This spirit was encouraged by Ludloe, who failed not to comment on my narrative, and multiply deductions from my principles.
He taught me to ascribe the evils that infest society to the errors of opinion.

The absurd and unequal distribution of power and property gave birth to poverty and riches, and these were the sources of luxury and crimes.

These positions were readily admitted; but the remedy for these ills, the means of rectifying these errors were not easily discovered.
We have been inclined to impute them to inherent defects in the moral constitution of men: that oppression and tyranny grow up by a sort of natural necessity, and that they will perish only when the human species is extinct.

Ludloe laboured to prove that this was, by no means, the case: that man is the creature of circumstances: that he is capable of endless improvement: that his progress has been stopped by the artificial impediment of government: that by the removal of this, the fondest dreams of imagination will be realized.
From detailing and accounting for the evils which exist under our present institutions, he usually proceeded to delineate some scheme of Utopian felicity, where the empire of reason should supplant that of force: where justice should be universally understood and practised; where the interest of the whole and of the individual should be seen by all to be the same; where the public good should be the scope of all activity; where the tasks of all should be the same, and the means of subsistence equally distributed.
No one could contemplate his pictures without rapture.

By their comprehensiveness and amplitude they filled the imagination.