itself be easily sawn or cut with a knife, and hardens promptly in the air: one makes an inexpensive use of it. I had taken various samples of prairie soils to have them analyzed; I regret having lost them: I am sure one would have found them a very varied composition; but I have seen these soils at work, and whatever their chemical nature may be, one thing is certain — that they accomplish in the best possible way their great productive and nourishing function. — Let us now occupy ourselves with the climate.

III

The fertility of a country, however powerful it may be, is a faculty whose results one calculates, whose products one admires; a professional agronomist may even describe it with enthusiasm: I have contented myself with giving you the notion of that of Texas through determined and decisive facts. But a climate is another thing; one suffers from it or enjoys it directly; and if the enjoyments it lavishes rise to the height of a veritable poetry, if it multiplies life, if it becomes a happiness, it may be difficult to speak of it without exaltation. So I must warn you, in approaching this chapter, that I do not yet know whether I shall be able to write it as didactically as I should wish; let us try nevertheless. The regions of which I speak more particularly are situated around the 33rd and 34th degrees of North latitude. These latitudes are, as is known, the most favored in the world. It is the height of Madeira. They are generally not subject to the extremes of temperature of the parallels nearer the pole or the equator, while, reuniting the faculties of the zones between which they form a transition, they cumulate their productions and their advantages. Here, however, the general data of latitude are modified by several great local causes, of which the most efficient are the specific temperature of the American continent, the height of the ground, and the system of atmospheric currents. These three causes wed themselves to the latitude in such a proportion that they raise the climate to a perfection bordering on the ideal. You will understand it easily. Under the parallels of the 33rd and 34th degrees, in the old world, the summers would already often be too hot for populations coming from the North, above all at the beginnings of settlement. But everyone knows that the temperature of the new continent is considerably lower than that of the old, at equal latitude. This is the general rule. The winters of New-York, situated at the height of Naples, are longer and harsher than those of Paris, and the tropical heats of America show themselves incomparably less strong than their African counterparts. The difference of temperatures at equal latitudes is estimated at 6° on average. The prevailing wind in Texas is that of the south. It blows from the Gulf of Mexico. Every morning between 7 and 9 o'clock the breeze rises and holds full until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Ordinarily, as the expression prevailing wind indicates, it is from the south that the breeze comes; sometimes it comes from the North, very exceptionally from the East or the West. As for the height of the ground, inclined toward the gulf as if to receive its breezes full on, it reaches, around the forks of the Trinity, 800 to 900 meters — perhaps a little less — above sea level. It is now easy for you to understand the magnificence of the climate resulting from the meeting of the five great conditions mentioned, to wit: the latitude, the specific temperature of America, the constant breeze of the south or north, the height of the region, and finally the opening of its great valleys inclined to the south-east — a direction more favorable still than that of the exact meridian would be, in that it allows one to contrive, for certain crops of the hot countries, easy shelters against the north wind in winter. The latitude is low enough to defend the region against the assaults of a rigorous winter: the sensitive plants, the cactuses, the mimosas and many plants of our temperate greenhouses grow spontaneously in the prairies. The height of the ground and the lesser relative heat of the American continent, on the contrary, withdraw it from the ardors of too hot a summer: all our European crops, as I have said, succeed there marvelously. But what I could not describe, what I give up making well understood — for one must have experienced, felt, breathed it to conceive its character — is the gentleness and the strength, the beneficence, the salubrity and the charm of the breezes of the south, at once tonic and velvety. The great breeze of the gulf is, I do not fear to express myself thus, the crown of all the benefits that nature seems to have taken pleasure in gathering upon upper Texas. It is she that completes the tempering, for man's sojourn, of those valleys and plateaus whose height began the protection against the dog-day ardors; it is she that does not allow the light coat of ice which the north wind and the serenity of the night spread, by their coincidence in winter, over the still waters, ever to last more than three days; it is she that sows the three months of winter with sixty days like our finest in the month of May; it is she that brings all year round rains ordinarily balanced and distributed as if for an on-demand watering of the countryside and the crops; that keeps the prairie grasses strong and living until about the end of November; that maintains the circulation in the superb system of irrigation with which Texas is endowed; it is she, finally, that allows the man of the north to ride, in full noon, under the vertical suns of June and July, without feeling an inconvenient heat. Here, moreover, is how the year behaves. The winter season begins in the last half of November. The leaves yellow and fall under the assault of the northers, or breezes of the north, which begin to grow cold. This breeze may last a day or two, never more than three. When the night has brought snow, it is rare that this has not disappeared by 11 o'clock or noon the next day. In brief, the cold days, given over to the northers, are reckoned at some thirty during the three months of winter. The sixty that remain to the gulf breeze, during the bad season, are, I have just said, charming. One must only take care not to let oneself be surprised by the norther in light clothing: abrupt transitions are everywhere dangerous.

In sum, the winter of upper Texas is a tonic, fortifying season, which re-tempers man and the plants, which allows one to harvest ice for the time of the heats (the Americans everywhere make great use of it), and which invites one, for two-thirds of its duration, to wear summer clothes. The major who commanded at Fort Worth told us that this Texas winter is a season so little to be feared that he made at that time expeditions of a fortnight, sometimes of a month, in the prairie or the forest, without serious inconvenience, and that often he and his men did not even take the trouble to pitch the tents for the night.

Toward the second half of February, the vegetation sets out again. From the first days of March it is off, never to stop. By 25 May, as we have seen, the harvests are done. Toward the end of June, we gathered in the woods a kind of fine wild plums at maturity, and grapes already good to eat. At that time the cottons were in flower, water-melons were being cut, and the young ears of Turkey wheat [maize], boiled or roasted, were served at table. In June and July, the sun was over our heads, at ten degrees from the zenith — that is to say, sensibly vertical. The shadow of my straw hat, at noon, covered me to the feet. As long as we remained in upper Texas, nevertheless, we did not suffer from the heats, and I found them far stronger at New-Orleans and at New-York. Texas is peopled with settlers come from all parts of the Union, above all from the neighboring States, of the West and the South; we met some, however, originating from the North. The soldiers of the Union belong to every country: in the forts, we found English, French, Irish, Spaniards, and even Russians and Swedes; Europeans, in short, in great proportion. Well! whereas in all the countries I have had occasion to traverse, in America as well as in Europe, I have always heard universal complaints about the climate of the place, here, despite the extreme diversity of races and origins, we gathered, I attest it, only a concert of praises, a perfect accord; not a complaint, not a regret, not even an exceptional discord. "It is the best country and the finest climate in the world!" Such was the in some sort stereotyped exclamation that invariably answered all our questions, whoever those were to whom we addressed them: "The finest country of all the United States! the finest climate in the world!"

But how to describe the evenings and nights of summer in these blessed regions? What suavity! what well-being one breathes! what beneficent poetry spread through the atmosphere! what soft and charming harmonies of the air, of the temperature, of the earth and of the sky! Those charming hours, so rare in our countries, which provoke in whole populations, when they crown a fine summer day, the spontaneous and collective expression of the ravishment of the senses and the soul; those nights that our poets go to seek, in order to comprehend and sing them, upon the waves of the gulf of Naples or of the Adriatic — there, the setting of the sun gives, half the year, the signal of them every evening.

In brief: in winter, thirty days of a cold that is not the rigorous cold of our countries; in summer, a few rare days when the indeterminacy of the wind between north and south leaves the victory for a moment to the sun: such is, all told, the account of the exception to the climatic perfection of these happy regions. One must remark, moreover, that these thirty cold days, if they demand some precautions of individuals and call for winter clothing or the shelter of the indoors, are a benefit for the population, above all if it comes from the North.

Whatever several notices, erroneous on this point, may say, one does not know in Texas what is called, in most tropical countries, the rainy season. The rains, I have already said, distribute and balance themselves generally over the whole year. Water falls at intervals of six to twelve days, most commonly, and the rain does not last long. There are met with, however, sometimes dry summers, from which the cultivation, despite the state of extreme imperfection in which it still is, does not appear to suffer considerably, the soil retaining in its depths a constant moisture. The wells of fifteen to twenty feet are indeed well supplied with water in every season. It is none the less certain that an agriculture that knew how to exploit the facilities the country offers for the establishment of great artificial irrigation would draw from it enormous profits. That is beyond doubt.

I will not end the chapter of the climate without adding two facts apt to help judge it, the first of which has besides, in agricultural economy, an importance you will easily appreciate.

This first fact is the total absence of the shelters and care required elsewhere for the good keeping of domestic animals. The horses, the oxen, the cows, the pigs roam all year in liberty in the woods or in the prairie. Nowhere is the least roof prepared for them; not a handful of fodder is cut for the winter on their behalf. Nature has provided for everything, and the breeds are superb. Only in Switzerland does one see cattle as fine; nowhere does one see them cleaner, in better health and more glossy. One marks the beasts and leaves them free: such is the whole theory and the whole practice of animal-raising. "You see these beasts," settlers said to us, showing us magnificent oxen; "they cost us no more to raise than our chickens cost us to keep. To prevent our poultry from going wild and to keep them about the house, we have to give them some grain from time to time. Our oxen fatten on the prairie. When the herd has strayed to too great distances, a child gets on horseback and brings it nearer. Bringing it back from time to time and marking the young — we have, with our cattle, no other trouble and no other expense."

The second fact relates to the dwelling of man himself. When a new colonist comes to settle, the neighboring settlers (the neighbors are 6, 8, 10 or at the nearest 15 miles off) send to ask on what day he will have cut his building timber. Until then, he camps with his family in the open air or in his waggon. On the appointed day, the neighbors arrive on horseback, bringing their axes and provisions. The newcomer makes known his plan, and by evening his dwelling is built. They are barracks of tree-trunks juxtaposed lengthwise, like those of the woodcutters in our forests. Each new colonist regards such a dwelling only as provisional. Well! such is the clemency of the sky and the gentleness of the climate that he soon thinks no more of giving himself a more comfortable one. The shelter raised suffices for the family, and until the point occupied has become, if such is its destiny, the nucleus of a nascent town, the provisional remains definitive. This, moreover, must already make you foresee a fact of very high value too; I mean the ease with which one can build, in such climatic conditions, very suitable dwellings. A mechanical sawmill, nails, hammers, paint and hands; no more is needed to improvise those elegant and light dwellings one meets with throughout America, but which are, by far, more appropriate and more comfortable in Texas than in the regions of the North. We shall return to it. Let us approach another subject.

IV

The question that most keenly excited our solicitude and provoked on our part the most multiplied observations and inquiries is that of salubrity. We have acquired, on this capital point, very exact notions. They are summed up in a formula which, once recognized, never deceived us, and here it is: All the parts exposed to the prevailing winds, all the plateaus and all the open valleys are of a perfect salubrity. The humid, marshy bottoms, surrounded by woods and closed to the breezes, are more or less feverish in summer. There is the rule. It is so exact that, on inspecting a settlement, we knew in advance whether or not the fever was authorized to show itself there. The settlers are often of an imprudence or an ignorance that nothing equals. We met some who seemed to have sought, for their dwelling, the reunion of conditions one would in no country face without perils. Well! these fevers, outside the private domains from which it is so easy to settle, are still little to be feared in the high country. An easy and well-known treatment readily gets the better of them.

One may affirm that, once one rises above the plains — humid though rarely marshy — of the sea's neighborhood, no country, even among the settled lands, is healthier than Texas. One knows there only maladies directly and in some sort voluntarily provoked: the fever in the circumstances I have just stated, and the affections due to perspirations imprudently checked in the winter season, the only one when the northers are to be feared. When one has been witness to the carelessness of most of the poor settlers who come to people the country, when one has seen their dwellings open to wind and rain, when one knows what their food and their regimen are, and to what they expose themselves, there would be great cause to be astonished at the health they enjoy, were not the climate, the height of the region and its magnificent airing there to account for it.

We consulted, in the forts, the hospital registers, questioned the physicians, the officers and the soldiers; the testimonies and the facts were in agreement. The salubrity of the country is on a level with its fertility and its climate. The life of the soldiers in the forts is certainly not very hygienic: times of idleness and tedium abruptly interrupted by expeditions of three or four weeks in the prairies and woods — above all in the woods — bivouacs in every season in the virgin forest and near the waters (one always seeks them out for camping); a food less cared-for than in the garrisons nearer the centers of population; these conditions are not of the best, and yet it results officially, the military surgeons told us, from the comparison of the very well-kept hospital registers, that nowhere in all the United States does the health of the soldiers equal that which they enjoy in the forts of upper Texas.

As soon as one has realized in these regions a few elements of social life and of a comfort so easy to create there, people will come from all parts of the Union to seek health there, as one goes to ask it in Europe at the îles d'Hyères, in the sky of Nice or of certain parts of Italy.

V

I have given you an idea — abridged, no doubt, but faithful — of the configuration, the fertility, the climate and the salubrity of the country with which we are occupied.

Having finished this picture, I feel almost a regret at not having been able to mingle more shadows with its light. It is difficult not to suspect illusion when one sees no serious drawback beside such a reunion of happy circumstances. It is not our fault, however. Brisbane and I, I can say it, exerted ourselves to study the reverse of the medal; we sought with the greatest care the hidden enemy, if there was one, upon this stage. We could establish nothing serious outside of what I have described to you. The mosquitoes, which are a real annoyance on many southern shores, are nothing in upper Texas: we saw no more of them there, in June, than one often sees in the heats at Paris, whereas I was truly tormented by them during my stay at New-Orleans. Our horses had to suffer from horseflies only for thirty-six hours at the end of May, in the clearings of the Cross-timbers. The rattlesnakes, like the bands of little prairie dogs whose young they eat, like the great herds of buffalos (bison), flee rapidly before the settlements and cultivation. The pigs quickly clean out a locality of them. They are much less common in Texas than they were in the States of the East and North before the peopling of these. We saw fewer rattlesnakes in our whole journey than Brisbane used to meet in one morning, in his adolescence, on the banks of the Niagara. Complete absence of ferocious beasts properly speaking. The wolves sometimes take a sheep or a small pig; they never attack, as often happens, even in France, the horses or the cattle. The bears are sought for their fur and for part of their flesh. The prairies and the woods teem with excellent game. It is impossible, in short, to meet with a more friendly nature; and, all told, the only defect we found in it, and which is common to all America, is a fairly great abundance of ants: they attack the gardens and would harm them if war were not made on them. They gather in great anthills which it is easy to destroy. I suppose that the annual fires of the prairie count for much in the rarity of the snakes, and the breezes in that of the harmful insects. The word insect reminds me that we met with many mulberry trees and that the country appears perfectly suited to the cultivation of the silkworm. The mulberry, in its turn, reminds me that among the indigenous trees that drew our attention, one must mention forests of magnolias as great as the oaks of our woods, which I could not weary of contemplating and admiring. It is in the low country above all that they abound. I sum up by saying, without fear of being contradicted, that Texas is the pearl of the thirty-two States of the Union; that none of these, at least on the Atlantic slope, could be compared to it, and that its high valleys constitute one of the most favored regions in the world. I do not doubt that plateaus chosen at suitable heights in Mexico, Brazil, or in the other Spanish States would offer natural conditions as rich and as happily wedded; perhaps even, in some points of those fine countries, nature would show herself more prodigal still; but the political, social and industrial state of most of them does not permit any enterprise that wishes to march with a sure and rapid step in a path of great prosperity to think of them today for its establishments. They must, until further notice, be held as closed. The great physical data of the country being sketched, it remains to take cognizance of its economic and social conditions. I shall speak of them without seeking too rigid a method, following the order in which they come under my pen; nevertheless, in recording the facts, I shall indicate, as far as I can, their reasons or causes.

VI

Texas is a wholly new State. During the first third of this century it still belonged to the vast empire of Mexico. Its independence dates from 1836, and its free annexation to the Union from 1845. The high country, under the Mexican administration, was still scarcely more than a magnificent desert. For a long time, the coast alone was occupied by the Spanish race. The low parts, near the gulf, and the regions extending to the East along the frontiers of Louisiana and Arkansas, had peopled themselves little by little with Anglo-Americans who, once in the majority, shook off the yoke of Mexico. The wandering indigenous tribes and the great herds of buffalos enjoyed without reserve the range of the prairies and the forests of the interior. These herds and these hordes retreat, both alike, before the crops. On the West-fork of the Trinity, we met the last remnants of these tribes on the march toward the reserved Territory, having traversed vast regions they were but barely quitting, and often our horses could cross the deep ravines of the forest only after having found the still very recognizable passage that the bands of buffalos had cleared there. It is a general fact, moreover, that the finest countries of the American continent are still almost unpeopled or wholly savage. The peopling of Texas has therefore proceeded from the coast, and from the eastern frontier where it touches Louisiana and Arkansas, this last State itself of fairly recent formation. Leaning on these two bases, colonization ascends the rivers and the valleys; the average direction of its movement is toward the north-north-east. The settlers of Texas come almost all from the neighboring States: at this hour it is still very little known in the States of the East and the North. The upper zone of colonization is forming throughout its extent by an immigration of diverse origins, but whose elements have this in common, that they all arrive on the ground with nothing or nearly so. We questioned hundreds of them; it was always the same story: that of the German Peutcher in the Indian Territory. One had come with his family, his waggon, two horses and four or five dollars; another had only a pair of oxen left; this one nothing at all; the greater part of the origins were at about that figure. We saw this everywhere, and everywhere, at the end of a few years, these families, lately destitute, found themselves surrounded by oxen, cows, horses, pigs that belonged to them, by fields ripening abundantly for them maize, wheat, sweet potatoes, potatoes, etc.; by poultry furnishing them eggs, and by gardens when one had given oneself the trouble of making them. We saw the man who arrived with nothing, nothing at all, working for a settler to earn the pair of oxen and the seed with which he was to begin his establishment three months later. We saw the already-aged father of a family who, beginning with a cow five years ago, had until now fed twelve children — of whom the eldest scarcely reached sixteen — and two women (the women do no field-work in America), with no other help than his brother-in-law. Fine cattle, horses, crops in full yield, were the conquests of those five years. I should never finish with these stories. A young French wheelwright had arrived, two years before, on the upper Trinity, with one dollar in his pocket for his whole fortune; he is now proprietor of the finest workshop in Dallas, which he had built at his own expense, and of an industrial capital of six thousand francs; he often works only the value of three full days a week. His friend Bourgeois, whom he had come to rejoin — also French, and a tailor — told us that he easily earned in one day's work the expenses of the whole week. He recounted to us, among other things, at the home of Gouhénans, with whom they both lodge, that he had received, as the price of cutting and sewing a summer overcoat for which the cloth had been furnished him, a sow ready to farrow. The produce of this sow, which he had only to leave in the woods, fed his household for two years; he sold some to his father-in-law; the Indians, who were still in the country, did not fail to kill some: and when he wished to change residence, he gathered his herd and ceded it to a neighbor who counted out 80 dollars for it, that is, 400 francs! All this may seem fabulous, I know. I repeat, however, that I should never finish if I wished to recount all the facts of this kind by which we were surrounded. It would become difficult for me, though, to detail them, for they resemble one another so much that they begin to grow homogeneous and merge in my memory, forming there now only the general notion of a state of things. We could not believe our eyes and our ears before having resolved ourselves the contradictions these facts offer and which often seem irreconcilable. When I asked, for example: "How can it be that oxen, horses, pigs, which cost absolutely nothing to raise and feed, nevertheless keep good market values?" — to this question, as to any other of the same kind, I was answered: "It is so. Why? We do not trouble ourselves to know." — The explanation of these economic facts that surprised us so greatly is found in the play of various causes: the arrival in growing progression of a new population; the communications which, elementary as they still are, nevertheless allow the products to descend toward the zones of the maritime market; finally, the enormous value of labor combined with the advantages of first occupation.

These advantages, always considerable, often prodigious in all the States of the Union, are bound to exceed in Texas the degrees of the common law. The colonizing flood, by rising ceaselessly, develops a wealth proportional to the natural powers of the soil. One gains merely by holding one's place. At the end of ten years, the first occupants of a nucleus of condensation, arrived destitute, find themselves rich, and sometimes enormously so. At Austin, for example, the building lots that were at 5 dollars five years ago are obtained with difficulty today for 6 thousand. They cited to us, among other cases, a German cobbler established for a dozen years in the locality, whose fortune, represented by a zero on his arrival, rises today already to several millions. Galveston presents, for some years past, facts perhaps more extreme still. These facts, incredible as they may seem, are only the salient points of the general law of the added-value that marches with the flood of colonization, irresistibly invades all the occupied spaces, and rises everywhere to a height proportional to the density of the population.

