Don't Question the Revolution

from "A Knot of Dreamers"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

We had left the the rusty iron frame-work of society behind us. We had broken through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary tread-mill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stept down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose -- a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with its generosity -- to give up whatever we had hertofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles, on which human society has all along been based.