over a dozen persons, in five or six families, withdrew from Icaria and moved to Sonoma Co., California, where they bought eight hundred acres of land and have formed a commune. They are said to be prospering as fruit-growers. Icaria talks of joining them in California with a view to the fusion of the communes. Peron (a prominent member) says they would like the climate better than that of Iowa, and would also find fruit-growing more congenial than general farming. It would give more time for mental culture, and would admit of a more agreeable style of living. The society publishes a monthly paper called the _Communiste-Libertaire_—which is written and printed by Peron. If there had been harmony, and no division, I think that Icaria would have been prosperous to-day—with perhaps several hundred members. As things now stand it is hard to foretell the fate of either branch. If the one goes to California, the other may have a slow, steady growth in Iowa. A good many young people lack the devotion to the principle of communism necessary to keep them in the society, and they withdraw from time to time. The difficulty of Frenchmen living harmoniously in a commune seems the great source of disaster. Spite of his theory to the contrary, a Frenchman has a great deal of “individualism,” and not a great deal of patience and forbearance.... It just occurs to me to say one thing more. The Icarians are _good American citizens_. Cabet and all his comrades took out naturalization papers, and were all ardent abolitionists! They voted the first Republican ticket (Fremont) in 1856, and Mr. Marchand tells me that he has voted for every Republican president since. The “old folks” in New Icaria are still solidly Republican in politics; but Mr. Peron and his friends in the other community have been voting the _Greenback_ ticket for a year or two. They say that it seems to them that the Greenback party represents the laboring classes in their struggle against great corporate and moneyed monopolies; and it is in the spirit of agitators that they support the Greenback party, and not so much because they expect anything definite from that party. “Peron is very brilliant and epigrammatic in conversation.... He is a scientist, a positivist philosopher, an internationalist, somewhat of an avowed anarchist, and a terrible proletarian. In short, he is a character whose acquaintance I enjoyed making—Gérard, Marchand, Peron, Fugier, Sauva, and Bettannier are the sort of men who figure in French history or in Hugo’s novels. Their tremendous individuality seems to me ill at ease in an obscure little commune where, theoretically, no man is more than his fellow-man.”