William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[86] His own experience had shown him that a prime obstacle to a successful social experiment was “the kind of persons who are naturally attracted to it, the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, and the good-for-nothing generally; who, finding themselves utterly out of place and a discount in the world as it is, rashly conclude that they are exactly fitted for the world as it ought to be.” He had found, too, that, where such experiments had been a success, they rested either on a communistic basis (and he would not admit that a member contributing $100,000 to an industrial enterprise should stand on the same footing as one who brings nothing, or that a skilled mechanic should receive no more than a ditcher) or on a “firm and deep religious basis.” In other words, the system as he took it up originally was a failure, and a scheme as he would have limited it would have been rejected by modern socialists.

Greeley was attracted by Sylvester Graham's dietetic doctrine that there is better food for man than the flesh of animals; that all stimulants, including tea and coffee, should be avoided; that bread should be made of unbolted flour, and that spices should not