Utopias ; or, Schemes of Social Improvement. From Sir Thomas
More to Karl Marx. By the Rev. F. Kauffmann, M.A. (C. K. Paul and Co.)—The author has attempted too much,—not, we believe, from want of ability to deal with his subject, but from want of space. A reader who is quite unfamiliar with the subject may get some little idea of it from these pages, but they will prove unsatisfactory to any other. And if we were to be content with sketches—and the plan of the work, embracing so much, made this necessary—why no men- tion of Plato's " Republic," the first and grandest of all Socialist con- ceptions? And why nothing, or next to nothing, about the most practical part of the subject, the realised " Utopias," which are to be seen actually existing, in a condition more or less prosperous, and anew or less—rather less than more—approaching the ideal, in the United States ? Mr. Kauffmann quotes a book, Nordhoff's " Communis- tic Societies of the United States," which gives the most recent account of a favourable yet candid observer of these phenomena ; but does this
only once, and then gives no particulars about the community to which the quotation refers. The practical far exceeds the historical or the
literary interest of these experiments, and we should have been glad to have heard more about this part of the subject.
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