. Brook Farm in
Massachusetts and the Wisconsin phalanx each endured six years, and
the North American phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted thirteen
years.

Icaria is a romantic sequel to the Owen and Fourier colonies. It
antedated Brisbane's revival of Fourierism, was encouraged by Owenism,
survived both, and formed a living link between the utopianism of the
early nineteenth century and the utilitarian socialism of the
twentieth. Etienne Cabet was one of those interesting Frenchmen whose
fertile minds and instinct for rapid action made France during the
nineteenth century kaleidoscopic with social and political events.
Though educated for the bar, Cabet devoted himself to social and
political reform. As a young man he was a director in that powerful
secret order, the Carbonari, and was elected to the French chamber of
deputies, but his violent attitude toward the Government was such that
in 1834 he was obliged to flee to London to escape imprisonment. Here,
unmolested, he devoted himself for five years to social and historical
research. He returned to France in 1839 and in the following year
published his _Voyage en Icarie_, a book that at once took its place
by the side of Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_. Cabet pictured in his
volume an ideal society where plenty should be a substitute for
poverty and equality a remedy for class egoism. So great was the
cogency of his writing that Icaria became more than a mere vision to
hundreds of thousands in those years of social ferment and democratic
aspirations. From a hundred sources the demand arose to translate the
book into action. Cabet thereupon framed a constitution and sought the
means of founding a real Icaria. After consulting Robert Owen, he
unfortunately fell into the clutches of some Cincinnati land
speculators and chose a site for his colony in the northeastern part
of Texas. When the announcement was made in his paper, _Le Populaire_,
the responses were so numerous that Cabet believed that "more than a
million cooeperators" were eager for the experiment.

In February, 1848, sixty-nine young men, all carefully selected
volunteers, were sent forth from Havre as the vanguard of the
contemplated exodus. But the movement was halted by the turn of great
events. Twenty days after the young men sailed, the French Republic
was proclaimed, and in the fervor and distraction of this immediate
political victory the new and distant Utopia seemed to thousands less
alluring th