VII

We could not, in Europe, form an idea of the quantity of movement with which American civilization is animated, of the rapidity with which progress goes there and public wealth develops. It resembles fairy-tales. New-York, in 1830, was still scarcely more than a town of wood whose population rose to 200 thousand souls. See it today! New-York already counted 515 thousand souls in 1850. New-York is already more than a league in length over an increasing breadth. New-York contains whole avenues lined with veritable palaces of fine sandstone, of granite or of marble. Broad-way, the great axis of the city, is a wide street dazzling with luxury and riches of every kind. There are, all around the bay that envelops the city, lands where one saw scarcely a few barracks twenty years ago, and over which populous towns now extend. Brooklyn, one of them, which had only 12 thousand inhabitants in 1830, has today more than 100 thousand, and the island of Staten, unoccupied at the same period, is covering itself with villas and country houses.

And New-York, and all these towns that surround it, go so fast that after a few months' absence one can no longer recognize whole streets, nor great spaces of land that one had left vacant. In those streets all is renewed; all is built or in construction over those spaces. The city, literally, extends before one's eyes. A Frenchman established at New-York for twenty years told me he had shot wild duck for several years in Canal-Street; not only has the city reached and overflowed that axis perpendicular to the city's length, but it will soon cease to occupy a central position.

Brisbane showed me at Buffalo a piece of ground given to him, when he was 15, by a friend of his father's. — "The lot I give you, Albert," said this friend, "has no value today; but if you live long enough, you will see the day when it is worth 10 thousand dollars." Such was the foresight of a man who had a very great faith in the rapidity of America's fortune. Brisbane has not reached the age the donor was thinking of. He refused 45 thousand dollars for this lot in my presence. The population of Buffalo, of fifteen hundred souls in 1810, already exceeded 40 thousand in 1850. For the rest, let us look at the whole. What were, two hundred years ago, the spaces occupied by the Union? Immense deserts. These deserts bear at this hour a population of 25 million men; the movement of accumulation of social wealth and the multiplication of productive forces of every nature go on there by steam. The United States have seen their population grow by more than 10 million souls in the last twenty years; they will gain at least 25 million in the twenty-five years that are beginning. Such is the regular law of their growth (1). No doubt American society is as yet only a Civilization; but whereas our European Civilizations are waters that stagnate and corrupt, American Civilization is a great river that flows and fertilizes. To speak in our terms, it is an ascending Civilization, full of sap and vigor, which performs its function by conquering nature, by transforming the deserts, by multiplying and empowering the instruments of labor, and which launches itself into the great career of the social progress of humanity, starting from the maximum attained by European Civilization and below which the latter has already descended by a phase and a half.

(1) Here are the exact figures and the law of the increase. — Population of the United States. Years: 1790 — 1800 — 1810 — 1820 — 1830 — 1840 — 1850. Pop.: 3,929,827 — 5,305,941 — 7,239,814 — 9,638,191 — 12,866,020 — 17,069,453 — 23,263,488.

But leaving these general considerations and returning to our subject, we will say that these prodigious phenomena of American progress not only already extend to Texas, but that, without any doubt, they are bound to take, upon this magnificent field, as soon as it is better known, proportions extraordinary for America itself. Never has human foresight rested on more positive data. And yet already, without evoking a future that marches with great strides, whose movement is as visible and as certain as that of the sun, the present conditions offer bases of prosperity whose character you will easily judge. It suffices, indeed, to form an idea of the breadth and solidity of these bases, to reflect on the means by which ease forms itself and wealth disengages itself at present on this stage. What I have told you above can scarcely make you conceive the universal poverty and the extreme weakness of these means. The prodigality of nature does, in Texas, nineteen-twentieths of what man must draw from his labor, his industry and his science in Europe. What is this army that nevertheless conquers so rapidly in Texas? A poor mass, destitute, scattered, and generally as ignorant as it is deprived of all resources. Capital, instruments of labor, knowledge, connections — everything is wanting to the settlers. They settle 5, 10, 15 and 20 miles from one another, and remain without ties, without mutual aid save what they bring one another in certain wholly exceptional circumstances, and deprived of all the advantages that the division of labor would assure to denser populations. Will you believe that we saw, at almost every settler's of the high country, the maize and grain that were to make the quarter-cooked paste eaten a moment later under the name of bread, ground before the meal in a kind of coffee-mill? Each settler is obliged to do everything: his rough furniture, part of his implements, sometimes even his saddle. It is by axe-strokes that he procures planks. He will ride 40 or 50 kilometers to have a horse re-shod or a plow mended, etc.

And do not think that this destitution of things is compensated by an excess of labor. Not at all. The Texan pioneer does not tire himself too much. Nature is so prodigal to him that he rests part of the year, letting wealth come to him in the form of natural products, of livestock, of the added-value of lands, etc., and waiting for Civilization to catch up with him to bring him comfort, social activity and the enjoyments he does not disdain virtually, but which he does without so long as they are not within his reach. He is besides frightfully held to ransom by a commerce whose disorganization multiplies the intermediary cogs. American commerce does not have for its principle that small profits make great gains; it professes, on the contrary, that it is large profits that make large fortunes, and if it acts accordingly everywhere, it is particularly in the new countries that it has its elbow-room.

VIII

The social state of the settlers, over the whole breadth and depth of the zone of attack, is something that has neither name nor place in the natural series of the course of social movement. Subjectively — that is to say, as to its elements, its action, its aim and its effects — this state is no doubt far superior to savagery, since it is a seed of civilization that grows very rapidly. But, in its form, it is inferior to it. The savages, at least, live gathered in hordes, in camps or in tribes. Among the settlers, the principle of fragmentation is pushed to the absolute. Transitory and temporary though it be, their state none the less realizes the extreme theoretical limit of isolation: a strange ambiguity to be classed below savagery in certain respects, although it here virtually contains a very imminent and very rich civilization. However that may be, you will easily deduce from what I have said — and I could add still other motives, more particular to a part of the new populations of Texas — that it is impossible to imagine, for the work of colonization and conquest, conditions more wretched, means more minute, and, if one may say so, forces more feeble. Ah! when we had before our eyes this contrast of things, when we were witnesses of this destitution, of this weakness of the attack, of this absolute want of all the aids of civilization and industry; and when we saw, nevertheless, wealth springing up all around those poor pioneer barracks, lost in the great solitudes; when we had before us the spectacle of that immense tide of prosperity that rises from the coast, that rises ever and gains, without anything being able to stop it, the high lands; when we contemplated that munificent nature and calculated what she gives for so little labor, what she yields for so little effort and organization; we felt ourselves quiver with impatience, with desire, with regret and with fear! It was the desire and the impatience to attack, with the superior means we combined in our minds, this field of conquests so sure and so fine; it was the regret of not having known it sooner, the regret above all that all our friends, our brothers in social convictions, could not see it as we did. And the fear, finally — why should I not confess it to you — was the thought that you, not having seen with your own eyes, we should remain powerless to transmit to you the striking notion of things and the invincible attraction that emanates from it. They know well, however, I said to myself, that I do not lie! when I tell them: here is what I saw, they will not be able to doubt that I saw. But will they decide? not having seen themselves, not having felt, touched, breathed the reality, will they be able to assimilate it by transmission? will they awake, will they hear the liberating Surgite? or else, drawn for a moment from an atony that circumstances have made, will they awake only to say: "It would be very fine... but it is too far!" and then fall back into European torpor? The longer my reason had kept, condensed in its inner forum, all the resistances, and the more I understood the social value of those realities that had triumphed over them, the more I should have wished to be able to carry that reality before your eyes to triumph over yours. I no longer doubted America then! It was indeed the land of realization, the happy land, the Promised Land; I doubted no longer except of you and of myself. Would it be given me to arouse in you the resolve that would be the conquest! — One has only to will it; will they will it? These simple words sum up all the sentiments that stirred me.

IX

Whatever may be said of my fears of that time, you must already perceive that the social circumstances present themselves at present, in Texas, for an enterprise like the one we shall soon have to sketch, no less singularly favorable than those that nature has gathered there. You will not be slow to recognize that they surpass these, if it be possible, in guarantee of great prosperity. And indeed, in this nascent society, everything is to be done; and everything is to be done on the most productive conditions. There is everything to be done in importations of industry, of commerce, of science, of education, even of luxury; in the grafting of progressive procedures of every order, acquired and realized elsewhere by civilization. Everything is still wanting there and everything is virtually invoked there by the combination of the primitive destitution and the so rapid development of the great elements of material wealth. The pioneer of the extreme frontier perforce does without what he cannot dream of giving himself in his solitude; but already the stratum that precedes him is more ambitious; the rapidity of commercial fortunes and the high price of importations and of all trade and finished work are the irrefutable proof of it. A colony provided with the most ordinary elements of our civilizations would therefore find, in the surrounding social circumstances, a field of prosperity richer still than that of nature.

One example among a thousand will make the idea concrete. On seeing great wagons laden with a few enormous bales of cotton descend across the prairie, I said to Brisbane: Try to calculate what there would be to gain by setting up, at suitably chosen points, on the banks of the rivers, powerful mechanical presses of the kind that enabled the English army to transport fodder in Spain during the war of 1808? — Arrived at Galveston, the principal port of Texas on the gulf, I learned that the cotton press already functioned there and that it gave 200 dollars of profit a day to each of the three or four partners who had set it up. That there be exaggeration in these figures, I am quite willing to believe; but, even making large allowance, the operation must surely yield enormous products for such estimates to be voiced in the locality.

From what you know of the system of atmospheric currents of Texas, you readily understand that there is no country in the world, Holland included, more favorable to the establishment of windmills, and where this mechanism is more powerfully called for — for raising water, for milling, for the making of oils, the sawing of wood, and a hundred other objects. Well! there is not a single windmill in the country. They do not know what it is. Over three-quarters of the already-inhabited surface of the country, planks are made, as I have said, by axe-strokes; the grain is ground in kinds of coffee-mills. We scarcely met, where the settlements began to draw a little closer, with shapeless ox- or mule-treadmills. An intelligent manufacture of the principal organs of these machines would soon find everywhere a market for its products and would rapidly give considerable profits.

But here, no more than at many another point of my narrative, could I make an end were I to attempt an enumeration. From the simplest operations of the awl, the needle, the sewing-machine (already much employed in the States of the East), to the construction of the elementary machines suited to the country's needs, one would have only the embarrassment of choice among a thousand branches all very lucrative.

Finally, a nucleus of colonization at all compact and proceeding with an idea of the whole, merely by organizing its own transports and its lines of communication, would seize with the greatest ease, over wide zones running along those lines, a commerce that would be a benefit to the surrounding populations, and whose profits would exceed even those of the other branches.

X

Understand this well: poverty, in Texas, is not an old poverty, a resigned and stationary poverty, a normal state, a habit of the populations, like our poverty of Europe. Were it so, one should speculate only on the advantages directly furnished by nature. But no; far from it, and quite the contrary, this poverty is here only a transition of a moment, a beginning, a point of departure. Ease and wealth gallop after it. This fact, which is capital, which results at once from the material data of the country, from the nature of the population that carries itself there, and from the aim that this population proposes to itself and promptly attains there, dominates the whole field of the considerations I have just indicated to you. In a milieu where the matter of wealth, the elementary substance of prosperity and of social life, are created so abundantly and so fast, every nucleus soon becomes a center of condensation, and assimilates to itself the elements of the surrounding life in proportion to its gravitational mass and its force of radiation. It multiplies the vitality of the external milieu, and the latter incessantly empowers its own in its turn. Now, there is not, that I know of, another place in the world, at this hour, where the social circumstances offer to the spirit of industry, to the importation of the progress acquired and realized by the labor of civilization, harvests at once as abundant and as assured as in Texas; because nowhere else is this rapid transition from poverty to wealth so general, so certain, so little aleatory, and because the historical facts and the local data have preserved, until this moment, to the country an almost exclusively agricultural character. No doubt there will for a long time yet be much to do, and on very fine conditions, in Texas. But if one wishes to do marvelous things there — that is to say, if one proposes certainly to attain enormous results with means of a relative inferiority, of a disproportion I would readily call impossible or ridiculous — one must lose no time. Why? for a very simple reason: because Texas is soon going to be better known; because the eye of the North begins to open and to look in this direction, and the great speculation, the railways, industry, the proper elements of the East will not be slow to descend there. Now, it will be quite another thing to have preceded this invasion or to come after it. Established before, one profits freely and abundantly from the new flood of added-values and from the great movement of business it brings with it. After, on the contrary, the roles are reversed, and one will indeed have to pay tribute to it. There is, over the whole confederation of the States, and for a long time yet, even without leaving the data of civilization, a development of prosperity of which the relative stagnation of Europe can give no idea. But everywhere the system of this development offers singular points, epochs of acceleration, times when the new life surges up and launches itself with an extraordinary abundance and promptness. To seize such an epoch, to establish oneself on a point already brilliantly privileged by its natural conditions, at the moment of one of those risings of great sap that make, in some sort, the social vegetation suddenly burst forth, to be oneself element and substance of that sap — this is, from the point of view of the practical question and the practical spirit, a consideration of the first order and that is well worth taking heed of.

To enlighten you on this important point I could do no better than to reproduce here a document I found on the ship that brought me back. This document, extracted from a General Statistics recently published at Philadelphia, sums up very well besides all that I have established previously, and will serve me to complete the general information it is my task to furnish you. Here is the textual translation of the chapter in question:

XI

Texas. Configuration of the soil, etc. — "The country is set upon a vast inclined plain, descending from the mountainous heights of the West, lowering gradually toward the South-East, as far as the coastal plains, and furrowed by a multitude of watercourses in this direction. "This whole divides itself into three distinct zones. The first, comprising the plains that begin at the sea, extends over a strip 50 to 100 miles wide. It is a low region, of extreme fertility; its alluvial soil, very rich, does not present those quagmires and stagnant waters so common on all the maritime shores of the other Southern States. The banks of the rivers there are covered with superb woods. The best pastures abound there. "The next zone is a very extensive region, whose soil undulates and which presents itself under the aspect of prairies cut by forests, of a powerful vegetation. The soil, formed of calcareous and siliceous earths, is excellent. "The last zone, the highest of the three, which advances and extends partly upon the great chain known under the name of the Mexican Alps, contains great very fertile plateaus, mountains producing the most numerous varieties of trees and shrubs, and valleys of a productivity to render to the farmer a hundred times the price of his establishment (extraordinary fruitful, capable of repaying the soil of the husbandman a hundred fold). One may affirm without fear that this immense State presents to agriculture, over the whole extent of its surface, one of the most admirable regions of the entire earth. "Woods are met with everywhere. The most common species are the live oak, of superior quality, several other varieties of oak, the hickory, the elm, the walnut, the sycamore, numerous species of acacias, of cypress, rubber-trees, etc. The high lands produce fine stands of cedars, of pines and of similar species. Fruits and kitchen-garden plants of every desirable sort are cultivated there with as much ease as success. Peaches, melons, grapes and the other fruits of the temperate climates come there in profusion, while figs, oranges, lemons, dates, pineapples, olives and the other fruits of the tropics abound in the southern parts. "The products of large-scale farming are cottons (the long-staple species), maize, wheat, rye, barley and the other grains, sugar-cane, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc. Rice and tobacco grow at several points, and among the indigenous plants one counts indigo, vanilla, sarsaparilla and a number of medicinal products. Considerable quantities of cattle, of horses, of mules, of sheep and of pigs fatten on the prairies, without, to tell the truth, requiring any care. Enormous herds of buffalos and wild horses roam the prairies; deer, bears and several other species of game show themselves there in profusion. No State of the Union equals or approaches Texas for the richness of its pastures. "Indians. The territory and its neighborhood are still infested by hordes of Indians, most of whom subsist by incursions and depredations, and often show the most destructive and bloodthirsty dispositions. Constant and growing efforts have not ceased to be opposed to their marauding, and to be made to bring them to a state of relative peace and friendship. But until the country has attained a stronger density of population, this so desirable result will probably not be attained. The population of the State, in 1850, was thus distributed: Whites, 154,000; free blacks, 331; slaves, 58,161. Total, 212,552. "Climate. Travelers and residents agree in representing Texas as enjoying a delicious climate and a remarkable salubrity everywhere, save some few exceptions at certain seasons. "As in California, the winter or rainy season begins in December and ends in the month of March; the rest of the year, comprising spring, summer and autumn, is the dry season. The winter is never rigorous and snow shows itself little there, save on the summits of the peaks. The heat of summer, though intense, is greatly tempered by the regular and refreshing breezes that rise every day with the sun and do not drop before three in the afternoon. All year, besides, the night air is refreshing. From April to September the temperature varies from 63 to 100° Fahrenheit, the average at noon being about 83°. In summer, the intermittent fever shows itself ordinarily in the low lands, on the gulf shores, though it there rarely takes an epidemic character."

XII

That is how they already write in the North about Texas. To rightly appreciate this document, one must know what the country's reputation was not long ago. The remoteness of Texas, its situation at the southern extremity of the Union, the slight elevation of its maritime shores and the fabulous tales to which its origin gave rise, had accredited about this country the most false and most absurd notions. It had at first been assimilated to the most unhealthy parts of the Southern States; its civil reputation was no better than its sanitary one: it was represented as the asylum of all the thieves and all the bandits of the Union; finally it was agreed that hordes of the most ferocious savages ravaged it for all they were worth, and that adventurers, secessionists, whites as savage as the Cadoes or the Comanches alone could dream of settling there. How many people, before our departure, recounted to us ourselves such things! They had indeed made of the winds of Texas — the crown of its magnificent climatic regime — a terrible bogey.

The above document proves that one is recovering from these errors, although it still contains a few of them. The author, who surrounded himself with the best information he could procure in the North, describes things as we saw them; only, the division of the year into a dry season and a rainy season is a false application to Texas of what constitutes the regime of many southern countries; the rain, as I have said, is ordinarily distributed there in an almost regular fashion over the whole year — we were formally assured of it. As for the matter of the savages, it is a grosser error and truly laughable.

The frontiers of the United States, mobile on the Indian side, are at intervals strewn with forts. At the first inspection of these, we thought the Indians of the South were today little to be feared. These forts are simple barrack-huts that they do not even take the trouble to close with wooden barriers, and their garrisons often contain no more than 50 or 60 men.

The day we arrived at Preston, the woman of the inn where we slept, recounting to us the dangers one ran in the country seven or eight years ago, told us: "I expected every night to be murdered. The country was full of Indians; there were almost no whites, and when my husband was not at home, I had to stand in the evening before the door with a stick to guard it." She was a little woman of Virginia who looked more like a doll than an athlete. We had to conclude that the ferocious hordes of Texas could not have been very formidable.

For the rest, the tribes are no longer left within the lines of the forts, and these advance as the settlements form behind them. And when the Indians still occupied the country, the settlers none the less fixed themselves in their midst, isolated and out of all immediate aid from one another. Bravado, exaggerated tales, multiplied by the distances, were the true causes of the fables long accredited in the North about the tribes of Texas. I conversed with the heroes of the great Indian wars; I had recounted to me the famous campaigns that had such resonance 10 or 12 years ago, and that still have their echoes in the distant States: all that was reduced, in the mouths of the leaders of the expeditions themselves, to a few pursuits of parties that had stolen horses. I repeat, moreover, that those times are wholly past; and, traveling alone on the extreme frontiers, we recognized for ourselves, as well as by the unanimous testimonies in the already-inhabited parts, that the security of the country is today everywhere far superior to that one enjoys in the streets of Paris, of London or of New-York.

As for the white population, although it has not always had the most virginal origin, it is none the less, in fact, one of the good ones among the States — the agricultural population above all. Life is so easy in Texas that one does not see a beggar there and that one knows no other thefts than those practiced very legally in all civilized countries. I do not mean that Texas has not been the refuge of more than one secessionist; but I say that secessionism, allow me the word, is not practiced in Texas. There one does business, that is all. All told, I repeat it, the country is among the safest of the safe.

