This most cheerless of all communistic schemes fitly took its origin among those sunk in the most degraded materialism of the French Revolution. CHAPTER III. CABET. It is a relief to turn one’s attention to the plans of Étienne Cabet. They, at least, have the merit of not robbing life of all poetry, sentiment, and trust in something higher and better than food and drink. One might find life tolerable in one of Cabet’s communes; but every noble soul will acknowledge that if life’s ends and aims are all to centre in a full stomach and a warm cloak, then, indeed, life is not worth the living. Cabet, son of a cooper, was born in 1788 in Dijon. He received a good education, became a lawyer, and practised first in his native city, then in Paris. He was appointed attorney-general of Corsica in 1830, but lost his place in the following year on account of his opposition to government. He was elected member of the Chamber of Deputies shortly after, and returned to Paris. He devoted the remainder of his life to literature, politics, and communism. One of his principal works was a “Popular History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1830.”[25] In a journal which he published at that time, _Le Populaire_, he advocated moderate communistic principles, or Icarian principles, as they were afterwards called. He was condemned to two years’ imprisonment for an article in this paper, in which he attacked the king personally, but he was fortunate enough to escape imprisonment by flight to London. It was here he became acquainted with Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” from which he drew a large part of his inspiration. He returned to France in 1839, and published his “Voyage to Icaria,”[26] which he himself called a philosophical and social romance—_Roman philosophique et social_. The title indicates his dreamy character. He describes in this work a previously unknown country, not quite so large as France or England, but as populous and a thousand times more blessed. Peace, wisdom, joy, pleasures, and happiness reign there. Crimes are unknown. It is Icaria; “a second Promised Land, an Eden, an Elysium, a new terrestrial Paradise.”[27]