Right Place, Wrong People: The Personality Traits Which Caused the Failure of Blithedale Farm

"On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together, nor, perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. Persons of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might be called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a faggot. But, so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near, without finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward. We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every imaginable subject. Our bonds, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with, in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any farther. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity. We did not greatly care¾at least, I never did¾for the written constitution under which our millennium had commenced. My hope was, that, between theory and practice, a true and available mode of life might be struck out, and that, even should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in the trial would not have been wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the experience which makes men wise."--"A Modern Acadia" from The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne