All modern philosophy converges to a single point—the overthrow of all government, the substitution of the untrammelled "Sovereignty of the Individual," for the Sovereignty of Society, and the inauguration of anarchy. First domestic slavery, next religious institutions, then separate property, then political government, and, finally, family government and family relations, are to be swept away. This is the distinctly avowed programme of all able abolitionists and socialists: and towards this end the doctrines and the practices of the weakest and most timid among them tend. Proudhon, and the French socialists generally, avow this purpose in France, and Stephen Pearl Andrews re-echoes it from America. The more numerous and timid class are represented by Mr. Greeley and the Tribune, who would not "at once rush," like French revolutionists, "with the explosive force of escapement, point blank to the bull's eye of its final destiny," but would inaugurate social conditions, that would gradually bring about that result. Mr. Greeley does not propose to do away at once with marriage, religion, private property, political government and parental authority, but adopts the philosophy and the practices of Fourier, which promise gradually to purify human nature, and fit it, in a few generations, for that social millenium, into which the bolder and more consistent Andrews urges society at once to plunge.

The Christian socialists are beautifully and energetically co-laborating with the infidel socialists and abolitionists to bring about this millenium. They also are divided into two parties. The one would wait upon Providence—only help it a little, like Mr. Greeley—and permit our poor old effete world to pass out of existence by gentle euthanasia. The other and bolder party, feel themselves "called" as special instruments, to give at once the coup de grace to the old world, and to usher in the new golden age, of free love and free lands, of free women and free negroes, of free children and free men.

We like the Northern socialist theoretical abolitionists—read their speeches, essays, lectures and books, because they agree with us, that their own form of society is a humbug and a failure; and in their efforts, speculations and schemes to re-organize it, afford the most beautiful, perfect and complete specimen of the reductio ad absurdum. A lecture from Mr. Andrews on No-government, an Oneida den of incest, a Greeley phalanstery, or a New York free love saloon, afford equally good instances of this mode of demonstration by the absurdities which they exhibit, and equally good proofs of the naturalness and necessity of slavery, since such horrid abuses are everywhere the approved and practiced outgrowth of free society. As all our thoughts, arguments, proofs and demonstrations are suggested by or borrowed from the abolitionists, it seems to us we ought to dedicate to them. The Tribune very properly remarked that our Sociology was the first attempt of the kind at the South. It ridiculed our ignorance, too, severely. It should have recollected that were there no sickness there would be no physicians. We assure the Tribune, we are quite a prodigy in these matters for a Southern man. We have no social diseases, and therefore no social doctors to write about them or cure them. Such diseases have been rare: for Aristotle complains that there are no terms to express the relations of husband and wife, or parent and child. These relations have worked so smoothly in slave society to this day, that we in writing have felt the same want of language of which Aristotle, more than two thousand years ago, complained. You should invent such terms at the North, if it be true, as Mr. Andrews states in italics, that there are ten fugitives from Northern matrimony to one from Southern slavery—from which he seems to infer very logically, that the necessity of abolishing the family at the North, is ten times as great as that for abolishing slavery at the South. He and you are experts, and we know it is presumptuous in us to dispute what you say about your own society. Still we are dead against your phalansteries and his love saloons. Gentlemen and scholars, generally at the South, would as soon be caught studying or practicing the black art, as in reading Owen or Fourier, or in building phalansteries. For ourselves, like the Bastard in King John, we learn these things, "not to deceive, but to avoid deceit." We have whole files of infidel and abolition papers, like the Tribune, the Liberator and Investigator. Fanny Wright, the Devil's Pulpit and the Devil's Parson, Tom Paine, Owen, Voltaire, et id genus omne, are our daily companions. Good people give our office a wide berth as they pass it, and even the hens who loiter about it, have caught the infection of Woman's Rights, for we saw but as few days ago a Shanghai cock under its eaves hovering a brood of twenty chickens, whilst madam hen was strutting about in as large a liberty as any Bloomer or wise woman of the North.

Love and veneration for the family is with us not only a principle, but probably a prejudice and a weakness. We were never two weeks at a time from under the family roof, until we had passed middle life, and now that our years almost number half a century, we have never been from home for an interval of two months. And our historical reading, as well as our habits of life, may have unfitted us to appreciate the communist and fusion theories of Fanny Wright, Owen and Mr. Greely. In attempting to vindicate and justify the ways of God and Nature, against the progressiveness of Black Republicanism in America, and Red Republicanism in Europe, we would forewarn the reader that we are a prejudiced witness. We are the enthusiastic admirer of the social relations exhibited in the histories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The social relations established in Deuteronomy, and 25th chapter Leviticus, and as practiced by the Jews to this day, elicit our unfeigned admiration and approval. Moses is with us the Prince of Legislators, and the twenty-fifth Leviticus the best of political platforms. The purity of the family seems to be his paramount object.

Homer, too, especially in his Odyssey, charms and enchains us with his beautiful descriptions of family felicity and family purity. As conquest and commerce introduced wealth and corrupted morals and manners, the family was corrupted and disrupted, as it is now, at the most commercial points in the North. But we have only to pass over to Italy, and there, from the earliest days of tradition until the extinction of liberty, began by Sylla and Marius, and ended by Augustus, we find the family a pure, a holy and sacred thing. From that era till slavery arose in the South, the family never resumed its dignity and importance. Feudalism did something to correct the loose morality of the Augustan Age, but it adopted its colonial slavery, relaxed family ties, and never drew together in sufficiently close connection and subordination, the materials which nature dictates should form the human hive or social circle.

