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Updated: May 29, 2025
More, too, denied privacy and ruled an absolute community of goods, at any rate, and so, coming to the Victorian Utopias, did Cabet. But Cabet's communism was one of the "free store" type, and the goods were yours only after you had requisitioned them. That seems the case in the "Nowhere" of Morris also.
I have heard that Cabet developed at Nauvoo a dictatorial spirit, and that this produced in time a split in the society. The leader and his adherents went off to St. Louis, where he died in 1856. Meantime some of the members were already settled in Iowa, and those who remained at Nauvoo after Cabet's desertion or flight dispersed; the property was sold, and the Illinois colony came to an end.
One cannot help respecting the handful of men and women who, in the wilderness of Iowa, have for more than twenty years faithfully endeavored to work out the problem of Communism according to the system he left them; but Cabet's own writings persuade me that he was little more than a vain dreamer, without the grim patience and steadfast unselfishness which must rule the nature of one who wishes to found a successful communistic society.
For nothing appears to me more certain than that a communistic society, to be successful, needs above all things to have the training, mental and physical, which comes out of a life of privation, spent in the patient accumulation of property by the labors of the members. Moreover, in Cabet's first paragraph he shows contempt for one of the vital principles of a communistic society.
That, indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian speculations old and new; the Republic and Laws of Plato, and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit Altruria, and Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western Republic, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Campanella's City of the Sun, are built, just as we shall build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete emancipation of a community of men from tradition, from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servitude possessions entail.
The reply of the workingmen in 1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria, "a new terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if you please, contains this interesting objection: "Because although those comrades who intend to emigrate with Cabet may be eager Communists, yet they still possess too many of the faults and prejudices of present-day society by reason of their past education to be able to get rid of them at once by joining Icaria."
Amongst the arguments which are advanced by socialists none is more often met than the alleged socialist teaching and practice of the early Christians. For instance, Cabet's Voyage en Icarie contains the following passage: 'Mais quand on s'enfonce sérieusement et ardemment dans la question de savoir comment la société pourrait être organisée en Démocratie, c'est-
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