Whatever then may be said of the past, of the frightful fables and their causes, what is certain is that the light is being made rapidly at the present hour, and that the reality, as soon as it is in full daylight, will not be slow to call upon this great and beautiful country the capital, the industry, the enterprises and the speculation of the North. The report that Captain Marcy was printing when I left New-York, and which I am astonished not yet to have received, will hasten this epoch already prepared by his lectures (oral expositions) of last year, which fixed our attention and determined the direction of our journey. I will add this significant fact: that on our return we met, between Galveston and Austin, capitalist notabilities of New-York who came to inquire themselves into the state of things and to see what there is to do in acquisitions of land, construction of railways and operations of great speculation. Already the execution of the first ways of this kind has begun in the low country, and there is fairly strong talk of the valley of the Trinity or of the Red River for the famous line of the Pacific-Railroad, destined to join, across the lands of the Union, the Atlantic and the Pacific. At the rate things go in America, and particularly railway enterprises, one point in any case is certain: that if the main California line does not cut through these valleys, one of the most important branches of the Southern system will traverse the region (1).

Arrived here, you probably think that I have exhausted the series of those exceptional factors whose conjunction raises to so high a power the coefficient of the present virtuality of Texas. Well! no; and as in the last analysis all these factors, whatever their number and value, express themselves by positive, established facts which I content myself with reporting to you, which cannot be contested, which are there, which besides hold together among themselves and whose links, origins and causes, after all, explain themselves clearly, I have nothing to fear and I continue my testimony. The new object of which I am going to speak is as considerable as its statement is simple. It is a question of the price of land.

(1) At the moment I am correcting the proofs of this chapter, I receive news showing that things have advanced greatly since I left the country. Brisbane has just sent me a map on which the most probable project of the Texan line is traced. — See the map of Texas at the end of the volume.

XIII

You say to yourselves: "Granted! the lands here are more fertile than in all the other States. That fact is established. But the price of these lands is at least not lower there." Well! no — the highest price of acquisition of free lands is still, at this hour, 625 per 100 cheaper in Texas than in all the other States. The acre of free lands costs, in all the States, a dollar and a quarter, or 125 cents (1). The acre, in Texas, is still obtained at the price of 20 cents. — There is the fact.

(1) The cent is, very nearly, our sou of 5 centimes: 100 cents are worth a dollar. A dollar is worth at Paris 5 francs. Its real value is fr. 5.48, and its theoretical value, in the United States, fr. 5.38. (Goodrich.) The American acre is sensibly 2/5 of the hectare; exactly, 40.4671 ares.

That is not all: under conditions you will know presently, the acre comes back to only 6 cents — that is to say that the land is there, in this case, 21 times cheaper than in the other States!

Note that I do not speak of determined lands, but of lands one chooses at will over all the spaces not yet appropriated. — Let us explain this mystery.

In the United States, the virgin lands belong generally to the Union, which sells them at the uniform price of 1 dollar 1/4 the acre; such is the common law.

But, first point, Texas — a dismemberment of Mexico and an independent State — reserved to itself in its act of free annexation to the Union the full and entire property of its lands.

Second point, at the time of the war of independence, the Texan government, obliged to recruit forces against Mexico, had to call up volunteers and offer them, as bait and rewards, immense territorial concessions, which were effectively distributed in the form of bearer bonds called head-rights, giving the right to the property of the quantity of land stated in the title, to be chosen on the free surfaces.

Now it happened that these volunteers, foreign adventurers for the most part, made haste each to turn his head-right into money: such enormous spaces of land, thrown onto the market, made prices fall to almost nil figures, and for a long time even after the war, the causes I spoke of above weighed upon an issue already crushed by its own weight.

So much so that the acre of land was quoted, in head-rights, at only 5 cents (25 centimes), no more than 5 years ago. But this period of extreme debasement is past: in 5 years the head-rights, rising in regular progression, have realized an increase of 400 per 100; they stood, at the time of our passage, between 18 and 22 cents the acre, that is, 1 fr. — Note, I beg you, how significant such an increase, in the last few years, is, and how it confirms what I was setting out just now on the present phase of Texas. Evidently this phase of very rapid ascending transition that I announced is not only prepared, but really already begun.

That is not all. In view of the so vast extent of its lands and of the country's interest in being promptly peopled, the Texan law makes to every immigrant the concession of 320 acres of land, to be chosen in one block, in return for a payment of 20 dollars for various fees. The price of the acre is, in this case, about 30 centimes.

In sum, the prices were, 5 years ago, by head-rights: the acre, 25 centimes; the hectare, 60 centimes. They are today, by the same way: the acre, 1 fr.; the hectare, 2 fr. 50 c. And by way of direct establishment: the acre, 0 fr. 30 c.; the hectare, 0 fr. 75 c. Such is, on this subject, the state of things at this moment. The square league, of 1,600 hectares, which was worth 1,000 fr. 5 years ago in head-rights, is now worth 4,000, and is besides acquired for 1,200 fr. per each dozen colonists arriving. Such are the causes — all particular to Texas, resulting from its own history, from its immense extent and from the obscure and adventurous origin from which it is emerging — that make the free lands, despite their uncontested superiority, still, in this State, 6¼ times cheaper for one case, and 20 times for the other, than in the other parts of the American Union.

XIV

You now know the general data of nature and the social and economic circumstances that constitute the present state of things in this country. What I have told you puts you in a position to appreciate for yourselves, not only the value of the fixed data, whose conjunction forms the inalienable capital of these so highly privileged regions, but also the historical circumstances — themselves wholly exceptional — that have prepared there this practical moment, this phase of vigorous ascending transition, this great movement of first social sap of which I have tried to give you the idea. All the young States of America present this phenomenon more or less regularly in their turn; but it must exceed, in Texas, the ordinary proportions, by the very fact that it has been more delayed, and that the enormous advantages the country reunites have been longer veiled by errors that are vanishing and fears that have no real motive today. One may even add that it is not only in America that the day is breaking on the virtuality of Texas. An extract from the Annals of Foreign Commerce, very recently inserted in the Moniteur (No. of Thursday 27 October last), proves that the reality is beginning to penetrate into Europe. It is a document to add to the one I cited previously. Its publication in the Moniteur, and the place it occupies there, give it the character of an administrative warning addressed to French commerce on the outlets that the near future of this country may offer, if one puts oneself in a position to profit from them (1).

For myself, having sketched for you this series of elements of prosperity that nature has been pleased to make concur in composing the extraordinary endowment of this country, I deliver to your meditations the facts by which each of these elements manifests itself, I invite you to estimate for yourselves the proper value of each of these factors, and to calculate their product. Having initiated you into the dispositions of mind with which I approached things, having then reported them to you as I saw them, and having made known to you their natural causes or their historical origins, my task on this subject is accomplished.

(1) One may read this article in the No. indicated above; I shall extract a few passages from it, for those who may not have the Moniteur at hand. The article is entitled: United States. Notice on Texas. "During the year 1852," it says, "the commerce of Galveston took, at the same time as the general prosperity of Texas, a remarkable upswing; the harvests of every kind, sugars and cottons, almost doubled; direct relations were established with Europe and principally with Germany. "Many European emigrants arrived directly from Germany, and by way of New-Orleans. A greater number of Americans came by the overland route, from the slave States of the Atlantic, whose lands are exhausting themselves every day... "It is regrettable that French commerce, which has such need of outlets, has not yet made any serious effort to exploit a State of which the Germans have almost the monopoly, and which, in a few years, will probably be the most important of the United States for the production of sugar and cotton... "The climate of this new State of the Union is very salubrious, save on the banks of the rivers near the sea where the fevers are to be feared... "The lands are at very low prices; one obtains them from 50 centimes up to 10 fr. the acre (a). The proximity of rivers, of roads, of towns or villages constitutes the price of the land, as well as its quality... There is nothing to fear from the Indians, save in the West and on the Rio-Grande. The yellow fever is generally unknown in Texas outside the centers of population, and, in any case, 100 miles from the sea. At that distance the country rises and extends in undulating plains broken by woods..." (a) The lands indicated at 10 fr. the acre are appropriated lands. This figure therefore signifies nothing. (Author's note.)

Understand only this well: that, by the reading of this simple narrative, you know Texas far better than the immense majority of Americans — including the greater part of its own inhabitants, whose mass, still little cultivated, has more the instinct of the country's value than it could have the reasoned intelligence of it. In any case, in this rapid Report where, for the first time that I know of, the real and present Texas is set forth with some coherence (1), I affirm this: that there is met with, in these regions, a wholly extraordinary combination of conditions, several of which would constitute, even separately already, rare and exceptional privileges, and that, at this moment above all, it is easy to attain there, with relatively minimal means, enormous results. I affirm this in November 1853 and I ask that it be recorded. I know that not many years will pass before this affirmation has received, from external facts and whatever may happen, a striking confirmation; and it is in the interest of my responsibility that I ask today for the recording of it between us.

(1) I have learned, since the time when the first edition of this Memoir was published, that a fairly large number of pamphlets on Texas had been written in Germany. My friend Ch. Burkly, of Zurich, who has read them all, told me that they do nothing but confirm my own documents.

PART THREE — Proposal

I

Well then! you will say to me, now that you have set forth Texas for us and that we know the state of things, what do you propose to us?

What I propose to you, friends, you are about to learn.

I propose first to the phalansterian School that it shake off its torpor; to the faith that sleeps, that it awaken; to the one that is dead, that it rise again.

I propose that, all and each of us, we associate in spirit, in heart and in will, to a work that the will of all determines, realizes virtually ipso facto, and posits as the greatest thing that can be undertaken: the foundation, from whole cloth, under conditions approved by reason, of a society which, establishing itself in full consciousness of its end and of its means, has for its object the condensation of the most advanced elements and the most progressive ideas acquired by humanity, into a hearth of liberty, of light, of pacific power, of sovereign attraction and of radiant and liberating prosperity.

I propose that, all and each of us, we free ourselves on the spot, by an act of faith based on the finest material data and on the religious and strong sentiment of the social Truth with which we are charged, from discouragements, from torpors, from theoretical and practical impossibilities, and from the somber present realities of Europe, or from the illusions of a passive, deceiving and virtueless hope.

I propose that each free himself from all these things, at this very hour, by an inner, decisive resolution; rise above the mortal vapors of abandonment, of moral somnolence, of senile resignation or of egoism, which asphyxiate Socialism in Europe, and salute in his heart the homeland of the first and approaching Realizations of his ideas, of his religion, of his faith. And that each and all, united in spirit across the distances, resuscitated to the consciousness of collective power, to the strong sentiment of the communion of souls and of the convergence of concurrences, we constitute, by this act, a phalanx of wills resolved to make, near or far, of these glorious realizations, the work and aim of immediate practical activity.

Friends, I tell you, the Promised Land is a reality. I did not believe in it; I did not go to seek it; I was led to it. We saw it and traversed it for forty days and I have described it to you. The redemptive idea slumbers in the captivity of Egypt. Let it awaken! Believe, and the land of Realizations, the sacred land is yours. A strong resolution; a collective act of faith: this Land is conquered. I say it to you in a simple voice that does not diminish the solemnity of the word: I bring you the way and salvation, and I propose to you the inauguration. Let us only unite in resolved will, and, however small a thing that may seem to those outside, I tell you, because I believe it and because it is so, the new era of the world is founded.

The phalansterian school contains more forces than the initiative of the work requires. Let them stir, unite and converge; virtually and from this moment on, the foundation is accomplished.

II

If this word has comforted you, if it has awakened those who were sleeping, if desire has sprung up in your souls; if you feel yourselves vibrating with love, hope and faith over this work: this work is not only living, it is moreover baptized in devotion in our hearts. It is nobly and religiously entitled. Its character is acquired for it by the sentiment in which it is conceived; for, I repeat, it is from now on conceived, it lives. The conjunction of our wills is the very act of conception. The germ is created. It has its title of life, its elementary soul, its initiating principle, its own formative activity. It now remains only to furnish its development with a progressive nourishment.

And I can now, without diminishing the character and the title of this work, set forth for you its ways and means in their material and industrial practice, and even in their direct and unhoped-for bearings upon the well-being and personal interests of those who, near or far, will take part in it.

We find, in effect, this first contrast between the only rational mode of realization that the old world offered us and those the new presents to us, namely: that on the old field the first work was necessarily a wholly scientific and entirely isolated experimentation, limited to the restricted and narrow number of elements on which the progressive experiment of the serial process should have been made; whereas on the proposed field, the work of realization rapidly comprises conditions of new life and of assured prosperity for all the elements apt and disposed to concur in it.

So long as we still had only the data of Europe, it was and could be a question only of a gathering of convinced and devoted capital, defraying the costs of a circumscribed experiment. And it is not useless that I recall here with what obstinate sincerity I have not ceased, for my part, to combat the illusions, so often reproduced, that wished to attribute to a first trial of the serial mechanism, in Europe, the character of a secure and more or less lucrative investment of funds. A hundred times — it was for me a rigorous dictate of conscience — I have insisted on these three points, namely:

That the first realization of the serial process must be considered as a costly experiment;

That it could do nothing, before its completion and the social and external consequences of its success, for the improvement of the lot of those who would have furnished it its conditions of existence and of development;

That finally, and in consequence, it required a very extended concurrence, so as not to have to appeal to pecuniary engagements which it would not have been loyal, in the circumstances, to encourage to be, relatively, too considerable.

And the School has very generally accepted, in all times, that it pursued its social end for itself, for the triumph of the universal good, for the cause and the salvation of humanity, its sovereign object. It constituted itself upon a disinterested faith and in a devotion. It has made its proofs, and this character is acquired for it today now that there opens before it a new field where faith no longer commands sacrifices; where, far from it, what it asks of its own is that they seize, with decision and energy, the extraordinary avenues of prosperity that are offered them so that, from this unexpected prosperity itself, there may soon issue, rich, powerful and radiant, the Realization of the idea with which they are charged.

You have already understood, in effect, that on the new horizon the old ways and means of Realization are changed and singularly enlarged, and you doubtless foresee the system of great operations whose revelation issues as of itself from the data now known to you. For us — I speak here of Brisbane and myself — as soon as we had these before our eyes, all our earlier discussions ceased: the nature of things indicated to us the bases of the work to propose to our co-religionists of the two worlds; and such is the breadth of these bases that they lend themselves to all that can be conceived and accommodate themselves even very well to the diversities of which the views, the procedures of execution and the ways and means are susceptible. — We are going to occupy ourselves with determining these bases.

III

When colonization has cast its first roots in a new land, the work pursues itself of its own accord and develops like an integral function representing the sum of the individual actions of the elements that concur in it, each on his own account and at his own risk and peril. Such is the case of American society considered as a whole, and especially of the new States and the Territories (1) of the Confederation.

But when it is a question of beginning the work of conquest, of creating the bases of operation, that is another question, and the problem has rarely until now been solved straight off. The ordinary means of civilization have most often shown themselves insufficient there, whether the enterprises proceeded by the employment of the individualist principle, or whether they had recourse to that of collectivity.

The individualist principle is too weak for the attack, and the collective principle, having until now produced itself only under the rudimentary and crude form of community, has never been able to prosper by itself and without the help of a very energetic religious faith. — The enterprises of colonization directed from Europe upon new countries properly so called, almost always ill conceived and ill conducted, have generally failed in their beginnings, or have at the least had very painful commencements.

In Texas, whether we choose our locations (sites) in the North or in the North-West, we shall not be in the case of the attack of an absolutely new country, since we shall be neighbors of the zones already occupied by the vanguard of the settlers of civilization. Nevertheless we shall not be either in that of a colonization which does no more, like these, than continue a movement already begun. Their scattered parceling is not what we can intend to reproduce. We have therefore a problem to solve, the solution of which must be obtained prior to the enterprise, and which will dictate to us the good conditions of execution and of development of our work. We shall arrive at it easily by the process of serial development, which consists in positing the general function and determining its value by successive approximations. This function is here nothing other than the general and initiating idea of the work itself. It is therefore by the expression of this latter that we must begin.

(1) The Confederation counts today, besides the district of Columbia placed under the direct government of the congress whose seat it is, 32 States and six Territories. The Territories are destined to become States when their population is sufficient; until then, they are administered by the government of the Union. — Nevertheless what is called the Indian Territory is an exception. The Indians, in effect, govern themselves there in their own fashion. There is already, in this country, a party that demands the erection of the Territory into a State and annexation.

IV

General and initiating idea.

The generating and first idea is the foundation, from whole cloth, on free lands, in Texas, of a society new not only in its existence, but new again in its character. This character is determined by the very object of the foundation and by its procedure of action:

It proposes to seat upon a rapid development of great material prosperity the realization of the social Progress whose modern dogma it proclaims; to inaugurate, by liberty and by science, truth, solidarity, distributive justice, the convergent and spontaneous combination of individual activities, social Harmony in fine, which is its ideal and its faith.

Such is its end; and the practical procedure of which it joins, as adequate means, the proclamation to that of its end, is the free employment of the experimental process in the search for the conditions of the perfecting of the social relations of men.

The general formula being thus posited, we are going to seek the first term of its serial development, that is to say the first approximation of its practical value, or, if one will, of its conditions of execution.

V

Approximation.

The society will found and develop itself by the progressive creation of the organs necessary to the successive and natural phases of its existence. The initial organ is evidently an Agency of colonization, to which will fall first two preliminary functions:

1st. The acquisition of the lands where the first Nuclei of the proposed society will be seated;

2nd. The preparation, which must render these lands fit for the suitable reception of the first swarms of the population.

The ulterior organs will be these Nuclei themselves, functioning freely in the direction of the ideas they will have brought and sown in the social field where they will be established.

With a view to assuring the society to be created the great prosperity that will give it, in the order of material means, the power to pursue and to attain its higher end, to guarantee it the perfect liberty of action it will need, and the pacific and radiant influence at which it must aim for the prompt fortune of its ideas, the Agency of colonization will acquire lands extensive enough to form the element of a new State, if Texas — as is thought probable enough, given its dimensions — must ultimately be fractioned, or at least the base of one or several districts, in the contrary case. The already too far advanced appropriation of the lands in the South of Texas, and the superior climatological and sanitary conditions of the North and the North-West, determine the choice of acquisitions in these latter regions.

The lands acquired, the Agency of colonization proceeds on the spot to the dispositions necessary to the installation of the swarms of the vanguard. The preparation made, the elements of these swarms — chosen on the double ground of aptitude to present needs and of communion in the general idea that presides over the foundation — are called, on known conditions, stipulated in a contract previously and freely debated between them and the Agency of colonization or its representatives. As soon as the swarms, established, have recognized and declared themselves autonomous, they act and administer themselves as such, in plenitude of liberty in the sphere of their personal affairs and interests.

The first nucleus founded becomes naturally, itself, an instrument of preparation of new terrains, for new establishments, whose framework of personnel the Agency of colonization and its correspondents have continued to compose during the first installations. The primitive operation now repeats itself by the employment of the colonial forces acquired, and so on. Each establishment is constituted in consequence by two contracts of the Agency of colonization,

The one with the preparers of the terrain;

The other with the new colonists who will come to take possession of it.

Such is the first term of our development, that is to say the first approximation of the object and of the mechanism of execution. General as it still is, this expression is already settled. It is only a sketch, but a sketch that marks the essential and fundamental traits of the plan. The approximation of the second degree will be obtained by a justificatory examination and an already more precise drawing of these general traits.

VI

2nd Approximation. Character of the foundation. — You will remark first that, although presented to the initiative of the phalansterian elements, the proposed realization is by no means exclusively that of their own special object: it is more general and contains this latter no doubt, but it contains also the faculty of practical experimentation and verification, offered to every other progressive doctrine, under the personal responsibility of that doctrine and at its own risk, in the wholly independent sphere of its own affairs.

This proposal does not say to the Phalansterians: come make in Texas the first experiment of the serial mechanism: arrive; we constitute ourselves as a society and we found the Phalanstery. If the proposal enclosed us in that circle, I judge that it would be more than imprudent, and would substitute for the certainty of a success serious chances of reverse.

The proposal says to the Phalansterians: Let us found in Texas a society entitled in progressive social faith, by the living ideas and elements that will give themselves rendezvous there, but who will occupy themselves above all with taking possession of a friendly and fecund nature, under the practical conditions most favorable to the rapid development of its virtual riches, and who will then ask of this prosperity the means of putting their ideas to the test.

Thus, although the ulterior and special end of the Phalansterians is indeed the experimentation of their social process, these latter — and I would give an analogous counsel to the representatives of any other new systematic conception — must take good care not to wish to employ, straight off and by preconceived determination, the social regime that is their end, as the means of colonization.

