Mark Woolston was much too sensible a man to fall into any of the modern absurdities on the subject of equality, and a community of interests.  One or two individuals, even in that day, had wished to accompany him, who were for forming an association in which all property should be shared in common, and in which nothing was to be done but that which was right.  Mark had not the least objection in the world to the last proposition, and would have been glad enough to see it carried out to the letter, though he differed essentially with the applicants, as to the mode of achieving so desirable an end.  He was of opinion that civilization could not exist without property, or property without a direct personal interest in both its accumulation and its preservation.  They, on the other hand, were carried away by the crotchet that community-labour was better than individual labour, and that a hundred men would be happier and better off with their individualities compressed into one, than by leaving them in a hundred subdivisions, as they had been placed by nature.  The theorists might have been right, had it been in their power to compress a hundred individuals into one, but it was riot.  After all their efforts, they would still remain a hundred individuals, merely banded together under more restraints, and with less liberty than are common.

Of all sophisms, that is the broadest which supposes personal liberty is extended by increasing the power of the community.  Individuality is annihilated in a thousand things, by the community-power that already exists in this country, where persecution often follows from a man’s thinking and acting differently from his neighbours, though the law professes to protect him.  The reason why this power becomes so very formidable, and is often so oppressively tyrannical in its exhibition, is very obvious.  In countries where the power is in the hands of the few, public sympathy often sustains the man who resists its injustice; but no public sympathy can sustain him who is oppressed by the public itself.  This oppression does not often exhibit itself in the form of law, but rather in its denial.  He, who has a clamour raised against him by numbers, appeals in vain to numbers for justice, though his claim may be clear as the sun at noon-day.  The divided responsibility of bodies of men prevents anything like the control of conscience, and the most ruthless wrongs are committed, equally without reflection and without remorse.

Mark Woolston had thought too much on the subject, to be the dupe of any of these visionary theories.  Instead of fancying that men never knew anything previously to the last ten years of the eighteenth century, he was of the opinion of the wisest man who ever lived, that ’there was nothing new under the sun.’  That ‘circumstances might alter cases’ he was willing enough to allow, nor did he intend to govern the crater by precisely the same laws as he would govern Pennsylvania, or Japan; but he well understood, nevertheless, that certain great moral truths existed as the law of the human family, and that they were not to be set aside by visionaries; and least of all, with impunity.