e, and describes "Icaria" as "a Promised Land, an Eden, an
Elysium, a new terrestrial Paradise." The plot of the book is simple in
the extreme, and its literary merit is not very great. The writer
represents that he met, in London, a nobleman, Lord William Carisdall,
who, having by chance heard of Icaria and the wonderful and strange
customs and form of government of its inhabitants, visited the country.
Lord William kept a diary in which he described all that he saw in this
wonderland. This record, we are told, the traveler had permitted to be
published through the medium of his friend, and under his editorial
supervision. The first part of the book contains an attractive account
of the cooeperative system of the Icarians, their communistic government,
equality of the sexes, and high standard of morality. The second part is
devoted to an account of the history of Icaria, prior to and succeeding
the revolution of 1782, when the great national hero, Icar, established
Communism.

The book created a tremendous furore in France. It appealed strongly to
the discontented masses, and it is said that by 1847 Cabet had no less
than four hundred thousand adherents among the workers of France. The
numerical strength of revolutionary movements is almost invariably
greatly exaggerated, however, and it is not likely that the figures
cited are exceptional in this regard. It is possible, _cum grano
salis_, to accept the figures only by remembering that a very
infinitesimal proportion of these were adherents in the sense of being
ready to follow Cabet's leadership, as subsequent events showed. When
the clamor rose for a practical test of the theories set forth so
alluringly, Cabet visited Robert Owen in England and sought advice as to
the best site for such an experiment. Owen recommended Texas, then
recently admitted into the union of states and anxious for settlers.
Cabet accepted Owen's advice and called for volunteers to form the
"advance guard" of settlers, the number responding being pitifully,
almost ludicrously, small. Still, the effect of the book was very great,
and it served to fire the flagging zeal of those workers for social
regeneration whose hearts must otherwise have become deadly sick from
long-deferred hopes.

The confluence of these two streams of Communist propaganda represented
by Weitling and Cabet constituted the real Communist "movement" of
1840-1847. Its organized expression was the Communist League, a secret