The logical generation of things requires first colonization by the best practical means, which implies the setting aside of every preconceived system, whence might result a hindrance of liberty and, in consequence, an obstacle to the activity of the colonizing elements. It calls only afterward for the special object of each progressive doctrine, that is to say the experimentation of such or such social process by the concurrence of its special partisans, and in whatever fashion these latter may have originally established themselves.

Thus the character of the general and primordial proposal is easy to grasp. It is a question of creating, on a theater where all the resources of nature unite with very fortunate economic circumstances, a vast field of social activity; of assuring there first the collective prosperity, not by beginning with innovations and experiments, but by importing and combining there — under conditions of foresight and solidarity for the whole at the same time as of full liberty for individual action — the proven instruments, the knowledge and the technical processes already created and in use elsewhere; and of consecrating it a general field of asylum and free flowering, open to the progressive thought of humanity, repulsed, stifled and vilified under the name of Socialism by the old world.

This conception, for being broader than the mere foundation of an experiment of the societary regime, is only the more phalansterian, that is to say more conformable to the higher principles of our doctrine, to the sovereign end that has been the constant motive of the moral activity and the religious devotion of our School: the unconditional search for the good of humanity. It is moreover the formal application of the theory of the scientific and positive conditions of social progress, which the School has the glory of having introduced, the first, into the domain of ideas, and which it here conquers the no less great glory of incarnating in that of facts. We create a field of experiment for our own processes of realization of progress, and we open this field to rival ideas; we invite all the organizing doctrines to come and make there, like us, their proofs for the profit of humanity. I repeat it, this conception is great, it breathes the unconditional love of the good, and bears a testimony no less formal of the elevation of our religious sentiment than of the solidity of our social faith. I add finally that as a way to attain our own experimentation, it is incontestably the surest, by that very fact that it is the most liberal, the noblest and the broadest. We shall have occasion further on to deduce the proofs of it.

Conservation of the social end. — As to the conservation of the end of the foundation, it is evident that its guarantee lies wholly in the initial impulse of the conception, and in the ideas and the wills of the living forces that will gather on the field of activity. It could not be elsewhere. There is no other manner of bringing an idea into the world of reality than to furnish the intelligences and the wills it has conquered with the faculties and the practical means necessary to its realization. A doctrine becomes an institution only by the spontaneity of the intelligences it has enrolled. A faith incarnates itself and creates its form only by the volitive and creative activity of its own. To bring the idea onto a free field of realization, to give it the means of producing rapidly itself, on that field, the substance indispensable to the progressive construction of its own form, of the tangible and visible organism of which it is the prototype, is to set the soul to creating the body to which it aspires.

Acquisition of the lands. — A few words are necessary on this first function of the Agency of colonization, as well as on the second. It is a question of the extent of the primitive acquisitions. The reasons that command a considerable acquisition have already been implicitly or explicitly set forth. First it is clear that there would be characterized folly in conceiving and beginning an operation destined to bring, to given points, capital, a movement, a life and a population that would immediately raise, on the surrounding zones, considerable increments of value, and to leave benevolently foreign speculation to seize these values one would have created oneself. As things stand, that would not simply constitute a most absurd loss of gain, it would be besides a hindrance, a serious obstacle, a rampart one would thus raise against one's own development; for the localization of the first establishments would no sooner be made than foreign speculation would very quickly seize the surrounding lands. So that one would have shut oneself thus within a circumvallation the stronger against oneself, the more life and prosperity one developed oneself within. The general end of the work, and the reason of business and of practical conduct, are therefore perfectly in accord in calling for a fairly large acquisition of lands while these are still, all in all, very cheap. And besides, what danger is there in such an acquisition? Were one to do nothing on these lands, the increment of value would soon have reached them with the growing settlement of the country and the rising tide of business. The price of head-rights, quadrupled in the last five years and growing each day, shows well enough that, were it only as pure speculation, the acquisition of suitably chosen lands in Texas would not be already an investment to disdain. — Let us conclude, then, in the sense determined by these decisive motives.

Preparation of the lands. — This object is very important. It is, in effect, for having failed to take account of the absolute necessity of this function — the local preparation prior to the installation of the first swarms of colonization — that so many enterprises, inaugurated under the auspices of hope and even of enthusiasm, but directed by illusion, ignorance and improvidence, have fallen miserably.

To bring a nucleus of colonists, and particularly of European colonists, onto a virgin terrain, without prior dispositions, is, in most cases, to have prepared at the very least the dispersion of the elements of which it is composed, and often a disaster. In Texas, it is true, the dispersion of the elements would not be, today, their ruin; they would find means to get by, and could place themselves personally. The collective enterprise and its end would be no less missed for that.

The reef I point out here is well known. The annals of modern colonization are so instructive in this regard, and the reasons for the absurdity there would be in transplanting elements drawn from a civilization into the midst of the desert, asking them to improvise their establishment there, are so easy to find, that I dispense myself from deducing proofs in this regard. Each of us will accept straight off, in principle, the necessity of prior preparation.

The rule is, here, that the colonizing elements must find, on their arrival, a life at least equal, in the elementary conditions of existence and well-being, to that they will have left, plus the hope — founded on positive and palpable motives — of a rapid improvement. This is a fundamental condition. To work up devotion, to exalt enthusiasm in order to ask of them a victory that seems easy under a momentary excitement, is to strain one's springs to excess, to run nineteen chances out of twenty of breaking them, and, at the least ill that can happen, to have used up one's forces and one's energy in advance. — Let us boldly calculate our advantages, let us not fear to speculate upon formal and positive data; but let us guard against founding anything upon the gilded mist of illusions.

The plan being settled in its bases, its initiating principles and its contours, we are going to grasp its object more closely by pursuing the operation.

VII

Determination of the definitive values.

It results evidently from the nature of the method to which we ask the successive terms of our development, that each of these is obtained with the help of a more approximate value of some one of the factors of the general expression. So it is by occupying ourselves with one of these latter — the first colonial nucleus — that we shall continue to march toward the solution.

It is easy to see that this factor is capital. It is to such a point that if one supposes a first establishment founded and in activity, within the general conditions previously indicated, the whole problem is solved, that is to say that the colonizing work henceforth develops of itself. This first establishment, in effect, whatever its constitution — with which we have not yet to occupy ourselves — accomplishes naturally, by the sole fact of its existence, two functions that henceforth suffice for the nourishment, the increase and the spontaneous development of the new society of which it is the embryo. These two functions result from the receptive capacity that its faculties of expansion and elasticity, so to speak unlimited, give it, and from the existence of the lines of communication it has already necessarily had to create for itself. Effectively these lines, by means of which it communicates more and more regularly and easily with the navigable rivers and the arteries of external circulation, henceforth offer, to the elements of immigration, a sure, easy, economical arrival, which has no longer anything indeterminate or painful about it. Brought by steamboats to the river ports nearest the establishment, or, a little later, to the depot of a railroad, the new arrivals climb into the colony's carriages, which await them, and are transported to the spot, without having the least embarrassment to dread nor the least care to take for themselves or for their baggage and their movable effects. They can, from their arrival at New-York, at New-Orleans, in a European port or even at Paris, leave entirely already the care of all this to the Agency of the colony. They will have only to make themselves known and to provide themselves with a ticket for the whole journey. The voyage will be made in the manner used today for the tours from Paris to London, or on the banks of the Rhine and return by Belgium, known under the name of pleasure trains. All this is simple and requires no further elucidation. The bridge is established, the passages are easy and the arrivals regularized.

If only you reflect now on the conditions of elasticity of the first establishment, on the extent of the lands at its disposal, on the climate of the place, on the facility of improvising constructions as soon as one has hands and a few mechanical sawmills in activity (subjects we shall examine more closely later on); you will recognize very quickly that this first center is perfectly apt, as soon as it is constituted, to receive the new arrivals, to lodge them, to house them and to offer them immediately productive labors in its industries, its workshops, its agriculture and its affairs — whether these elements should attach themselves there and settle, or whether they should make there only a provisional stay while awaiting that establishments more conformable to their convenience, conceived and raised to their liking, in the preparation of which they could concur themselves, should be ready to receive them.

To remain faithful to the method of rigorous deduction and of logical and progressive exposition that guides us, I shall not develop further at this moment the double idea I have just touched upon. It suffices here that its initiating importance and its generating value be well understood. Now, I do not think that any of those to whom these lines are addressed can mistake themselves in this regard. All of you, in effect, have your minds sufficiently exercised in the science that has given us the key to true things, to the general laws of nature, to have perfectly recognized the character of the work that occupies us. This work is the creation of a living being. This being is a society, and the successive conditions we disengage are themselves only those of the progressive formation of natural organisms. We have to do social embryogeny, conforming ourselves to the known laws of physiological embryogeny. We have proceeded by the act of conception that gives to the being in creation the initial vital impulse, confers on it its characterial title and its formative soul. We have furnished it with an exciting apparatus and an embryonic brain (the Agency of colonization); we have recognized the necessity of preparing for it a milieu of incubation; and we have seen these data of elementary life lead us, by the logic of their natural tendencies, to the constitution of an organ of nutrition armed with an apparatus of communications, by means of which it will draw from outside the alimentary substance, of which it assimilates a part for its own increase, distributing the rest to the other organs to be created or developed around it.

VIII

I shall make here a remark of which account would have to be taken if one wished to enter into the details of the embryogenic law. So as not to go astray in this order of considerations — to which I do not fear to attribute a very serious practical value, however little case may be made of it by those who believe that a certain intelligent routine and a more or less clear-sighted empiricism constitute the true practical spirit — it must be observed that nature, which is always analogous in its ways, is never identical, and that, in the case that occupies us, a social embryo differs from an individual embryo as the composite order differs from the simple order.

Thus the animal embryo nourishes and increases itself, that is all; its external and active functions begin only subsequently to birth. On the contrary, a social embryo, such as the one that occupies us, is still only embryo in relation to itself, in relation to the barely sketched development of its ulterior organism, yet already it functions actively to the exterior. — It is that here the integrant monads, instead of being only elementary substance, are already substance of high preponderance of intelligence and of activity, human beings.

Such is the observation the misapprehension of which would strike with error or sterility every attempt to apply the physiological laws of embryogeny to the progressive creation of the social being. The formative process, the general law of the development of life continues itself no doubt in this latter creation, but in developing itself and in changing order, the elements by which it acts henceforth pertaining to the composite order and no longer to the simple order. Every phalansterian a little versed in the philosophy of science will perfectly grasp the bearing of this observation, which I shall not pursue into developments for which a volume would be needed. — I shall however take occasion of this to say that the knowledge of the true laws of life — so disdained under the name of theory by certain intelligent mediocrities who deck themselves with the name of practical minds — is the first condition of the superior practical spirit.

And hold it for certain that we shall succeed, we, by the knowledge of these laws, there where these pretended practical minds, with all their savoir-faire, would fail miserably. Had they to pursue the accomplishment of a project such as this one, they would run great risk of seeing the enterprise vanish under their eyes, like the smoke of the prairie at the breath of the norther. I boldly defy all the contrivers of civilization, and the so-called practical men, the most enlightened themselves, with their knowledge that I do not disdain, their exact figures and capital that they would gather more easily and more abundantly than we; I defy them to found, in the matter of colonization, anything other than parceling, and in general moreover to succeed at that more than once in twenty times.

What they have and what they know, in effect, does not suffice; there is needed besides something they disdain.

A social foundation, a colonization of the whole, can succeed straight off only by a common idea, a common faith, and better still, by a common faith joined to the knowledge of the laws of the natural developments of life. — In every other case, it fails. In the favored regions, the elements disperse. They may prosper individually no doubt, but the collective enterprise has vanished. Under a rigorous nature, they die; and it is only after several assaults repulsed with loss that, vanquished in the long run, such a nature will let itself be taken.

IX

We have determined the general conditions of the work, and sketched the notion of the embryonic apparatus by means of which the being increases and grows, henceforth operating of itself the transformation of its primitive organisms into organisms more and more elevated, up to its definitive constitution or perfect state. — We have therefore our bases, and it remains only to continue the deductions.

The initial impulse, the characterial germ and the other primordial conditions of the work being given, we already know, with a logical certainty that will soon become a full evidence, that the general development depends on a single thing: the creation of an organ fit to fulfill the functions of nourishment. We know besides that this organ, which will suffice for ulterior development, itself requires, for its incubation and its own formation, the preparation of a suitable milieu. Evidently, then, all reduces to these two problems:

1st. What must this embryonic milieu be?

2nd. What must this first organ be?

We shall easily obtain an answer to these two questions.

I. DETERMINATION OF THE PREPARATORY MILIEU. — To know what this milieu must be, we have only to ask ourselves what function it is destined to fulfill, what agents must execute it, and what must be the mode of execution.

X

Function.

This function consists in receiving, sheltering and maintaining in a solidarity of the whole the elements called to form the first organ, and in furnishing them the conditions necessary to the spontaneous arrangement whence will result, as we shall see later, the natural constitution of this organism. These elements will be the first European and American colonists. Now, and quite evidently already, in order that this arrangement be easy for them, in order that it constitute a strong and robust germ, it is essential that these integrant elements be not hampered and impeded by necessities foreign to the work of their social combination, subjected to imperious needs to whose painful and discouraging decrees one would have above all to submit, and whose irresistible strains would soon entail the disjunction and dispersion of the elements, or would at the least imprint a regrettable character of original weakness on the constitution of the collective being.

The principle that dictates the conditions prior to the establishment of the colonists properly so called has therefore already been posited; we do, at this moment, only recover it, and we shall develop it immediately by deducing and circumstantiating as follows: On their arrival on the terrain the colonizing elements must find:

A) Shelters all ready to receive them and constructed so as not only to offer them a degree of general comfort already sufficient, but also to satisfy the variety of individual conveniences;

B) An integral system of alimentary bases, founded and economically established, which supposes — besides certain facilities of provisioning — sufficiently stocked stores, crops in full yield, sown fields, furnished gardens and a whole stock of cattle, of pigs, of sheep and of barnyard animals; plus the machinery and workshops necessary to the transformation of raw materials into objects of daily consumption — mills, ovens, kitchens and utensils relating thereto.

C) A supply, easy to maintain, of the raw materials necessary to the making of clothing, footwear, etc.

D) In addition to these three conditions indispensable to the conservation and the comfortable maintenance of the material existence of the first colonists, the milieu that receives them must offer them further the dispositions proper to employing immediately and productively their activity and their principal industrial faculties. — Visibly, the objects required by this last condition are contained, in great part, in the preceding ones. In effect, the extension of agriculture, domestic labors, the industries of first necessity (cutting, sewing, wheelwrighting, forge, etc.) working for the interior and soon for the exterior, will employ the greatest sum of activity of the first arrivals, who will moreover have had to be chosen by reason of their aptitudes for these elementary industries. — The last condition could therefore require, in addition to the preceding, only certain workshops, certain instruments of labor and a few special supplies.

Y) These four orders of fundamental needs suppose cumulatively a first commercial organism, both for the flow of the interior products and for the maintenance of all the supplies in objects that are not yet created on the terrain.

XI

Agents and mode of execution.

The mode of preparation of the milieu is easy to determine. It is evident, in effect, that the natural agents of the operation are the individuals whose aptitude for the function is proved by the fact that they know it, that they have practiced it and already happily fulfilled it. This is to say enough that the natural chiefs of the preparatory operations are Americans practiced in these takings-possession of virgin nature, inured to these labors of pioneer and of vanguard. — We have, in our friends of the West, men as capable as resolute, who have made their proofs in this kind, and who are ready. They await only the signal. The attack will be under their direction.

These are the chiefs. Who will be the soldiers? — The individuals employed in America in analogous circumstances. When one has a canal, a railroad, or some labors of the same kind to make, in America, one employs there Irish or German emigrants who have not yet amassed the nest-egg by means of which they can establish themselves on their own account. They are engaged for a given time and on agreed conditions. — Several decisive reasons militate here for the employment of German emigrants, in preference to the Irish.

Thus, practiced and competent Americans will gather, as best and as close as possible, suitably chosen workers, will pass with these latter engagements conformable to the laws and usages of the country, and will lead them onto the terrain. The plans of the clearings and of the constructions being settled, the execution belongs to them. The transformation of the prairie into fields of large-scale cultivation and into gardens, the cuttings to be made in the forest, the clearings, the felling of timber and the raising of the buildings are their affair. Steam-powered mechanical sawmills and a mill, taken whole from Cincinnati or Pittsburg, are first set up on the spot. Meanwhile, herds of cows, of pigs, of sheep, of mares, a first stock in fine, is installed on the lands. It suffices to deliver to it the prairie and the forest for it to increase and multiply rapidly. All this is known, practiced, and, with the appropriate agents, goes of itself.

During this phase, however, there are needed, exceptionally already, a few European elements, notably at least two nurserymen, one for the fruit trees, the other for the vine, plus a gardener; and soon one or two shepherds from Lorraine, from Hungary or from New-Mexico, with their dogs, accustomed to the management and the surveillance of the great flocks.

Of these different specialties, the first three above all would be necessary to the good conduct of the beginnings of the executive work. Other European elements could render great services no doubt, but I am still making only a statement of minimum.

Up to here, then, no difficulty. With the necessary capital and the agents one will find in America, the first operation will be carried through. Let us approach the second question.

II. DETERMINATION OF THE FIRST NUCLEUS OF THE COLONY. — Although of a more complicated aspect and requiring a less reduced development, this third problem will hardly embarrass us. We shall have, as above, only to analyze the terms, interrogate the natural principles and register the answers.

And, first, considering the question, we see it subdivide on the spot of itself. The establishment of the first center of population, in effect, must present successive phases in its formation, and it is clear that we have for the moment to occupy ourselves only with the first. This spontaneous division of the subject gives us therefore a first problem which is formulated in these terms: What are the theoretical conditions, or if one will, the true practical conditions required for the construction of the initial phase of the first center — the preparation of the milieu that is to receive it being supposed accomplished? We shall determine these conditions rigorously by our method, seeking successively the expressions:

1st. Of the function of this phase;

2nd. Of the nature of its integrant elements;

3rd. Of the needs of these latter;

4th. Finally, of the mode of organization of the establishment.

XII

CONSTRUCTION OF THE INITIAL PHASE OF THE FIRST NUCLEUS.

Determination of the function.

The object of the first center, we have already seen, will be double or of composite order: this center will have to provide for its own interior development, and to operate promptly as an agent of surrounding colonization.

These two general objects of the first organ accord in indicating the function of its initial phase as having to be, quite specially, the abundant creation of the raw and nutritive material, necessary above all to the development of the establishment itself and to that of colonization.

They impose therefore, conformably to the embryogenic law, the initial preponderance of the physical system, and require an almost exclusive production of the substance proper to the muscular formation of the organs destined to the exercise of the ulterior functions of social life, from the most elementary up to the most elevated. — It is to the material needs that one must, above all, provide.

We write therefore that the regular constitution of the system of the material bases of social life — interior or exterior — is the special and natural function of the initial phase. This needs no other demonstration.

XIII

Determination of the integrant elements.

It is deduced immediately from the function by the simple ascertainment of the aptitudes the latter requires. We shall formulate therefore this easy determination of the base elements of the initial phase, in these terms:

The composition of the population, at the start of the initial phase, must offer a great proportion of elements apt for agricultural labors — creation of raw materials —; and increase, soon after, that of the workers proper to the operations of the arts, crafts and industries called of necessity.

But, one will be tempted to exclaim, this is quite simple, and there is no need of mathematical methods and scientific apparatus to find conditions of execution that good sense indicates sufficiently.

No doubt, I shall say in my turn, it is very simple. And yet, I shall permit myself to add, how does it come about that these things so simple are always misunderstood?

How does it come about that so many attempts at colonization have failed miserably, for not having followed only the rules so simple, already determined?

How does it come about, finally, that almost all those who come to chat with me about the Project that occupies me imagine — without thinking even to make it the object of a doubt — that one is going to begin by attracting and leading immediately, to the spot, the elements disposed to relish the enterprise and ready to respond on the spot to the idea that conceives and proposes it?

Nothing is more simple and more clear than true things, expressed and deduced in their natural and scientific order. That is already a reason to follow this rigorous order, in order to analyze and disentangle complex questions and progressive conditions. But a far more powerful reason, take heed, is that a rigorous method alone can give to the revelations of good sense, to the indications of instinct, the value of rules, of imperative laws, of formal conditions of success, which the instigators and the cooperators of the work then firmly resolve to observe, and to which all the wills won over to the concurrence feel and accept themselves the necessity of submitting by common accord.

