ca and try it out." There were so many of these
enterprises that their exact number is unknown. Many of them perished
in so brief a time that no friendly chronicler has even saved their
names from oblivion. But others lived, some for a year, some for a
decade, and few for more than a generation. They are of interest today
not only because they brought a considerable number of foreigners to
America, but also because in their history may be observed many of the
principles of communism, or socialism, at work under favorable
conditions. While the theory of Marxian socialism differs in certain
details from these communistic experiments, the foreign-made nostrums
so brazenly proclaimed today wherever malcontents are gathered
together is in essence nothing new in America. Communism was tried and
found wanting by the Pilgrim Fathers; since then it has been tried and
found wanting over and over again. Some of the communistic colonies,
it will appear, waxed fat out of the resources of their lands; but, in
the end, even those which were most fortunate and successful withered
away, and their remnants were absorbed by the great competitive life
that surrounded them.

There were two general types of these communities, the sectarian and
the economic. Frequently they combined a peculiar religious belief
with the economic practice of having everything in common. The
sectarians professed to be neither proselyters nor propagandists but
religious devotees, accepting communism as a physical advantage as
well as a spiritual balm, and seeking in seclusion and quiet merely to
save their own souls.

The majority of the religious communists came from Germany--the home,
also, of Marxian socialism in later years--where persecution was the
lot of innumerable little sects which budded after the Reformation.
They came usually as whole colonies, bringing both leaders and
membership with them.[15] Probably the earliest to arrive in America
were the Labadists, who denied the doctrine of original sin, discarded
the Sabbath, and held strict views of marriage. In 1684, under the
leadership of Peter Sluyter or Schluter (an assumed name, his original
name being Vorstmann), some of these Labadists settled on the Bohemia
River in Delaware. They were sent out from the mother colony in West
Friesland to select a site for the entire body, but it does not appear
that any others migrated, for within fifteen years the American
colony was reduced to eight men. Sluy