Aristotle understood this subject thoroughly; and it seems to have been generally so well comprehended in his day, that he takes little trouble to explain and expound it. He commences his treatise on Politics and Economics with the family, and discourses first of the slaves as a part of the family. He assumes that social life is as natural to man as to bees and herds; and that the family, including husband, wife, children, and slaves, is the first and most natural development of that social nature. As States are composed of families, and as a sound and healthy whole cannot be formed of rotten parts, he devotes much of his treatise to family education and government. Would that modern statesmen, philosophers and politicians, would become practical like Aristotle, and not attempt to build social and political edifices, until they were sure of the soundness of the materials of which they would construct them. As all human beings live for the greatest part of their lives in families, it is all important that they should look to the wise arrangement of this old and universal institution.

We wish to prove that the great movement in society, known under various names, as Communism, Socialism, Abolitionism, Red Republicanism and Black Republicanism, has one common object: the breaking up of all law and government, and the inauguration of anarchy, and that the destruction of the family is one of the means in which they all concur to attain a common end. We shall quote only from Stephen Pearle Andrews, because he is by far the ablest and best informed of American Socialists and Reformers, and because he cites facts and authorities to show that he presents truly the current thought and the general intention. Mr. Andrews is a Massachusetts gentleman, who has lived at the South. He has been an Abolition Lecturer. He is the disciple of Warren, who is the disciple of Owen of Lanark and New Harmony. Owen and Warren are Socrates and Plato, and he is the Great Stygarite, as far surpassing them, as Aristotle surpassed Socrates and Plato. But it is not merely his theories on which we rely; he cites historical facts that show that the tendency and terminus of all abolition is to the sovereignty of the individual, the breaking up of families, and no-government. He delivered a series of lectures to the elite of New York on this subject, which met with approbation, and from which we shall quote. He established, or aided to establish, Free Love Villages, and headed a Free Love Saloon in the city of New York, patronized and approved by the "Higher classes." He is indubitably the philosopher and true exponent of Northern Abolitionism. With this assertion, which none who read his Science of Society we think will deny, we proceed to quote from his able and beautiful lectures, embodied in a publication entitled "Science of Society." Our first quotation is from his first lecture and the first chapter of his work:

Every age is a remarkable one, no doubt, for those who live in it. When immobility reigns most in human affairs, there is still enough of movement to fix the attention, and even to excite the wonder of those who are immediately in proximity with it. This natural bias in favor of the period with which we have most to do, is by no means sufficient, however, to account for the growing conviction, on all minds, that the present epoch is a marked transition from an old to a new order of things. The scattered rays of the gray dawn of the new era date back, indeed, beyond the lifetime of the present generation. The first streak of light that streamed through the dense darkness of the old regime was the declaration by Martin Luther of the right of private judgment in matters of conscience. The next, which shed terror upon the old world, as a new portent of impending revolutions, was the denial, by Hampden, Sidney, Cromwell, and others, of the divine right of kings, and the assertion of inherent political rights in the people themselves. This was followed by the American Declaration of Independence, the establishment of a powerful Democratic Republic in the western world upon the basis of that principle, followed by the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, the Re-action, and the apparent death in Europe of the Democratic idea. Finally, in our day, comes the red glare of French Socialism, at which the world is still gazing with uncertainty whether it be some lurid and meteoric omen of fearful events, or whether it be not the actual rising of the Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His wings; for there are those who profoundly and religiously believe that the solution of the social problem will be the virtual descent of the New Jerusalem—the installation of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth.

First in the religious, then in the political, and finally in the social relations of men, new doctrines have thus been broached, which are full of promise to the hopeful, and full of alarm and dismay to the timid and conservative. This distinction marks the broadest division in the ranks of mankind. In church, and state, and social life, the real parties are the Progressionists and the Retrogressionists—those whose most brilliant imaginings are linked with the future, and those whose sweetest remembrances bind them in tender associations to the past. Catholic and Protestant, Whig and Democrat, Anti-Socialist and Socialist, are terms which, in their origin, correspond to this generic division; but no sooner does a new classification take place than the parties thus formed are again subdivided, on either hand, by the ever-permeating tendency, on the one side toward freedom, emancipation, and progress, and toward law, and order, and immobility on the other.

Hitherto the struggle between conservatism and progress has seemed doubtful. Victory has kissed the banner, alternately, of either host. At length the serried ranks of conservatism falter. Reform, so called, is becoming confessedly more potent than its antagonist. The admission is reluctantly forced from pallid lips that revolutions—political, social and religious—constitute the programme of the coming age. Reform, so called, for weal or woe, but yet Reform, must rule the hour. The older constitutions of society have outlived their day. No truth commends itself more universally to the minds of men now, than that thus set forth by Carlyle: "There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all. That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there—this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final! It is a time to make the dullest man consider, and ask himself, Whence he came? Whither he is bound? A veritable 'New Era,' to the foolish as well as to the wise." Nor is this state of things confined to Europe. The agitations in America may be more peaceful, but they are not less profound. The foundations of old beliefs and habits of thought are breaking up. The old guarantees of order are fast falling away. A veritable "new era" with us, too, is alike impending and inevitable.