How many examples might one not cite where, for want of this rigor of method, the more or less confused indications of good sense — across the ill-settled contours of which illusions moreover penetrate so easily — have ended in grave failures, in sad miscarriages or in full disasters.

Recall only the great Parisian emigration of 1848, directed in confusion by the government of the Republic upon Algeria; the phalansterian emigration of 1842 for Brazil; the communist expedition sent in 1847 by M. Cabet, under the title of first vanguard, to the foundation of Icaria, and so many others! There is not even excepting the N. A. Phalanx which, although under conditions very different from a colonization out of civilisation, does not owe, in part, the weakness of its constitution to sins of origin committed against these rules so simple — notably to the employment of its integrant elements in painful preparations that used up their forces, and to the proportion far too weak, from the start, of the agricultural element and of the industries of first necessity. This same fault, committed against the last of the principles we have just registered, would have motivated by itself alone the miscarriage of another phalansterian attempt, in America, the establishment of Brook-Farm. One could cite such examples by the hundreds. Let us not reject then as superfluous the employment of the method that makes our security, and let us continue our deductions, taking good care not to disdain its guiding thread. — The nature of the integrant elements of the initial phase being determined, in the first degree at least, let us pass to the third factor.

XIV

Determination of the needs of the elements.

These elements being men, and moreover men animated by a general faith, we posit, without preamble, that their needs are of three orders, physical, moral and intellectual, plus those pertaining to the pivotal spring, faith, unityism.

M) The material needs are amply provided for by the preparations prior to the arrival of the first colonial population, by its own composition principally entitled in faculties creative of the objects of these needs, and by the system of commercial communications, sketched before its gathering and already fairly strongly developed by the fact of its transport to the spot.

M. a) Let us note, however, that the maintenance of health, the development of the vigor and the equilibrium of the physical faculties of the population, require the organization of a composite gymnastics, the rudiments of which must not be adjourned, and which will contain gymnastics properly so called, horsemanship and swimming. — Horsemanship is moreover an art with which the population will promptly feel, on the spot, the necessity of familiarizing itself. One scarcely travels on foot in the prairies and the forests of Texas.

N) The intellectual needs, were they still but little developed in the mass of this population, must be immediately excited there in the triple view of beginning the work of its refinement, of creating for it enjoyments of an elevated order, and of attaching it more strongly, by the mind, to a work to which it has been attracted rather by motives of sentiment, aspirations and interests, than by facts special to the intellectual domain.

Above all, the reciprocal study of the two principal languages, English and French, put on the order of the day and organized into rival schools, must be of a collective tone. There will be needed besides elementary courses and an appropriate teaching, in the two languages; plus a nucleus of a library and reading-rooms. — The particularly agricultural and working population of the first phase must feel itself at once raised in dignity and in noble ambition by the facilities and the encouragements it will find for the culture of its intelligence. Such is the principle.

P) The moral needs are of two kinds, those of the affective and of the distributive.

The one and the other satisfy themselves by facts of social relations and by artistic facts.

Their common exigency wills that there be provided, in a certain measure already, for the social pleasures; it asks for halls of assembly, games, dances, music, a café, the public amusements that civilization knows how itself to create; a beginning of education and of artistic enjoyments; festivals; finally the introduction of collective luxury and the first sketch of a theatrical stage as soon as possible. — The collective culture of music is as pressing here as that of the fields and the gardens.

But what these needs require above all is liberty. Now, this liberty, in order not to remain an abstract principle, in order to be not only the right but indeed the faculty of living as one likes, requires dispositions capable of lending themselves to all the kinds of life that may be within the private conveniences of each of the elements of the population, individuals or families. Let us note this cardinal principle, which we shall not moreover be slow to find again.

X) Exigencies of unityism. Despite the preponderance of muscular force that its composition presents, the population of the first phase brings none the less a virtuality of unityism, a power of social faith that it imports in the highest degree not only to conserve and maintain, but again to develop always and to satisfy progressively. Its elements, in effect, although more specially devoted to the practice of material labors, are those who, in this category, have responded to the first call of the generating Idea of the new society. If they have come with the legitimate desire and the founded hope of finding well-being, they have brought also the notion of a great social end, the sentiment of human Solidarity, the modern faith of humanity.

Now, if the definitive object of these noble aspirations cannot be immediately constructed, it is at least necessary that immediately these latter find means to exercise themselves, to nourish themselves on the field that is opened to them, and to resolve themselves there already into fecund sources of social life and of high enjoyments. This first culture of the superior virtuality that occupies us evidently wills to be opened in composite mode, that is to say in the domain of pure idea, in that of material facts and in the neutral field or that of the organism. In consequence:

X. a) To the things of the first domain provision is made by the proper organ of pure idea, that is to say by the regular and periodic action of speech, of the word. — Sunday is naturally and more specially consecrated to the collective elucidation of the social end and of the common faith, to the superior and free education of the soul, of the general ideas and of the unityist or religious sentiments of the population.

X. b) To the needs of the second domain provision is made by the accomplishment of acts of material unity — proposed to the mass, deliberated and collectively acclaimed by it, and having for their object certain operations of public utility, of general convenience or of social embellishment, executed unitarily and in the character of religious functions. The elements attracted to the first hearth of colonization gravitate strongly upon these sorts of acts, the duration and frequency of which it will even be necessary to moderate, in order to husband and conserve, always well taut, their generous springs.

X. c) Finally provision is made for the neutral development of the same tendency by the successive creation — proposed to the population, voted and freely executed by it — of the organs by means of which it will progressively constitute its own Solidarity. — These organs will be, in general, institutions of reciprocity, of credit and of mutual insurance, of common guarantees for the cases of infirmity, of pension for old age, etc.

One could no doubt have instituted all these organisms in advance, by means of a constitution previously established and submitted to the acceptance of the immigrants before their arrival on the spot. Such would even be, today, according to all probability, the procedure of most of the socialist plans conceived in view of a cooperative colonization, which would not have constrained themselves to the scientific method of deduction that guides us so surely. It is easy already, however, to recognize that this would be a fault.

It would be a fault because, the social ideas and the interests of the elements attracted to the work tending strongly to these institutions, one can be assured that, these being proposed, they will be realized by them.

Now it is very important that these institutions have their origin in free, spontaneous acts, rather than result from a prior and passive acceptance. They will be only the better appropriated to the formal conveniences of the elements that will have created them on the spot, in full knowledge of the cause, and they will draw from this free origin an authority more moral and more solid. The successive work of this creation, by the active way, offers besides a very precious exercise for the education of autonomy, as well as for the culture of the instincts, the tendencies and the social faculties of the population. Finally this procedure consecrates, from the origin, the great principle of effective and active liberty, the fundamental guarantee of which is one of the initial conditions of the success of the colonizing work considered as a whole, in its means of collective prosperity and in its highest social end itself; this will not be slow to be put in full evidence.

XV

The spirit of our method leads us to carry back the last values obtained, into the preceding expressions, in order to have, of these, a more exact approximation. This operation, executed upon the terms with which we have just occupied ourselves, delivers to us, completely determined this time, the composition of the first swarm, which must in effect contain:

1st. The agricultural and working elements already recognized as having to form the base of its population, in correspondence with the objects A), B), C), designated above;

2nd. The elements apt for the functions required by the exigencies of the individual and social needs of this population, M), M. a), N), P.), X. a.), X. b), X. c) and Y).

Such is, very clearly settled now, the formula of composition of the population of the first phase.

XVI

Determination of the organism of the initial phase.

The statement of this problem reveals its importance, and here even more than on any other point we must guard ourselves against the arbitrary. Proceeding rigorously, we recognize at once that this question subdivides into two others: we have in effect to occupy ourselves with the form or the constitution, as one will say, of this organism, and to know its mode of development, the procedure of formation. This division delivers to us already an important solution. We recognize from the outset, in effect, that if we wished — as it would perhaps seem logical at first glance — to settle the form and then seek the mode of its construction, we should run the risk of throwing ourselves into the arbitrary. Such would be indeed, it is true, the logical procedure of an operation in which one proposed to make the experiment of a determined idea, in the physical order or in the social order. The elements, in that case, must be subordinated to the settled plan that translates the idea, chosen to construct it and to play in the mechanism that is to be verified. The elements are, in such a case, the means of an experiment. It is indeed thus that we have always understood the system of a practical trial of the societary process. But our aim, at this moment, is not to make a trial, to experiment with any social process whatever. Our aim is to create an establishment that subsists, that develops, that prospers and that fulfills as well and as soon as possible the active functions, internal and external, to which it is destined. To submit this creation to all the difficulties and to all the practical unknowns of an experiment would evidently be a rather bad means to choose for arriving at the aim.

So much so that we can already posit in full assurance this first deduction, namely: That the best form of the first establishment will be its natural form, that is to say the one that will result from the play of the free affinities of its elements.

We are thus led to study in the first place the conditions of this free work of the elements, in other terms, to solve the question of the best procedure of formation, before knowing the form that will result, and which, by that very fact, will be what we seek, that is to say the best of all.

It appears therefore that we shall solve cumulatively the two problems, or rather that we shall arrive at the knowledge of the probable form by studying the conditions of a free formation, the determination of these latter being alone important.

XVII

What is the procedure of nature or of life in the formation of organisms?

The germ once deposited in the embryonic milieu that is proper to it, the progressive work of organization requires no more than a suitable nourishment. In other terms, under the sole influence of the initial impulses or of the germs, the elective affinities of the elements furnished by the nourishment accomplish the work of which the being will be the product. — Such is the general procedure of life. — Let us see now our data.

Our milieu is prepared. The germ, the generating principle or the initial and impulsive idea, represented by the Agency of colonization, receives, in this milieu, the alimentary substance suitable to the first developments of the organism, that is to say the elements in attraction upon the general idea or the aim of the work, and possessing the aptitudes required for its first realizations. — There indeed are our data.

What to do then for the constitution of the desired organism? The answer comes of itself: To leave, in these conditions, to the elective affinities of the elements present, to the free play of their reciprocal activities, the work of this constitution. The formative procedure we sought is therefore found. What organization will it produce? We know nothing of it, and we shall not know it in a formal manner until the result is attained. We shall be able only to foresee this result and to determine it, as one will soon see, within certain limits. But what we know, in any case, is that we shall have obtained, by this way, a first social nucleus, instituted in the conditions of force, of health and of activity the best relatively to the state of its elements, and perfectly capable of fulfilling its function in the ulterior work of colonization, which from then on is assured and becomes easy.

XVIII

Here, despite the rigor of the deductions, I should not be surprised to hear more than one voice in the School exclaim: "What! are we then not going to aim at making a Phalanstery!" — This exclamation would have nothing astonishing about it, when one considers that the execution of an agricultural and industrial Phalanx is the aim we have been pursuing for more than twenty years in common, and that this act has always been, up to now, identified in our minds with the idea of the first movement, of the first concentration of the School's forces upon the practical terrain. There would be therefore nothing strange in this manifestation of accumulated regrets and impatiences. I find it natural; and, although I might be within my logical right to answer it by asking only a more attentive reading of what precedes, I prefer to pause all the time it shall take to give full appeasement to an excellent sentiment, which here would deviate into an illogism.

The work to which I summon you, friends, is great, the greatest — one must not fear to say it loud and firm — that can be conceived and proposed; it is a question here of nothing less, in effect, than the practical foundation of the free and social catholicity of humanity, in the pure and primitive sense of the word catholicity, which signifies universal concert.

The phalansterian School, which one has often sought to lower to the level of a sect, was destined, by the sovereignly broad character of the sentiments of which it has incessantly given proof, and by the all-comprehensive nature of the doctrines it has developed, to the glorious initiative of such a work. It was in the logic of things that this work should be conceived by phalansterian thought, proposed to the phalansterian elements, and by these undertaken. And since these elements are thus the natural organs of this initiative, the higher interest of the aim, no less than my sentiments of fraternity toward all, makes it an obligation for me to spare nothing in order to obtain an accord as perfect, a collective convergence as happy and as powerful as possible; it imports to edify all souls of good will.

I take up therefore the question again and I say: No, we must not propose to make, of the first establishment, a Phalanx. — Why?

First because such an aim would immediately violate, and by that very fact overturn from top to bottom, the general plan we have developed and of which each of us, I do not doubt it, has grasped the greatness, the positive value and the practical fecundity.

Such a beginning, in effect, would first of all substitute an exclusive term for a general term. Instead of founding the great field of asylum freely open to the progressive thought of living humanity, under all its forms, we should appear to imprint, from the origin, upon the foundation, an exclusive character, which the liberty left to other ideas to act beside us on their own account would not suffice to destroy. These latter would be disposed, if not entitled, to fear a pressure on seeing us thus subordinate, from the first act, the general aim to what one would call our particular affair. One would wish to see in it the proof of an egoism of doctrine and one would dread its consequences.

So be it! the pressing phalansterian faith with which I here have to deal will perhaps reply. What does it matter, after all? we declare the field open, we invite the others to come and do their work there and we do ours there. If the others do not come, will our work be any less done for that, and as we know that it contains the true solution of the social question, the problem of humanity will be no less solved.

I could reply that this expression was the right of the phalansterian Idea when it was alone; but that its very propagation, having much contributed to changing the state of the world, the circumstances are no longer the same. The vibrations it has imprinted upon the human mind have not counted for little in the production of the social doctrines that have sprung up on the intentional field of progress.

Now, the School, inspired in this by the very breadth of its principles — while combating the theoretical errors of these doctrines, and without concerning itself with the grievances which these latter have not always spared it, any more than with their tendencies often very different from its own liberalism — has always defended their rights with the same energy as its own, has not ceased to push them all to the formulation of their principles, and to claim for them, as well as for its own practical conception, the terrain of experience.

This elevated position, which we have constantly maintained in the domain of discussion and of ideas, is good. It is even the superior expression of our faith, since it expresses not only our desire to experiment with its object, but also that of seeing at work, too, all the rival doctrines.

Finally — a thing that has met itself but uncommonly with a determined and positive powerful faith — it bears an irrecusable testimony, as I have already expressed, of the unconditional love of the societary School for progress, the good, humanity.

Such ideas, such sentiments measure an intellectual breadth and a moral greatness that have their laws. Noblesse oblige. Such titles are moreover glories in the domain of history and forces in the republic of souls. I shall not be alone among us to think that these are not things to disdain.

Now, I could reply, would it not be to fall away from this high datum to abandon the general plan by which we nobly translate its principle into practice, in order to wish to hasten too much to attain the aim particular to our doctrine?

XIX

But, I shall add, would one be quite sure that, in thus belittling the act whose glorious initiative offers itself to the societary School, the latter would attain its social aim sooner? I do not think so. I do not think so, first, because, for every work that goes toward the good, the shortest road is always the broadest; I do not think so, next, because the practical reasons abound to demonstrate that this haste would be a certain procedure for missing the aim, and the true manner of compromising everything.

These reasons are not new; we have studied for more than twenty years the question of putting the serial mechanism to the test, and we have successively disengaged it from all the illusions that presented the operation as easy and going of itself.

We have recognized that such a work would require numerous conditions, chosen elements, repeated gropings, and that during the duration of the construction of the mechanism, of the trial of the parts, of their play and of their gearings, it would be necessary that the work be abundantly provided and incessantly nourished with all the more or less unforeseen aids of which daily experience would indicate the nature and the need.

The study of these practical necessities has occupied us without respite. You all know to what conclusions they have led us: no question has been better elucidated in the School, because it was in effect for it the supreme and decisive question.

Now, however little one recall the conditions necessary to the conduct of such an experiment, who can dream of meeting them, were it partially, on the terrain — however prepared it may have been — where the first elements of our colonization would meet?

The thesis of an experiment in a new country is moreover not new for us, and I have already recalled at the beginning of this writing by what decisive reasons we answered the people who said to us: "You ought to go and make your phalanstery in a virgin country." We had no trouble, in effect, in establishing that if we had, gathered together, the capital capable of furnishing us, in a civilized country, the means of the experiment, they would be far from being able to put at our disposal those it would require in a country where nothing exists, where everything is to be created and done. We showed, with great reason, that when one has a work already delicate and difficult in itself, it would be absurd to complicate it with difficulties foreign to it; and we concluded peremptorily, in the case posited, that it would be senseless of us to overload the problems to be solved in the first experimentation of a new social mechanism with the obstacles inherent in that of a colonization.

Now these reasons, which were just then, would they have ceased to be so today? The circumstances may vary, the rational principles do not change. One will not see me, for my part, attempt to color as true, in a present interest, what at another epoch I demonstrated to be false. I know however, despite the conscientious efforts made to extirpate them, that the illusions of facility of phalansterian realization still have roots in the mind of more than one among us, and that on the rich domain of the data I bring you, they would probably ask only to spring up again. Far from me, nevertheless, the cleverness that would consist merely in not opposing them. I hold moreover that what is truly strong is what is truly true. In brief, it is in calling today the forces of the School out of civilisation, in inviting them onto new lands, and resolved — whatever the answer may be — to go personally to bear there the graft of the Future, that I say to those I call: Guard yourselves against illusions, guard yourselves against believing in an immediate realization of your ideal, of our dearest wishes, of our most ardent aspirations; guard yourselves even against the thought of wishing to undertake it there prematurely. It will therefore be well understood that, despite the encounter of conditions of colonization of an unhoped-for fecundity and facility, we are no more disposed than before to complicate the work special to social experimentation with that of the beginnings of a colonization; that, far from it, we mean to ask of the prosperity of the colonization and of its character the means we do not yet have, of doing the other work, of nourishing it throughout the whole duration of its trials, of repeating it, of reproducing it if need be under different forms, and that thus, in the most formal interest of the social experiment, the success of the colonization is the prior question. That being so, it can no longer be proposed to engage the fate of the latter on the chance of success of a trial of which it must itself furnish the indispensable conditions; to compromise it, by requiring of it that it produce its fruits before having germinated, pushed its roots, and assured its existence; to impose, finally, upon the elements proper to the colonization a first, settled form, to which everything would have to be subordinated, and in which, willy-nilly, these elements would be obliged to move.

XX

Well then! I am willing to admit that one persists still, and that one says: "But, according to all probability, these elements, who will have responded to the thought of the foundation, will in no way be hampered in this form; it is the very milieu invoked by their aspirations, the regime within which they desire to live as soon as possible; this regime, moreover, presents advantages of economy, of unity of action, of spirit and of power, which it would be excellent to put at the service of the work of colonization." There is the theme in which will take refuge the illusion I have undertaken to reduce. To this there are several categorical answers.

First it is not a question, in the thesis I uphold, of hampering the elements, since this thesis is that of their very liberty, of their practical and effective liberty, of their liberty on the terrain. It is therefore not a question of forbidding them such regime as would suit them, but of bringing about, on the contrary, that they be subordinated to no preconceived regime, not even to the one for which they might have voted in advance, in more or less good knowledge of the cause.

But here is where lies the vicious circle of the argument to which I reply. It is that precisely it supposes solved what is in question; it supposes done what is not done, easy what is not easy, succeeded what, in the conditions one pleads, might be hard to succeed. The elements, however eager they may be to live in the milieu conformable to their aspirations, will they create this milieu straight off and by enchantment? Not at all, certainly. So that instead of the regime one pictures to oneself, one would find oneself, in fact, in a kind of existence unknown, in series of difficulties, of trials and of strains that it is given to no one even to be able to calculate in advance. What exactly would the harvest be? I know nothing of it; but one would have sown illusions, this is sure.

The hypothesis from which one starts is moreover not just. It is not possible to admit, in the first immigrants, a similitude of dispositions such as that on which one speculates. It would be necessary, for that, to subordinate the choice of persons no longer to the condition of a good beginning of colonization, but to that of the best trial of the regime one would have in view. This would impose the choice of a pre-pubescent population, or would at least entail — in the thought of those who believe the experiment easy with families — the necessity of a quite particular purification and of an obligatory confession of orthodoxy, which would be singularly narrow, positively absurd in the circumstance, and perfectly contrary to our true orthodoxy, which has human liberty at its base. There is more: it is that, even among the men most devoted to our cause, among the Phalansterians of full faith, of full desire and the most disposed to bring to the field of the foundation the concurrence of their activity, there are many who would refuse, and with reason, to engage themselves there, if they were not assured, in any case, of finding there, for themselves and for their family, the guarantee of a private existence after their own liking, the faculty of living personally according to their conveniences. And to finish, suppose the dispositions to be what one will, each will none the less bring, with these dispositions, habits. Now, these latter, whether or not one had thought to take account of them, could not fail to have their influences as soon as it were a question of the realities of life, and would make, in many cases, of the individuals best disposed intentionally, the subjects least proper, in practice, to the trials one would have to pursue, and sometimes the greatest obstacles.

