an it had been before. The group of young volunteers,
however, reached America. After heart-rending disillusionment in the
swamps and forests of Louisiana and on the raw prairies of Texas, they
made their way back to New Orleans in time to meet Cabet and four
hundred Icarians, who arrived early in 1849. The Gallic instinct for
factional differences soon began to assert itself in repeated division
and subdivision on the part of the idealists. One-half withdrew at New
Orleans to work out their individual salvation. The remainder followed
Cabet to the deserted Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, where vacant
houses offered immediate shelter and where they enjoyed an interval of
prosperity. The French genius for music, for theatricals, and for
literature relieved them from the tedium that characterized most
co-operative colonies. Soon their numbers increased to five hundred by
accessions which, with few exceptions, were French.

But Cabet was not a practical leader. His pamphlet published in German
in 1854, entitled _If I had half a million dollars_, reveals the
naivete of his mind. He wanted to find money, not to make it. The
society soon became involved in a controversy in which Cabet's
immediate following were outnumbered. The minority petulantly stopped
working but continued to eat. "The majority decided that those who
would not work should not eat ... and gave notice that those who
absented themselves from labor would be cut off from rations."[20] As
a result, Cabet, in 1856, was expelled from his own Icaria! With 170
faithful adherents he went to St. Louis, and there a few days later he
died. The minority buried their leader, but their faith in communal
life survived this setback. At Cheltenham, a suburb of St. Louis, they
acquired a small estate, where proximity to the city enabled the
members to get work. Here they lived together six years before
division disrupted them permanently.

At Nauvoo in the meantime there had been other secessions, and the
property, in 1857, was in the hands of a receiver. The plucky and
determined remnant, however, removed to Iowa, where on the prairie
near Corning they planted a new Icaria. Here, by hard toil and in
extreme poverty, but in harmony and contentment, the communists lived
until, in 1876, the younger members wished to adopt advanced methods
in farming, in finance, and in management. The older men, with wisdom
acquired through bitter experience, refused to alter their methods.