considerations not unlike those that underlay republican opposition to a standing army. Brownson argued, in effect, that the people would lose the capacity to educate themselves and their children if they turned education over to a class of professional custodians. Like republicans, he opposed the whole trend toward a more and more highly specialized division of labor; this was his basic quarrel with the political economy of liberalism, as it was theirs. In 1841, still contending that the "mission of this country" was to "raise up the laboring classes, and make every man really free and independent," he regretted the "division of society into workingmen and idlers, employers and operatives," a "learned class and an unlearned, a cultivated class and an uncultivated, a refined class and a vulgar." The only way to reverse this trend, in his view, was to make every man a proprietor. This was the upshot of his famous essay of 1840, "The Laboring Classes"—a piece so radical that it was received, as Brownson later recalled, with "one universal scream of horror." ^*

With good reason, commentators have seen in "The Laboring Classes" anticipations of The Communist Manifesto, launched upon the world eight years later. "All over the world this fact stares us in the face, the working-

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"The gravamen of my offence was my condemnation of the modern industrial system, especially the system of labor at wages, which I held to be worse, except in regard to the feelings, than the slave system at the South.... I contended that the great, the mother-evil of modern society was the separation of capital and labor; or the fact that one class of the community owns the funds, and another and a distinct class is compelled to perform the labor of production." Brownson conceded that his remedy—to make "every man an owner of the funds as well as the labor of production"—"would have broken up the whole modern commercial system, prostrated all the great industries, or what I called the factory system, and thrown the mass of the people back on the land to get their living by agricultural and mechanical pursuits." But that was precisely "one of the results I aimed at," even though it "went directly against the dominant sentiment of the British and American world" by calling into question "its crowning glory." Note that Brownson never retracted these opinions. "I am unable even to-day to detect any unsoundness," he wrote in 1857, "in my views of the relation of capital and labor, or of the modern system of money wages." The "practicability" of his reforms was the point on which he later changed his mind, the campaign of 1840 having "disgusted" him with democracy and made him "distrust both the intelligence and the instincts of 'the masses.' "

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