ABSTRACT
Of the cultured idealists, who projected the Brook Farm experiment, one, looking back on it, said with regretful candour that its failure was inevitable from the first. Its success, he said, was contingent on the absolute supremacy of a sentiment which has, as a motive to work, no actual existence. These words, which were used with reference to the American experiments generally, and to one experiment in particular, would have been still more poignantly applicable had they been used a generation later with reference to the experiment of Lane. The socialist experimenters have had always a third alternative—namely, that of walking away, and pursuing their own interest under circumstances of a different kind; and this was the very alternative which they all in the end adopted. The actual extent and the limits of a selfless enthusiasm for others may be further illustrated by other examples, which, though less extreme, are of wider range than these.