I think there is enough of this for us to be able to hold henceforth as well fixed this principle: The first establishment will be subjected to no preconceived idea, to no predetermined organic plan: its organization will result from the liberty of the integrant elements, from the practical work of their reciprocal affinities in the milieu where these latter will be present.

XXI

This principle acquired, we must foresee all its possible exigencies, in order to obtain a determination — rigorous this time — of the constitution of the preparatory milieu. This constitution, only sketched in the preceding approximations, is in effect going to be given to us wholly by the condition of the guarantee of full liberty that it must offer to the organic work of the elements. It results, visibly, from the nature of the dispositions, the ideas and the habits brought by these latter, that, in order to enjoy this liberty in its plenitude, they would have to meet a field open to all the kinds of life, from the individual and parceled regime up to integral association, including all the intermediate degrees. In other terms, the milieu must enjoy an unlimited elasticity, if that is possible. Well then! the nature of our project and, with it, the local data concur marvelously in this elasticity without limits. The climate, the space, the facility of raising constructions, of improvising collective or particular establishments, the need that the colonizing work will have of the one and the other, render this theoretical ideal not only possible but of an easy execution. One understands, in effect, that if, in our hostile climates, with territorial data necessarily narrow and modes of construction relatively very costly, societary life requires a tight, compact edifice, defended against the rigors of the atmosphere — whose system differs essentially from that of the dwellings of the parceled regime — it is no longer thus in the wholly other circumstances that are offered us. The mode of construction of the humblest settlements already reveals the principle of the architecture appropriate to the natural data of the country, data to whose conveniences the most perfect societary architecture would necessarily have to satisfy. This principle excludes compactness, calls for space, air, openings welcoming the reigning breezes and affording them everywhere the easiest circulation. The atmosphere and the sky moreover generally perform here the functions of the street-gallery, so that the societary plan itself would resolve, in these conditions, into a unitarily combined system of separate pavilions, linked by verandas or open galleries (shades, shadings).

It is therefore easy to dispose a milieu that satisfies at once the conditions of a societary regime as developed as one will suppose, and the most pronounced exigencies of the parceled regime — consequently, all the intermediate degrees.

And not only is it easy for us to obtain this universality, but moreover, and by the most fortunate natural disposition of things, it happens that, far from having any sacrifice to make there, the arrangements that produce it are themselves only the general and harmonic resultant of the natural data. — The free lands moreover abound around our first nucleus, and nothing limits the number or the nature of the establishments that it becomes henceforth extremely easy to raise on the surrounding zones.

A word of elucidation, before passing on, concerning what I have just called the intermediate degrees.

XXII

The individualist regime is known. It is that of the social state in which we live.

The integral cooperative regime — whether it be supposed realized in phalansterian mode, in communist mode or in any other manner — is easy to picture to the mind. Put the two regimes in presence on a free and indefinitely extensible field; conceive besides, spontaneously formed on the same field, all the partial associations that it may suit isolated elements to make among themselves; imagine, in addition, all the possible combinations of these three regimes one with another: you will have then not only the notion of all the intermediate degrees between the individualist regime and that of integral cooperation under its various forms, but also that of the simultaneous existence, on a single terrain, of all these regimes and of their free relations. Such an ensemble itself constitutes an absolutely general system, and the expression I have just given of it is nothing other than the concrete formula of the new social conception whose foundation is proposed to you. This formula having to give — if one has proceeded rigorously — as a particular case that of the first nucleus (which must be homogeneous with the total system of which it is the origin), we can now determine easily, if not the precise details of the organism of the first establishment — which we know to be impossible before the result — at least the principal traits of the system that the free work of the elements will constitute. The milieu, where these latter are received, has been prepared conformably to the conditions, now known, that render it equally apt for the simultaneous practice of all the kinds of life, from isolation, for whoever should require it, up to integral cooperation.

The dispositions of the persons that the generating idea will bring first onto the terrain will certainly lead a greater or lesser part of them to wish immediately, for themselves, a regime of integral cooperation analogous to what has been easily realized in the N. A. Phalanx, with the elementary and purely economic principles of the theory.

This realization will be easier still here for several motives that we shall deduce later, but first by this categorical reason that the organization of the N. A. Phalanx is at present a practical fact, a tried affair, a datum that one can study and reproduce — were it without immediate improvements — as a point of departure. Now, such as it is, the system of the N. A. Phalanx, transported with a more numerous, unfatigued population, and in the superior conditions one knows, onto the field of colonization, would already fully suffice there for the embryonic representation of the integral cooperative regime. Nothing limits, moreover, the perfectionings that one may bring to its organism.

Other immigrants — less pressed, less desirous of engaging, themselves and their family, in a new kind of life, more disposed in fine, for whatever motives, to a complete independence — will prefer to establish themselves separately and on their own account. — The needs of the nascent colony moreover require isolated establishments, notably for the occupation of its lines of communication, of its points of disembarkation, and for certain workings more or less distant from the first center, within which, let us understand each other well, the individual regime will itself be wholly optional. But the elements that will have chosen the separate regime will not be slow to form freely among themselves relations of every nature. They will associate for certain operations, will undertake in twos, in fours, in tens, certain labors, certain affairs, will realize certain partial solidarities. The vast field of the facts pertaining to the transitional or guarantist order is open, and each moves freely there with his views, his ideas, his resources and his industry. All is to be done, all is to be created, space is lacking in no direction, and one may at one's liking conceive and pursue all sorts of enterprises. — Free contracts, naturally seated on the principle of reciprocity, will suffice for the realization of all the relations and of all the intermediate associations. Analogous bonds form between the societary establishment properly so called, the partial associations and the separate individuals.

Such a one of these latter, for example, wishes to keep house apart, but it suits him to work in the workshops or the cultivations of the association. Such another, on the contrary, reserves his industry; but he is delighted to profit from the advantages of consumption in societary mode. Others, finally, will engage in the cooperative work only a part of their time, a specialty of their activity, and will make use of the rest outside and on their own account.

Moreover, each family or each individual, whatever regime he may at first have adopted, always retains the faculty of changing it, and passes at will from one to the other. The master rule is: liberty and reciprocal convenience.

Behold then that, without being able to specify the particular forms in which the organic work of the elements will end, we have acquired the perfect notion of the system in which their activity will move, and foreseen, as completely as is necessary to provide for it, all the possible arrangements. Such is the true solution of the problem we had set ourselves on the nature of the organism required for the best constitution of the first nucleus of colonization.

Nothing will prevent us from grasping more closely the prevision of the most probable arrangements; but we know already that, even if all the elements should establish themselves in the separate regime, the nature of the Idea that determined their gathering on the new field, and the conditions within which they will meet there, would very quickly have engendered a general system of solidarities, of insurances, of mutual credits, of reciprocities, in a word of guarantees of all sorts.

Now such a system, spontaneously developed on this free field, would realize, from this moment on, a social state much more homogeneous, much better bound and more advanced than the one that could be given for a long time, in Europe and in the most favorable circumstances, by the application of what has been called the common program of all the socialist schools.

We know moreover, and that would suffice for the aim, that, in any case, we possess, well established on the terrain, a first bed of population by means of which henceforth the development of the colonizing work suffers no more difficulty.

XXIII

I could stop here. The project is achieved. The bases on which the work must be seated are known, and the laws that must direct its conduct without interruption, up to the point where it will continue by its own forces, are categorically determined. What I shall say henceforth will add nothing, in serious practical value, to what has been set forth. It is permitted to us, however, by way of study and elucidation, to take up the questions again under a form if not more positive, at least more concrete.

Up to here, nothing in our determinations has been given over to hypothesis. They have proceeded from deductions to deductions always rigorous. But if, now, we propose to ourselves no longer to know the directing laws of the operations — this knowledge being acquired — but to follow a descriptive application of them, we must evidently have recourse to a hypothesis. Our plan, in effect, is settled in its proportions, in its lines, and in its successive conditions of execution. But what will be the scale of the application? — That is what no one knows. This scale may vary from small to great; that will depend on the initial concurrence. If this concurrence is considerable, which I keenly desire, the work will march with a prodigious rapidity, and the success will be very near. If it is weaker, let the resolute reassure themselves: the work and the success will demand more time and more pains, no doubt; but, in any state of the case, we shall arrive at the aim.

Let us make then a hypothesis, recalling well that neither this hypothesis nor the deductions pertaining to it have imperative value. What has imperative value, once again, is the system of the laws governing the economy and the practical conduct of the work, whatever the dimensions of the latter may be.

XXIV

REALIZATION ON THE SCALE OF FOUR MILLION FRANCS.

Let us suppose, then, that the social enterprise of the Euro-American colonization, in Texas, is founded with a capital of 4,000,000 fr. available as needs arise.

The Agency of the company of colonization occupies itself with gathering head-rights corresponding to an extent of land of about 100 square leagues of 1,600 hectares. Present value, 400,000 fr. At the same time it sends a commission, to which is adjoined a geologist engineer, to visit the western regions of Texas and to traverse those of the North. These two tasks done, the head-rights are wholly or in part localized on chosen lands, forming probably several principal divisions, sub-divisions, and in any case series of detached points, radiating from the agglomerated parts to the rivers and toward the littoral, in order to seize the lines of communication destined to link the massed spaces with the centers of the underlying population and with the system of external circulation. There will be opened, moreover, a credit of 240,000 fr. for the continuation of the territorial acquisitions, as the immigrants arrive; which, at the rate of 1,200 fr. for a square league and per dozen immigrants, will add 200 new square leagues to the domain of the colony, for the first 2,400 adult immigrants who shall arrive.

Note. — It is very probable that, in presence of a serious operation such as this one, the government of Texas will make, by legislative measure, to the company of colonization a free concession of lands which may be very considerable. — In that case, a notable part of the 640,000 fr. allotted to the territorial acquisitions would remain available for other employments.

While these preliminary measures have been taken, the documents relative to the operation, the information of every nature, the proposals and the individual engagements — all things whose centralization is going to begin at the reception of your first replies to this Memoir, and which from now on will not cease to be solicited and registered — will have permitted the establishment of approximate calculations on the number of the personnel disposed to form the population of the first center and its accessories, and on the time necessary for the successive arrivals of men and of things.

That done, one will have the dimensions, or the scale of execution of the preparations to be made on the terrain.

One will determine, for the constructions, a unit of space and an architectural element (1) deduced from the local and climatological conveniences.

By means of these two units — of which the first will serve for the composition of the general plan, and the second for the execution of the buildings — one will be assured of obtaining an ensemble of constructions extensible, elastic, varied though always homogeneous and symmetrical, and susceptible of lending itself to all the needs that may manifest themselves in practice.

The Americans charged with the direction of the cohort of the pioneers of first preparation receive the plans, and execute them, either by way of contract, or on the company's account, according as it shall be decided. It is understood that this first campaign will comprise the preparation of at least one center and, in any case, of a certain number of surrounding posts and of the detached points necessary to the occupation of the most important lines of communication. — It might well happen, moreover, that the principal center should be situated in the vicinity of a navigable river. In the hypothesis on which we reason, the preparation will require no more than a year, from the establishment on the spot of the first half of the cohort of pioneers.

(1) I understand here by unit of space what Durand, in his course of architecture, calls an entraxe [bay/center-to-center spacing]. In the conditions in which one will find oneself in Texas, this architectural meter will be of an employment as easy as it is fecund. As for the architectural element, it suffices, in order to understand the sense of this expression, to have seen a drawing of the Crystal Palace of London. This palace, in effect, was the product of the repetition and the diverse combinations of an invariable element of construction, functioning like the integrant molecule.

Let us suppose that one must provide for the reception of 1,200 colonists — women and children included — in the course of the following year.

Let us reckon on 150 workers employed in the preparation during a year, a figure amply sufficient. These will be German immigrants taken on the Ohio or at New-Orleans, a few Americans of the West and of the North, plus a certain number of special and chosen European elements. Their gathering on the spot, save as concerns the last, is the affair of the Americans charged with directing the first campaign. We have not to occupy ourselves with it.

Let us carry, for the expense of 150 men, salaries, food and transport to the spot included … 300,000 fr. Mills and mechanical sawmills … 30,000 Instruments of carpentry, joinery, masonry and forge … 20,000 Agricultural equipment, harness, plows, harrows, threshing machines, spades, etc. … 40,000 Wagons, carriages, carts for transports of all sorts … 25,000 Supplies for the construction works, the sowings, the nurseries, general expenses and contingencies … 170,000

Most of these figures are exaggerated; but all these heads are obligatory.

It is not indispensable, but it will be very fruitful to set the prairie to work immediately, on a fairly vast scale, for the profit of the colonization, all around the points attacked. Let us dispose in consequence, for the establishment of a first stock of livestock to be procured without delay:

Purchase of 2,000 head of cattle (that is, 1,600 cows and 400 oxen) … 100,000 fr. 1,000 horses and mares (to be drawn from Mexico) … 80,000 Stallions (asses, entire horses, bulls and a few rams); mules, sheep, pigs and poultry … 60,000

It would be excellent to begin, from the first year, a manufacture of vats and casks, of common pottery and of terra-cotta pipes; a brewery; to prepare a tannery, and perhaps to start the manufacture of cheeses. Let us carry, for all these establishments and others of the same kind, of which one may have an interest in promptly laying the bases … 75,000

To have the figure of the credits pertaining to the first year, one must, from the sum of all the above-mentioned credits … 1,540,000 Subtract the 240,000 francs entered for the acquisition of the lands as the colonists arrive … 240,000 Remainder … 1,300,000 And, in the hypothesis of the free concession of the lands by the Texan government … 900,000

Let us reckon nevertheless, for the credits pertaining to the operations of the first year, on the maximum of … 1,300,000

Second year. — Let us carry, for the course of this year, to the credit of the transport to the spot of part of the colonists, European or American, the figure of … 100,000 For domestic and industrial furnishing of the establishment … 600,000

Total, for the first two years … 2,000,000 There remains then, for supplies, establishment of new industries, acquisition of machines, increase of the livestock and of the lands, and continuation of the colonizing movement … 2,000,000

This preliminary-project estimate amply suffices for our present aim. The most minute project could not have more value for the moment.

It is certain, in effect, that, in a work of the nature of this one, it would be puerile to aim at drawing up, a priori, a scaffolding of details and of previsions of particular facts that can only be calculated progressively, and that will issue from the movement of execution itself.

Staking, then, upon this general framework, we see that, from the beginning of the second year, the preparation necessary for the reception of the first columns of immigration is done.

These latter will find, on arriving, considerable spaces cultivated and sown, supplies in store or harvests standing, very extensive gardens in full yield, and already a fine stock of domestic animals. Save the orchards, which will still be only in nurseries, the agricultural and horticultural system functions completely.

XXV

The materials of the first constructions in America are: 1st, tree trunks laid horizontally, in the fashion of the cabins of our woodcutters — this is the procedure of the isolated settlers; 2nd, sawn beams and boards, laid overlapping and painted on the exterior. Where wood costs nothing and where one has mechanical sawmills, this latter procedure is very economical and most expeditious. This system, in use under the rigorous climates of the North, will produce immediately, under the sky of Texas, very comfortable dwellings; and nothing is easier than to obtain, with a simple expenditure of taste and a happy combination of architectonic lines, very elegant aspects. Each pavilion has, on the ground floor if not on all the stories, its veranda or open and covered gallery (shade), which joins, by prolonging itself, with those of the neighboring pavilions. These latter are separated by spaces in part sanded, in part furnished with flower-beds and shrubs.

Vines of all sorts, climbing along the small columns that bear the roofs of the verandas, suspend from one to the other their festoons of bushy shoots, their green girandoles strewn with sparkling flowers. Jasmines of a few years' growth already carpet the faces of the great walls and reach the top of the constructions like our centuries-old ivy. An aerial vegetation whose developments are so rapid, combined with this kind of light constructions, spaced and harmoniously distributed in their general plan, will produce as if by magic effects of architectural adornment and of collective charm, of which several dwellings, managed with a taste yet still quite elementary, have already offered us the image in little.

Nothing is easier, moreover, than to choose, for the sites of the centers, positions where the prairie, the forest, the natural groves, the movements of the ground and the works of an intelligent clearing marry under very picturesque aspects.

Besides wood, one will easily have brick, limestone — that soft stone of which I have spoken, which hardens in the air — and in certain localities excellent plaster. The domestic animals having the woods and the prairie for dwelling, the sky for roof, and agriculture not requiring manure, the rural constructions properly so called find themselves for the greater part suppressed, in the beginnings at least. The maintenance of public cleanliness requires only very simple measures. The primitive livestock, already considerably augmented, while sufficing for the heavy labors of the fields — which will not be slow, to all appearance, to be executed by steam mechanisms — offers an alimentary base that will henceforth only grow.

On the other hand, game abounds: a suitable management will provide for the conservation of this precious resource. At the epoch we are at, the earlier operations have already established a regular movement of communications. The commercial system of the colony is sketched; the relations of sale, of purchase and of transport are knit with Europe and America on the principles of the direct relation between producers and consumers. The colony has already its service of steamboats, whether it has established it on its own account, or whether it still contents itself with treaties with a few foreign vessels.

Thus, instead of having to give the first battles of the pioneer to wild nature, to camp on the prairie, to live as they could, isolated, without reciprocal aid, deprived of all the advantages and all the pleasures of society, obliged to pay at fabulous prices what they should ask of civilized commerce; instead of the ordinary condition of the settlers, in a word, our colonists have found comfortable dwellings of an overall aspect already very elegant, a very complete and perfectly settled system of alimentary bases, all the dispositions necessary for the organization of their labors, for the productive exercise of their activity, a social milieu.

They enjoy a beautiful sky and a climate that triples, in the year, the time one lives under ours.

The future is assured; each feels himself unburdened of the crushing weight of the cares of existence for his own and for himself, delivered from the atra cura attached with more relentlessness than ever, in the times in which we live, to all the conditions of civilization — the perpetual torment of this social hell. Instead of this life devoured by cruel anxieties, one has conquered at last that magnificent right which Fourier, in his truceless pursuit of the old moralism, was pleased to call unconcern, which results from the blessed sentiment of solidarity, and which gives each the consciousness that his individual life is an integral part of the collective life. It is the right to social life, the right to the harmonic relation of the element of life with the living being. Each here, in effect, feels himself a member of a social body founded by his faith and for his faith, destined soon to realize the latter in its plenitude, and recognizes himself an associate and active agent of a work whose moral greatness penetrates him more and more each day. The certainty of success, the rapidity of the development of collective prosperity, the spectacle of all the creations that spring up visibly within a friendly, fecund and generous nature, add then to the sentiment of the security of the future, of the guarantee of material well-being, and constitute for the whole population the dawn of happiness. I know the value of this expression and I employ it without fear. Elementary happiness is so easy in these favored regions! We met in the forts — transported and isolated on the frontier of Savagery and still in the full desert — ladies raised in a brilliant world, accustomed to the luxury and the refinements of the capitals of the East. Well then! they told us that, even in the present state of things, if they had only a few friendly families in the vicinity, to make them a little society, no existence in the world would seem preferable to them. One of them, the wife of a major who commanded Fort Worth for two years, told us that, for her part, all she would ask would be the assurance of passing there ten more years like them.

When we let our projects be glimpsed, no one doubted of the success if they were executed, and of a marvelous facility of happiness for the populations they would bring. And, in truth, if one thinks of the conjunction of all the faculties of the country, of the exclusion of all the painful, hard and thankless conditions of the labors of agriculture, of the joys that a population breathing health, well-being and liberty cannot fail to draw abundantly from the work of its conquests, from the development of social wealth, of collective elegance, and from the first blossomings of the great future of justice and liberating harmony of which it has itself borne the seed onto this soil and which it cultivates there for the social salvation of the world — if one thinks of all these things, it seems to me that one will easily be of the same opinion.

