America the French philosopher's naïve, social regimen of reducing
the world of men to simple units called phalanxes, whose barrack-like
routine should insure plenty, equality, and happiness. Horace Greeley,
with characteristic, erratic eagerness, pounced upon the new gospel,
and Brisbane obtained at once a wide circle of sympathetic readers
through the _Tribune_. Thirty-four phalanxes were organized in a short
time, most of them with an incredible lack of foresight. They usually
lasted until the first payment on the mortgage was due, though a few
weathered the buffetings of fortune for several years. 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. Étienne 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