Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1879 — COMMUNITIES AND COLONIES. [ARTICLE]

COMMUNITIES AND COLONIES.

Scattered through thirteen Btates, branches of eight main bodies, are sev-enty-two communities, whose central idea is that of holding all things in common. They number some 5,000 persons, owning, perhaps, 180,000 acres of land and $12,000,000 of property. The Icarians are French; the Shakers and Perfectionists are Americans, although the former were organized by an Englishwoman; the remainder are German. The Eben-Ezers of Aurora call themthemselves “Inspirationists,” their present leader—a woman—claiming to speak by divine inspiration, and this claim runs back over a century with them in Germany, before they became communal. The Separatists came from Wurtemberg, under stress of persecution on account of their religious views. The Shakers, who are the oldest and most numerous of all the groups, were organized by an Englishwoman named Ann Lee, who, while in prison for her religious manifestations in 1770, claimed to have had a special revelation from God, and was directed to come to America. She arrived in New York, with eight others, in 1774, and lived in the woods until 1780, when some unusually affected subjects of a revival in the neighborhood happened to wander to her. Her professions of supernatmal, and even miraculous, powers were kept up, and she is still called “Mother Ann ” by the Shakers, and venerated by them as a sort of patron saint. The Shakers and the Bappists or Harmonists are celibates, and it is an extraordinary fact that the latter, after several years of communal life, and while many of them were living in the marriage relation, deliberately abandoned it, a few who were unwilling to do so withdrawing. The Perfectionists at Oneida, in New York, and Wallingford, Ct., have what they call a complex marriage state, every woman being considered as married to every man. They say that there is “no intrinsic difference between property in person and property in things,” hence their communion extends to themselves as well as to what they have acquired, and the relationship between thesexes is as free as consent can make it, except that any disposition to a permanent association between the same two persons is repressed as being a manifestation of “selfishness.” The Communists unite provision for the wants of this life with peculiar religious notions which might be called fanatical but that they are entirely free from a spirit of intolerance. Some are Spiritualists in the ordinary sense of that word; some look very soon for the second coming of Christ and the end of all things, while others believe the second coming already past; they believe in a special nearness of God to themselves ; they have their own hymns, literature and observance, and seem to be moved by a desire to separate themselves from the world. The Perfectionists profess to aim at complete sinlessness, and some individuals among them even claim to have attained it. All the Communists are good citizens. They break no laws; they add nothing to the public charge on account of pauperism and vice; they are all non-combatants, and do not even attempt among themselves anything beyond moral suasion, but allow those to withdraw who become insubordinate. They have neither defalcations nor breaches of trust, and their honesty in all commercial dealings is as proverbial as their shrewdness. The morality of their life is unimpeachable. This must be admitted of even the Oneida body, with the exception of their peculiar institution, which is worse than the Mormon practice in its demoralizing influence, and justifies the present agitation against them in the central part of that State. » The Oneida people are manufacturers mainly, agriculturists incidentally; the rest are agriculturists mainly. All harve shown an extraordinary aptitude for invention and for economizing labor. The Shakers, who are particularly wellknown by reason of their numbers and their many colonies, have a large variety of trades, and the work of all communistic societies has an established reputation for both uniform excellence of quality and honesty of quantity. The Icarians, in lowa, were led by a Frenchman, who spent sixteen years in trying to realize a pretty dream of what he could do in founding a society if he had half a million of money; so his followers began with 4,000 acres of land and $20,000 of debt. To escape from the latter they finally surrendered the former, and, after hard work and bitter economy, were able to redeem 1,936 acres of it; they are now independent but reduced in numbers. The Bishop Hill colony, in Illinois, once having 800 members and some SBOO,OOO of property, was broken up by inefficient leadership and the trouble of debt, and their town is falling into decay. But the societies generally have rigidly adhered to the rule of having no debts and getting property only as they earn it. None of the communes are rich in the ordinary sense of. the word, and they do not try to be.