As for this expansion of social prosperity, it suffices, in order to have the guarantee of it in advance, to recall the success and the progress of the parceled colonization, and to compare the miserable conditions of isolation, of destitution and of ignorance within which the latter operates, with the means, the instruments and the powers with which is provided, and which combines in every order, a population very superior in intellectual developments, in capacities of whatever kind they may be, and often even in muscular energy and in physical activity.

In the hypothesis we are following, what we have called the initial phase would be of a very short duration. The first six months, after the completion of the preparation, would suffice for the regular installation of the agricultural population and of the industries of necessity. The elements more particularly proper to the organization of social education, of the arts, of the sciences and of collective refinement could be received, in a fairly great proportion already, during the last six months of the year, and the establishment would enter, with the arrival of these, into its second phase.

While these things are accomplished, the previsions of the facts pertaining to the following year take their course. The external relations and agencies have not ceased to extend or to develop themselves. The colony already possesses, on the spot, a printing-press, and its journal regularly makes known the movement of its affairs. It functions at once as a hearth of ideas, of realization and of attraction. The forces at its disposal permit it to execute, on surrounding points suitably chosen, the preparation of new milieux destined to receive columns of immigration more and more considerable. Its communications are perfectly organized by steam services on some one of the neighboring rivers, and, as we have already indicated, in establishing its lines of land or of water the colony has seized the external commercial function in their directions, raising country-stores or counting-houses at intervals, and accepting transport were it only to complete its upward or downward cargoes.

XXVI

We have had, previously, to foresee all the spontaneous arrangements that the elements of colonization might adopt, in order to put ourselves in a position to provide for them in advance and to offer to persons the conditions of the most complete effective liberty. At present, we may propose to ourselves the search for the probable arrangements.

It is proper to parceled or civilized colonization, in countries beautiful and open like Texas, to disseminate a very feeble population over immense spaces; at least such is the ordinary case of its beginnings.

We have not to occupy ourselves with the causes of this singular disposition toward this extreme isolation — very regrettable from the point of view of the development of sociability in a colony, and which, where it is prolonged, tends to produce, with elements issued from civilization, a state inferior, in many respects, to savagery itself.

The nature of our work, the sentiments, the ideas and the origin of the greater part of those it will attract onto its terrain, are to us sure guarantees against that extreme scattering of which the publicists who occupy themselves with colonial questions often groan, and against which a number of remedies worse than the evil have been proposed.

I do not mean to say, however, that among those whom the knowledge of the general facts revealed in this Memoir may lead to Texas, there could not be found, even in fairly great number, some disposed to establish themselves in isolation, within or outside the domains of the colony.

What does it matter! those will act wholly on their own account. And in whatever place they situate themselves, they will none the less contribute, in some relation, to the aim we pursue.

If they settle outside the lands of the colony, they concur in the peopling of the country, in the development of general wealth and of business.

If they establish themselves on our lands, with the intention of profiting from the advantages offered by the proximity of our centers of operation, they contribute still more directly to the increment of value of the colonial domains.

Will one object that these private establishments, if one welcomes them so easily, would withdraw lands that must be reserved for the cooperative enterprises?

But the society of colonization possesses more space than these enterprises will require for a long time; it reserves for them the zones that may more specially suit the great establishments; and each dozen men who arrive with the intention of operating in some cooperative mode adds, for 1,200 fr., a new square league to these reserves.

Let us not forget that the profits to be realized on the sale of a part of the lands, after these have acquired increments of value, constitute one of the branches of the remuneration of the capital of foundation, of the development of colonial prosperity and of the resources destined to facilitate the social experiments. Far then from having, in a narrow systematic view, to put an obstacle to the private establishments — even isolated and parceled, were they the act of individuals foreign to the social idea of the colonization — the society must not fear to open a free career to them, and in certain cases, to favor them if need be by very liberal concessions. Once more, it is not space that will be lacking. In developing itself, the colony acquires virgin lands, pushes forward, cedes in part — sometimes perhaps in totality, if it finds advantage in it — the first zones it occupied and where it created immense increments of value. The conquest of new lands, on a large scale, has become for it, with its solidarity and the forces at its disposal, a most easy operation, of which it is free to make a high collective industry of the first order. — And, to have done with the question of the foreign elements settled in its sphere of activity, would it not be a formal contradiction with the social Faith whose incarnation has been undertaken, even to doubt that these would soon gravitate freely — and by the advantages of every order they will find there — into the orbit of its system?

Conditions of morality and of honesty will therefore be the only things to ask of the immigrants of this class.

As for those of the colonists who, although attracted by the social principle of the foundation, would yet prefer to establish themselves more or less in isolation, they will be quite disposed to enter into a regime of reciprocities, of insurances, of mutual credits and of general solidarities, realizing a very advanced practical socialism. Even in the hypothesis where such a system of separation should prevail exclusively, it would none the less constitute a full guarantism, that is to say a milieu extremely propitious to the experimentations of the cooperative Regime, and from the midst of which the latter would not be slow to spring forth.

I have pleaded quite particularly the system of an effective and absolute liberty, because this liberty is the fundamental principle of our theory. We pursue Association; but, in the language of our doctrine, we have not even need to add to this word the epithet voluntary, Association signifying essentially, with us, convergence of free forces. Now, in order that Association be truly free, it does not suffice that the elements called to realize it have freely opted for this mode, that they have deliberately chosen and willed it at a given moment; it is further necessary that they persist in this will within the realized Association; and, as a necessary consequence, that they have at each instant not only the theoretical and abstract liberty, but also the positive faculty — guaranteed by the formal dispositions of things — of withdrawing from it should they come to feel ill at ease there. Well then! the guarantee of this faculty, directly deduced from our principles, enjoys two practical properties most precious both, the second of which will even permit us to solve in an unhoped-for manner the question, posed above, of the probable organic arrangement of the first elements of immigration. We are going to convince ourselves of it.

XXVII

1st. The guarantee of effective liberty is eminently attractive of the population.

This property — whose importance from the general point of view of the work the foregoing observations have just shown — is evident. It applies equally to all the possible cases and to all the kinds of elements on which one may speculate.

Relatively to those who would not be attracted by the social aim of the work, it is clear that effective and practical liberty is indispensable; without it they would not come.

As for those who feel themselves in affinity not only with the general aim, but more particularly still with our phalansterian aim, it is for them too of a very great value, unless they are blind; — and in that case there would be a monstrous immorality in speculating upon an enthusiasm — very noble in its principle — to attract men onto distant lands and to engage them there in a mode of existence in which they might not meet, as soon as they supposed, the conditions they would have hoped for — if one had not contrived for them, in any case, the refuge of ordinary individual life after their own liking. On the other hand, since the private establishment is always prepared and open, the most prudent among these could conserve no fear. Far from compromising anything, their in-homing to the country of the realizations of their social faith assures, in every hypothesis, their individual prosperity and future.

This liberty, finally, is the formal condition of attraction for the socialist elements whose practical procedures and theoretical views differ from ours. Repulsed by the old world, we invite them onto a vast field open to all the progressive doctrines. They could respond to this appeal only under the guarantee of being able to create and develop there, at their ease and after their liking, the conditions they judge necessary to the realization of their plans.

Now, mark it well, in the data of this great and noble conception of a field of asylum open to all the forms of the progressive thought of the century, all the doctrines are useful, all concur in the aim of the new society. The most erroneous themselves, by that alone that they repose on strong and sincere convictions, serve here the great cause of Truth and of Humanity.

They all bring, in effect, onto the field of progressive experience, elements of life, of activity, of labor and of collective prosperity; and as practice will inevitably and without mercy disengage the truths from the errors, will transform the one and the other into visible and tangible realities, and as the living elements will be, a little sooner a little later, infallibly attracted to the various realizations in proportion to what each of these will contain of true truth, human and living, sincere error will itself have served to prove and to nourish Truth. The social guarantee contrived for all conveniences is not only attractive of the population; it enjoys a second property no less important.

XXVIII

2nd. The guarantee of effective liberty is eminently proper to facilitate the success of every cooperative combination founded on just bases.

This property is such that I am now going to prove a thesis that may surprise, coming after the one in which I enumerated, just now, the difficulties inherent in the first experimentations of any cooperative regime whatever and in particular of our own. I say at this hour — confining myself to our own object — that with the data now acquired, one may consider the practice of the societary Regime as having the greatest chances of a prompt development on the field of the first establishment itself.

Let us first empty the apparent contradiction of this statement with the thesis I have just recalled. What I combated is the preconceived idea, the fixed resolve to make, of the first colonial establishment, a societary phalanx. In that hypothesis, the phalansterian organization was a condition one imposed on oneself, a necessity in which one shut oneself. Now, that is precisely, in my conviction, the datum that renders success very difficult, that multiplies the obstacles, and becomes very compromising if, the experiment failing, one finds oneself to have begun by engaging in a blind alley. On the terrain of the present data, on the contrary, the societary regime is no more than a faculty. Having made of it neither an immediate aim of experiment nor a necessary means, one adopts of it each day — without this being able to provoke serious divergences and discussions liable to fester — what one recognizes empirically profitable for the daily conduct. Finally, and above all, instead of having shut up the social substance in a boiler without a safety-valve, here all is open. One is, on all sides, in contact with space, the free air, the great atmosphere. — There is enough of this to render manifest the essential differences of the two systems. Let us see now the reasons that militate in favor of the latter.

We have recognized above that, without any doubt, a considerable part of the new arrivals will wish immediately to profit from the faculty offered them of constituting themselves on societary bases analogous, for example, to those of the N. A. Phalanx. — We may therefore reason as if this establishment were transported onto the colonial terrain, with a more numerous, fresh population, and whose springs, instead of being very fatigued, would have all their first vigor. Now, I say that this establishment itself, such as it is, were it on the field of the colony, would meet there at the instant conditions of life capable of easily triumphing over the causes that have paralyzed its development. The climate would already make there a very sensible difference. It is above all, in effect, during the long months of winter that the languor manifests itself there. The fine season brings back there a marked movement, an existence more animated and already sufficiently attractive for strangers to come willingly to take board there and fix their summer quarters there.

There would be here, however, for its expansion, causes far more powerful, among which must be ranked the extreme relative facility of the labors of agriculture, the rapidity of increase of individual and collective prosperity, and the charm resulting from the promptness of the creations of all sorts and of the conquests won over a nature that asks only to yield its treasures.

But a spring of an efficacy incontestably more energetic still would be found in the new aim and the new functions that would be suddenly offered to it.

What weighs most heavily, in effect, upon the N. A. Phalanx — it is easy to convince oneself of it when one spends some time there — is the sentiment of the missed aim and the little hope remaining of attaining it henceforth.

The N. A. Phalanx has precisely put itself in that blind alley of which I spoke just now. What makes, for the greatest part today, its weakness, is the preconceived idea in view of which it constituted itself, without having calculated the conditions or measured the difficulties of the realization. The weight that oppresses it now is that of its aim fallen back upon it.

On the field where we suppose it transported, the N. A. Phalanx would feel itself immediately apt for a function of high importance: it would very quickly conceive for itself a reason for being, a new aim of activity rising suddenly before it; and this aim, this time, it could not miss.

Such as it is at present, in effect, it would be already very proper for the reception of the elements of immigration, and would function suitably as an organ of nourishment of the colony. — The milieu in which it would be placed being indefinitely extensible, it would develop rapidly itself, as a special organ, while incessantly making grow the body of which it would be the embryo.

This hypothesis and this discussion put us in a position to calculate, with a very great probability, the course things will naturally follow in our first center of population. A great part of the first colonists will opt for an immediate societary organization, on a plan analogous to that of the N. A. Phalanx. — That is certain. This first sketch of the cooperative Order will nevertheless find itself seated on much broader bases and its constitution will be eminently more elastic. At the N. A. Phalanx, in effect, the individuals received as aspirants must, after a certain time of residence, be admitted as members or withdraw from the establishment. There are no intermediate degrees. — This lack of elasticity has been considered a serious defect, and the conception of the new establishment that former members of the N. A. Phalanx are raising at Raritan-Bay issued from this criticism. One proposes here to leave to individuals the faculty of associating integrally or partially, or again of forming, by groups, workshops or enterprises on their own account. Now, such are precisely the conditions that our data offer of themselves to the elements whose probable arrangement we are studying.

The proposed aim being by no means the experiment or the realization of the serial regime, but simply colonization, the minds of the immigrants are not raised to a diapason of exaggerated hope liable to cause, were it disappointed, a regrettable discouragement in the mass.

On the other hand, the facilities offered to the private establishment are no lesser a guarantee for the nuclei where societary life is sketched than for the interests and the personal conveniences of the immigrants. They permit in effect the Associations to keep, in full cooperation, only the elements whom their regime suits completely and who suit it themselves, without however absolutely setting aside the concurrence of the others.

Thanks to this faculty, no one will fear to try first the life of the great establishments, and, very naturally, these will find themselves retaining only the elements in affinity and in decided correlation of conveniences with their regime. Every discord, every incompatibility, every reciprocal hindrance is resolved by the individual establishment or by some position on the scale of the intermediate degrees. The integrant molecules take therefore here, as in the natural organisms, the places suiting their respective affinities.

XXIX

I have already spoken of the contrast of character of the Anglo-American race and of our Latin races. The American and the Frenchman form, more particularly, the complement of each other.

In a mixture of the two races, especially in a mixture effected in America, French effervescence, a little out of its element, will lose, for a good part, in contact with the calm, the cold reason and the enterprising and practical genius of the American element, its bursts of bravado, of vain frivolity, its dispositions to inconsiderate and uproarious criticism, to silly susceptibilities and silly quarrels, and will tend to resolve itself into a more useful, more serious and more harmonic activity.

This modification of the French element will be facilitated by the consciousness of the work of education that it will itself have to operate upon the American population. It will have, in effect, to inoculate the latter with its spirit of sociability, its joyous spirits, its artistic faculties, its leanings toward refinement, to enlarge for it the domain of the sentiments, and to inspire in it the noble taste for general ideas. This important mission of collective education being able to result only from a moral influence, from a tone to be set, the French element will be led to watch itself severely and to keep in check itself those individual deviations that could only expose it, en masse, to the discredit of those upon whom it will feel itself desirous of acting in the character of initiator and of representative of a more advanced degree of sociability.

The American woman is in possession of her personal right. The conquest of autonomy is a universal social character in the United States: there, as soon as the child walks, it has the instinct of its right.

The American woman has therefore the consciousness of her autonomy, very different in this from the French woman who, even amid the fumes of incense that are lavished on her enough, is hardly yet in reality anything but a slave.

A young girl is freer in her actions at fifteen, in the United States, than often with us a young man of good family at eighteen. She goes out alone, and when it pleases her; she has her own friends; she takes country walks with them; she receives them; she has her correspondence. She will not fear, if need be, to undertake alone a journey of several hundred leagues, finding everywhere the regard due to her, sure of being exposed nowhere to any sort of indiscretion on the part of whomsoever. She carries everywhere her right and makes use of it, knowing that it will never be misrecognized; she is, I repeat it, an autonomous being.

But she is reproached with having the heart little developed and with lacking charm. The old ideas will see, I do not doubt it, the cause of these defects in the very conquest I have just pointed out. Nothing of the kind. The real cause is wholly in the ultra-puritan origins of the United States, in the too little developed and still somewhat crude state of collective sociability, and in the exclusive preoccupations of the men with industrial and commercial affairs, with making money. By giving to the European woman the consciousness of her right, of her personality, and making of the latter an autonomous being like herself, the American woman will easily receive from her, in a suitable milieu, the gifts of grace and of sentiment that she often lacks, and the two elements will produce, by this exchange, a type much more elevated and richer than those they present separately the one and the other.

This complementary reciprocity, well marked in the things of common sociability, is found again to the same degree and in the same directions on the field of speculative ideas, of theories and of systems. There again the European mind will bring the products of a more learned, more philosophical and more advanced civilization, and will find the more positive and more realizing genius of the Anglo-American, to moderate its caprices and to regulate its adventures. The latter will burst more than one balloon filled only with a vague metaphysics, and will show at the same time to the Europeans that, in practice, nothing of what man can positively conceive is impossible.

In sum, I — who have always thought and who profess still that an experimentation of the phalansterian Regime, attempted by associating families in the tight, pressed, stiff and moreover costly conditions that such a work would necessarily have to undergo in Europe, offers there difficulties and dangers that have always made me reject the idea of it — I believe myself highly authorized to advance this conclusion, namely:

That under the benefit of the great local data and of the dispositions previously set forth, and on condition of not proposing to oneself prematurely, as an imperative aim, the experimentation of a social theory, but only the rapid prosperity of the colonization, the societary Regime will be able to attain promptly itself, on the new field, a development already very advanced and very satisfactory.

The progress of this regime will be, in effect, the easier as it will be easier to associate without hampering oneself, to combine one's labors while conserving one's habits, to unite while keeping one's elbow-room — and to withdraw from the Association at any instant and at will.

The cooperative establishments will indubitably be more apt than any individual establishment for the first reception of the new arrivals. The immigrants will therefore ask of the Associations, were it only provisionally in their thought, food and a part of the domestic cares; they will bring in exchange to the cultivations, the workshops and the affairs of these centers, the tribute of their activity.

The climate, the conditions of agriculture and the numbers will permit organizing, straight off, operations in rivaled groups, sketching series, and optionally varying the labors several times a day. One will content oneself at first with framing the alternations between the meals.

Each will easily recognize, moreover, as an experience of ten years has proved at the N. A. Phalanx, that Association is perfectly compatible with personal liberty, with the conservation of the interior and of the daily habits of family life.

The various natural sources of well-being, of wealth and of charm that we have enumerated, adding their influences to the advantages, the pleasures and the creations of a sociability that combines, meshes, develops and animates itself more and more each day — I should not be at all astonished if a good number of those who would have arrived with the thought of forming a private establishment found themselves too well off in the cooperative life to think of leaving it. So much so that, instead of having to regret the facilities contrived for the separate existence, it might happen that it would be necessary to encourage it by certain advantages, in order to provide for the occupation of all the points where it will matter to the colonization to have posts.

Be that as it may, I do not think there can now remain serious doubts in your minds on the fundamental question, that of the good and strong organization of the first centers of colonial population, on the sole condition of showing oneself faithful to the directing laws, to the principles of practical conduct traced above. — Now, we have categorically demonstrated it, a success of this order would fully suffice, whatever from the scientific point of view the fate of the first cooperative sketches. Whether the regime of these sketches surpassed or not the elementary degrees of the N. A. Phalanx, the general work would be none the less founded on solid bases, and assured of a development of prosperity that would promptly bring in its turn that of the ideas to which the new Society will have owed its origin.

XXX

The first nucleus enters into its second phase as soon as, the labors of agriculture and of the industries of necessity having taken root, it becomes useful to call, in a stronger proportion, the elements apt for the more refined functions, capable of developing the taste, the needs of the mind, the tendency toward perfecting in all branches, of awakening and exciting the artistic sentiment, of cultivating, in a word, the higher spheres of human sociability. We have already recognized that in the hypothesis from which we started this phase would open during the last six months of the year following the preparatory epoch. The organization of intellectual and moral culture, of the higher industries and of the artistic and scientific institutions, would thus follow very closely the establishment of the indispensable material bases. In consequence the elements of collective charm and of great social life, represented already in the first phase, will not be slow to be largely grafted onto those of agricultural wealth.

As soon as a first center is seated and in a state to receive new immigrants, detachments of workers undertake operations of general utility and prepare new centers. The creation of these is now made without offering serious difficulties. Immigration develops from then on according to the law of an increasing geometric progression; it distributes itself into establishments of all sorts. The cooperative nuclei multiply, and the variety of their institutions, the emulative rivalries that excite them to surpass themselves, the aid they bring one another, the improvements they borrow from one another, are not slow to perfect the first sketches, to refine the organisms and soon to realize decisive phenomena of collective attraction, of high social life and of collective harmony.

Now, let us put things at the worst by supposing that the first organizations should present difficulties such that the establishments of origin would not have sufficed to solve practically the problem of the combined Order. Well then! in that case we fall back on our European solution: the organization of the groups and series of childhood and of adolescence; — and this time we undertake it at home, in full liberty, and with all the necessary resources!

Far from the surrounding society impeding or obstructing its establishment, it is that society, here, that calls for it and demands it.

It calls for it because the Idea in whose name it was founded, and which has developed more and more vigorously in its bosom, marches toward its experimental incarnation as naturally and necessarily as a plant produces its flowers and its fruits when it has developed its roots and its leaves. It demands it because its children are there, and because educational institutions must be organized for the new generation.

