CHAPTER III.
CABET.
It is a relief to turn one’s attention to the plans of Étienne Cabet. They, at least, have the merit of not robbing life of all poetry, sentiment, and trust in something higher and better than food and drink. One might find life tolerable in one of Cabet’s communes; but every noble soul will acknowledge that if life’s ends and aims are all to centre in a full stomach and a warm cloak, then, indeed, life is not worth the living.
Cabet, son of a cooper, was born in 1788 in Dijon. He received a good education, became a lawyer, and practised first in his native city, then in Paris. He was appointed attorney-general of Corsica in 1830, but lost his place in the following year on account of his opposition to government. He was elected member of the Chamber of Deputies shortly after, and returned to Paris. He devoted the remainder of his life to literature, politics, and communism. One of his principal works was a “Popular History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1830.”[25] In a journal which he published at that time, Le Populaire, he advocated moderate communistic principles, or Icarian principles, as they were afterwards called. He was condemned to two years’ imprisonment for an article in this paper, in which he attacked the king personally, but he was fortunate enough to escape imprisonment by flight to London. It was here he became acquainted with Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” from which he drew a large part of his inspiration. He returned to France in 1839, and published his “Voyage to Icaria,”[26] which he himself called a philosophical and social romance—Roman philosophique et social. The title indicates his dreamy character. He describes in this work a previously unknown country, not quite so large as France or England, but as populous and a thousand times more blessed. Peace, wisdom, joy, pleasures, and happiness reign there. Crimes are unknown. It is Icaria; “a second Promised Land, an Eden, an Elysium, a new terrestrial Paradise.”[27]
The writer of the “Voyage to Icaria” represents that he met in London Lord William Carisdall, who found in Icaria the one truly happy people he had discovered in his travels. Lord William kept a journal, in which he described this wonder-land, and this, we are told, has been edited and revised for the public with his consent. The object is to show that communism is practicable and is the solution of all social problems. It contains an account of an ideal society, but one which Cabet thought he was able to establish. He made the attempt, choosing Texas as a place in which his ideals were to be realized. He secured the grant of a large tract of land on the Red River, and sent out several advance-guards of Icarians in 1848, who were, however, attacked by the yellow fever, and had disbanded before he arrived in New Orleans with a later detachment. He learned on his arrival that the Mormons had abandoned their settlement in Nauvoo, Ill., and set out for that place with his followers. While the Icarians were in Nauvoo they numbered, all told, at one time fifteen hundred. As Nordhoff, in his “Communistic Societies in the United States,” justly remarks, Cabet might have done something with such a large band, if he had had anything of a business head. But he lacked firmness and perseverance. They met with some success in cultivating their land, established shops, pursued trades, and set up a printing-office; but instead of rejoicing in his prosperity, and laboring to increase it, Cabet was dreaming what he might do if he had half a million, as is evinced by a publication which appeared about that time, entitled “Wenn ich $500,000 hätte”—“If I only had $500,000.” He described the theatre and the fine houses he would build, the gas-works he would found, the parks he would lay out, and showed, among other things, how he could then introduce hot and cold water in the houses.
To his description of this brochure Nordhoff adds: “Alas for the dreams of a dreamer! I turned over the leaves of his pamphlet while wandering through the present Icaria, on one chilly Sunday in March, with a keen sense of pain at the contrast between the comfort and elegance he so glowingly described and the dreary poverty of the life which a few determined men and women have there chosen to follow, for the sake of principles which they hold both true and valuable.”[28]
It is said that Cabet developed a dictatorial spirit in Nauvoo. This may be doubted. It is possible he only attempted to enforce measures without which he believed the commune must prove a failure. At any rate, a division took place among the Icarians. The colony at Nauvoo was broken up, and the members scattered, save fifty or sixty, who emigrated to Iowa. Cabet and his followers went to St. Louis, where he died in 1856. The emigrants to Iowa founded a settlement near Corning, on the Burlington and Missouri Railroad, which they called Icaria. They began with four thousand acres of land and a debt of $20,000. At first they had a hard struggle, being obliged to content themselves even with log-houses. When Mr. Nordhoff wrote his book, in 1874, the debt was paid, they lived in frame houses, and enjoyed a considerable degree of comfort. The community consisted of eleven families and sixty-five members, comprising twenty children and twenty-three voters. They had a good saw-mill and a grist-mill, and owned one thousand nine hundred and thirty-six acres of land, of which three hundred and fifty were under cultivation. They had one hundred and twenty cattle and five hundred sheep.
A friend[29] has lately spent a week in Icaria, and has kindly written me the following account of the present condition of the community, which has experienced noteworthy changes since Mr. Nordhoff paid it a brief visit a few years ago:
“Grinell, Ia., May 7, 1883.