Therefore, as soon as one supposes a first nucleus established, a bridgehead thrown onto the lands of the colony, and the movement regularly imparted to immigration, two or three years could scarcely elapse, at worst, before the social experimentations arise, and that, within the most desirable conditions.

This posited and acquired, let each of us ask himself whether the terrain of Europe — whatever hypothesis one may make on the things that may supervene — offers to the realization of the Idea with which we are charged chances comparable to a prospect so near and so sure?

For me, my answer is made. Were there to arise tomorrow such circumstances as would permit me to return to France at my ease, I should none the less be, within a few months, on the road to Texas. The realization of the work to which my life belongs is there: I am going there.

Thus the question is no longer, for me, whether the thing proposed will be done. What alone remains in question is the scale of proportion on which it can begin — an important question, no doubt, but nevertheless secondary. This, my friends, will depend on you and on your concurrences.

XXXI

I shall not conclude without touching on a point on which the minds to whom this Report is addressed have need to be edified. I wish to speak of the social consequences — ulterior and external — of the proposed foundation.

When we have not traveled a little, we are all more or less afflicted with European myopia. I mean by that that we readily imagine — because it has been so for long centuries — that Europe is everything, and that it is in Europe alone that the great game of the Destiny of Humanity is played. We are disposed to attribute only a very feeble influence still to progressive facts, however considerable they may be in themselves, if they are accomplished too far away. — Too far away means too far from us, that goes without saying. Now, that is today a parochial prejudice, neither more nor less; and I ask only two hours spent at New-York, at Boston or at Philadelphia to rid the most determined Europeanist of it. — Two words, then, on this subject for those who have not had those two hours.

Here, it is no longer the success of the enterprise that is in question. The objection presents itself under this form: — "So be it! we have succeeded; the new colony is founded; the serial mechanism itself is realized and functions conformably to the previsions of the theory. What influence will these facts have upon the world? Is not the field of proof too far from civilization, from the great theater of the social movement, from the battlefield where the question of the Future is decided? The solution will be given, no doubt, and the proof made; but made in the desert, and living humanity could not profit from it."

Let us seek to render ourselves an exact account of things, and, for that, let us picture to ourselves well, first, the facts realized. We have succeeded and the new society is founded. — What does that signify? — Let us analyze.

The domains of the colony are occupied by a population already considerable and ever growing, which has imported there not only the instruments of labor and the most powerful procedures of modern science and industry, but also the most advanced conquests of human genius in the sphere of general and progressive ideas. The raw lands have acquired enormous values, and these increments of value, transformed into capital of circulation, remain, for the most part, engaged in the work of the ulterior and more and more fecund developments of the primitive work. — It is probable, in effect, that even a great part of the increments of value attributed to the remuneration of the capital of foundation will reinvest themselves in the subsequent operations. Easy and rapid communications, going to join the great arteries of American civilization, are established. The colony has doubled, tripled, decupled the primitive extent of its domains by means of a double operation that consists in profiting on sales of lands neighboring its first establishments, and in carrying itself ever forward onto the virgin lands, whose preparation and conquest have become one of its industries. Meanwhile, the population of the underlying regions has itself grown considerably. The railroads, preceded by the electric telegraph, approach our domains. The arts, the sciences, the pleasures, collective luxury, the refinement of the population, higher education, all the flowers of social life in a word, blossom upon the deep strata of public wealth, in a milieu magnetized by the new Faith of humanity. The multiplied and varied trials of the organic combinations destined to solve the social problems brought by the course of the times have borne their fruits. Experience has done justice to the errors and given a body to the truth. The New Order is no longer only in germ in theories and ideas; it has found its forms, its practical laws. It is a society that develops, that creates and acts. It speaks, it writes, it prints, it trades with the external world. It lives and it radiates.

And what place does this hearth occupy?

It is situated in a region that one of the great arteries of the United States of America is going to traverse — the only country in the world where there flourishes today a civilization young, vigorous, progressive and truly modern in its character and its elements — the European civilizations being visibly engaged, since the beginning of this century, in the terrible straits from the 3rd to the 4th phase, and the regular and pacific issues having been missed...

A general and scientific examination of the present state of Europe would not be without utility here; but besides that I cannot engage myself incidentally in a question so considerable, I must suppose that each of us has his provision of reflections on such a subject.

The antagonisms of different orders that the European civilizations bear in their flanks have constituted themselves there, that is certain, in a state of implacable exasperation. The famous picture that Fourier traced of it in 1808, in the Epilogue of the Theory of the Four Movements, is truer today than ever, and already we have witnessed the prelude of those social wars that we have not ceased to announce for eighteen years, as one of the terms of the inevitable dilemma of the epoch. How much time would these antagonisms need to resolve themselves or to suppress themselves? A somber question.

Now, while Europe is thus engaged, America does its work and prepares its role which, in my eyes at least, is no longer a hypothesis. America is, today already and in the great historical signification of the word, the Occident of the World. What young Europe was to old Asia, young America becomes to old Europe. It is the same movement; only the centuries, so slow in antiquity, go in our days by steam. When one observes the general march of humanity, one easily recognizes that progress, in occurring in time, displaced itself in space, and that the hearth of light and of social impulse has always proceeded from East to West, like the sun. American civilization issued from our Greco-Roman civilization, as the latter had come from Egypt and from Asia. Everything indicates that the phase of evolution of the five preparatory Societies must close on the new continent, where it completes its tour of the world. — The facts accord singularly already with the expression of this law.

What constitutes the enormous virtual superiority of American civilization over ours is that the latter, being daughter of war, was long only a pure organization of conquest. The modern Elements — Science, Industry, Commerce, Labor, Peace, Liberty — could there operate their slow disengagement only at the price of secular combats; and, at this hour, despite all the progress accomplished, European society is still wholly impregnated with the traditional viruses of its violent and barbarous origin. — It is, on the contrary, these modern Elements that have themselves founded American civilization.

Thus, while on the old continent these Elements consume themselves in ceaselessly renascent struggles against the surrounding milieu, they find on the new one a society made by them and consequently a free and unlimited field open to their realizations.

Such are the causes. What are the effects?

The two following tables, which I borrow from a book published by M. Goodrich, ex-consul of the United States at Paris, set them forth with the most peremptory eloquence.

[Editorial — outside the scope of this transcription (cf. the scoping note: Goodrich extract excluded): there follow here two large statistical tables that Considerant borrows from Goodrich. The first, "Progressive population of the principal cities," gives the censuses from 1700 to 1850 for some fifty cities of the United States (Portland, Boston, New-York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, New-Orleans, San Francisco, etc.). The second, "Progress of the United States in 57 years (1793–1851)," compares receipts, expenditures, tonnage, extent, army, navy, lighthouses, miles of railroad, telegraph lines, post offices and European emigration between 1793 and 1851 — figures drawn from a speech by M. Webster, Secretary of State, delivered on 4 July 1852 at Washington. These two numerical tables (facsimile, PDF pp. 164–165) are not transcribed here.]

The official documents that these two little tables summarize are, in their kind, a page of practical history such as none similar has been written until now by any people of the earth. And, perhaps, the law of development they reveal is destined to grow still in speed. That, at least, is what would tend to be presumed from quite recent figures such as these:

And this other:

The sale of public lands quintupled in one year! One attributes this increase to the extension of the railroad system, that is to say to the development of the most energetic means of progress that civilization yet knows.

The power of absorption that the new world exercises upon the old grows with all the intensity of the political and social complications of Europe. The marvelous perfectionings of the ways of transport, on sea and on land, come still to its aid. One may very rationally consider the human mass, and particularly that of the civilized nations, as a liquid whose fluidity grows in proportion to the facility of communications, and which distributes itself over the surface of the terrestrial sphere, under the influence of two sorts of forces, the one attractive, the other repulsive. Now, evidently, for two centuries, the relative overflow of Europe pours itself onto the New Continent as if it were subjected to the action of a gigantic mechanism of progressively accelerated movement, and of double effect, of the kind of suction-and-force pumps. America attracts, Europe expels. The causes of this double phenomenon are, for the United States of America, the virtualities of a soil new, rich and in some sort unlimited, the political and social liberties, administrative economy, the conditions made for labor by peace and by the industrious and progressive impetus of the whole race. For Europe and its Disunited States, the causes are general misery, the appropriation and the high price of lands, the uncertainty and the low price of labor, the colossal dimensions of the budgets and of the military systems (even on the so-called peace footing), war ever imminent, and the chronic revolutionary state.

These causes are too deep to be able to be called accidental. They pertain to situations given in the great history whose personages are entire races, and the terrestrial sphere the theater.

Seen as a whole, civilization polarizes itself today upon the globe. The work of this polarization is even so far advanced that common speech has already two words to express it: old Europe, young America. — The contrasted characters of this double formation are easy to deduce.

California and Oregon people themselves rapidly; the center of Utah will soon be occupied by a State; and the two flanks, Atlantic and Pacific, of the Federation, anastomosed by an interior system of railways, will not be slow to weld themselves solidly.

The spaces comprised between the two Oceans, facing on one side China and India, on the other Europe and Africa, will count in 25 years 50 million men, and 100 million at the end of the century. The immense valleys of the Mississippi and the Missouri, lately the extreme frontier of the American colossus, will soon be its heart, and one will see, for the first time in the annals of humanity, a great people seated upon the backbone of the globe, occupying the slopes in the two general basins of the world, the Occident and the Orient.

This glance, summary as it is, and whatever there might still be to say, suffices, I think, for one to decide to make, from today, for the United States of America, a place in the great history of Humanity. Europe, certainly, will not be slow to recognize that they have one....

XXXII

A few words more, and it is not I who shall say them.

"A man comes to be born; his first years pass obscurely amid the pleasures and the labors of childhood. He grows; manhood begins; the doors of the world open at last to receive him; he enters into contact with his fellows. One studies him then for the first time, and one believes one sees forming in him the vices and the virtues of his mature age. "There, if I am not mistaken, is a great error. "Go back; examine the child even in the arms of his mother; see the external world reflect itself for the first time on the still obscure mirror of his intelligence; contemplate the first examples that strike his gaze; listen to the first words that awaken in him the slumbering enjoyments of thought; assist finally at the first struggles he has to sustain, and only then will you understand whence come the prejudices, the habits and the passions that are going to dominate his life. Man is, so to speak, wholly in the swaddling-clothes of his cradle. "Something analogous happens with nations. Peoples always feel the effects of their origin. The circumstances that accompanied their birth and served their development bear upon all the rest of their career. "If it were possible for us to go back to the elements of societies, and to examine the first monuments of their history, I do not doubt that we could discover there the first cause of the prejudices, the habits, the dominant passions, of all that composes in fine what is called the national character... "America is the only country where one has been able to assist at the natural and tranquil developments of a society, and where it has been possible to specify the influence exercised by the point of departure upon the future of the States...."

After establishing the existence of a general tint, common to all the English colonies that formed the stock of the United States, the author says:

"One can distinguish in the great Anglo-American family two principal offshoots which, up to now, have grown without entirely merging, the one in the South, the other in the North. "Virginia received the first English colony. The emigrants arrived there in 1607. Europe, at that epoch, was still singularly preoccupied with the idea that mines of gold and silver make the wealth of peoples: a fatal idea that has more impoverished the European nations that gave themselves to it, and destroyed more men in America, than war and all the bad laws together. It was therefore gold-seekers that were sent to Virginia, people without resources and without conduct, whose restless and turbulent spirit troubled the infancy of the colony and rendered its progress uncertain. Next arrived the manufacturers and the cultivators, a race more moral and more tranquil, but which rose at almost no point above the level of the inferior classes of England. No noble thought, no immaterial combination presided over the foundation of the new establishments. Scarcely was the colony created than slavery was introduced into it; that was the capital fact that was to bring an immense influence upon the character, the laws and the entire future of the South... "It is in the English colonies of the North, better known under the name of New England, that there combined the two or three principal ideas that today form the bases of social theory in the United States. The principles of New England first spread into the neighboring States; they then gained, by degrees, the most distant ones, and ended, if I may so express myself, by penetrating the entire confederation. They now exercise their influence beyond its limits upon the American world... "The foundation of New England offered a new spectacle. All there was singular and original. "Almost all the colonies have had for first inhabitants men without education and without resources, whom misery and misconduct pushed out of the country that had seen them born, or greedy speculators and contractors of industry... "The emigrants who came to settle on the shores of New England belonged all to the comfortable classes of the mother-country. Their gathering on American soil presented, from the origin, the singular phenomenon of a society in which there were found neither great lords nor people, and, so to speak, neither poor nor rich. There was, proportion kept, a greater mass of enlightenment spread among these men than within any European nation of our days. All, without perhaps excepting a single one, had received a fairly advanced education, and several among them had made themselves known in Europe by their talents and their learning. The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them admirable elements of order and of morality; they betook themselves to the desert accompanied by their wives and their children. But what distinguished them above all from all the others was the very aim of their enterprise. It was by no means necessity that forced them to abandon their country; they left there a regrettable social position and assured means of living; nor did they pass into the new world in order to better their situation there or to increase their riches; they tore themselves from the sweetnesses of the homeland to obey a purely intellectual need; in exposing themselves to the inevitable miseries of exile, they wished to make an idea triumph. "The emigrants, or, as they so well called themselves, the pilgrims (pilgrims), belonged to that sect of England to which the austerity of its principles had caused the name of puritan to be given. Puritanism was not only a religious doctrine; it merged still on several points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories. Thence had come its most redoubtable adversaries. Persecuted by the government of the mother-country, wounded in the rigor of their principles by the daily march of the society within which they lived, the puritans sought a land so barbarous and so abandoned of the world that it might still be permitted to live there in one's own manner and to pray to God in liberty. "The emigrants were about a hundred and fifty in number, men as well as women and children. One still shows the rock where the pilgrims descended."

The author says in a note:

"This rock has become an object of veneration in the United States; I have seen fragments of it carefully preserved in several cities of the Union. Does this not show very clearly that the power and the greatness of man are wholly in his soul? Here is a stone that the feet of a few wretches touch for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it attracts the gaze of a great people; one venerates its debris, one shares out its dust. What has become of the threshold of so many palaces? Who concerns himself with it?"

He resumes:

"It must not be believed that the piety of the puritans was only speculative, nor that it showed itself foreign to the march of human things. Puritanism, as I have said above, was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine. Scarcely disembarked on this inhospitable shore, the first care of the emigrants is to organize themselves into a society. They immediately pass an act that runs: "We, whose names follow, who, for the glory of God, the development of the Christian faith and the honor of our country, have undertaken to establish the first colony on these remote shores, agree, in these presents, by mutual and solemn consent, and before God, to form ourselves into a body of political society, with the aim of governing ourselves and of laboring at the accomplishment of our designs; and in virtue of this contract, we agree to promulgate laws, acts, ordinances, and to institute, according to the needs, magistrates to whom we promise submission and obedience." "This took place in 1620. From that epoch, emigration no longer stopped; the religious and political passions that tore the British empire throughout the whole reign of Charles I pushed each year, onto the coasts of America, new swarms of sectaries. In England, the hearth of puritanism continued to find itself placed in the middle classes; it was from the bosom of the middle classes that the greater part of the emigrants issued. The population of New England grew rapidly, and while the hierarchy of ranks still despotically classed men in the mother-country, the colony presented more and more the new spectacle of a society homogeneous in all its parts. Democracy, such as antiquity had not even dared to dream of it, escaped full-grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society."

After giving an idea of the primitive penal legislation — a direct inspiration of puritan rigorism and often of the most odious intolerance — the author adds:

"Beside this penal legislation, so strongly imprinted with the narrow spirit of sect and with all the religious passions that persecution had exalted and that still fermented at the bottom of souls, is placed, and in some sort chained with it, a body of political law which, traced two hundred years ago, seems still to be very far in advance of the spirit of liberty of our age. "The general principles on which repose the modern constitutions — these principles, which most of the Europeans of the 17th century scarcely understood, and which triumphed then incompletely in Great Britain — are all recognized and fixed by the laws of New England: the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxation, the responsibility of the agents of power, individual liberty and trial by jury, are there established without discussion and in fact. "These generating principles receive there an application and developments that no nation of Europe has yet dared to give them... "With most of the European nations, political existence began in the superior regions of society, and communicated itself little by little, and always in an incomplete manner, to the various parts of the social body. In America, on the contrary, one may say that the township was organized before the county, the county before the State, the State before the Union... "When, after thus casting a rapid glance over American society of 1650, one examines the state of Europe and particularly that of the continent toward this same epoch, one feels penetrated with a profound astonishment: on the continent of Europe, at the beginning of the 17th century, absolute royalty triumphed on all sides over the debris of the oligarchic and feudal liberty of the middle ages. In the bosom of this brilliant and literary Europe, never perhaps had the idea of rights been more completely misrecognized; never had the peoples lived less of political life; never had the notions of true liberty less preoccupied minds, and it is then that these same principles, unknown to the European nations or despised by them, were proclaimed in the deserts of the New World, and became the future symbol of a great people; the boldest theories of the human spirit were reduced to practice in this society so humble in appearance, and with which no statesman would doubtless then have deigned to occupy himself."

In another passage the same author says:

"The emigrants who came to settle in America at the beginning of the 17th century disengaged, in some fashion, the principle of democracy from all those against which it struggled within the old societies of Europe, and they transplanted it onto the shores of the New World. There, it was able to grow in liberty, and, marching with the manners, to develop itself peaceably in the laws."

XXXIII

The middle of the 19th century is not the beginning of the 17th, and the most advanced theories of the epoch are not bound, in our minds, to any narrow and blind fanaticism. That apart, the situations, at two hundred and fifty years' distance, have analogies so striking that any commentary on these lines would be idle (1).

The map of Texas annexed to this report gives the tracing of a projected railroad which, entering the State by Fulton, on the Red River, comes to cut the Trinity in the vicinity of Athens, directs itself upon Fort Gates, and goes up from there onto the Del Norte, which it reaches at El Paso.

I said, page 75, that we had met, on our return, capitalists of New-York who were coming to see "what there was to do in Texas," and I predicted that the enterprises of the North would not be slow to descend into the country. — My previsions are outstripped in speed. I did not expect, I confess, to receive at once communication of the tracing of this line, and of the conclusion of a convention of the Texan government on this subject.

The thing is done. Although the tracing is not yet definitively settled, the Texan legislature has none the less already granted 13,000 acres of land (three square leagues of 1,600 hectares), per mile of railroad, to the Company that proposes the execution. — That is how, over there, things go.

This line traverses the State of Arkansas and goes to join the Mississippi — that is to say the system of the great circulation of the Atlantic States — at Memphis. From El Paso to Memphis, 400 leagues. The line is to be continued as far as California. — The interior communication of the States of the South with those of the Pacific will certainly be made through Texas.

(1) From whom are they, these lines? — From a "statesman" very clear-sighted in the history of the origin and the development of the advanced ideas of two centuries ago, who will none the less have treated those of his own time as he remarks that his analogues of the 17th century treated those of theirs. See Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Vol. I, Introd. and chap. II passim.

I say it without the least fear of error: if there exists a country in the world admirably disposed to receive the workshop of practical elaboration of the problem of social Destiny, it is Texas. Let the cell of the New Society be raised on these lands today deserted, but which floods of human population will invade tomorrow, and soon thousands of analogous organisms will spring up as if by enchantment around the first specimens.

As proof and trial of its power of assimilation and of its decisive superiority over the anterior forms, the new social Organism will have, in its vicinity, to the North, Savagery — which American Civilization knows only how to destroy, which is its great crime; — to the South, Slavery, which this Civilization is powerless to transform, which is its great wound.

But let us admit that nothing is done so long as a specimen of the new Order has not been founded at the gate of one of our European capitals. Well then! is not, even so, the shortest road to arrive there today to bear the new Idea onto a free field, where it is easy to give it promptly a body, to make of it a tangible and living reality? And then, I tell you in truth, were the state of European things tomorrow wholly other, it would still be outside Europe that one would have, tomorrow, to think of solving the social problem. — This problem, which is the great affair of the century, is posed today in Europe in such a fashion and on such a terrain that for a long time it will not be easy to solve it there tranquilly and scientifically — if it has not been experimented elsewhere. Qui habet aures audiendi audiat. It is not a question of abandoning the European homeland; it is a question, still and always, of preparing its salvation and that of the world....

END OF THE REPORT.