The Icarians labored and planted with success at Nauvoo; they established trades of different kinds, as well as manufactures; and Cabet set up a printing-office, and issued a number of books and pamphlets in French and German, intended to attract attention to the community. Among these, a pamphlet of twelve pages, entitled, "Wenn ich $500,000 hätte" ("If I had half a million dollars"), which bears date Nauvoo, 1854, gives in some detail his plans and desires. It is a statement of what he could and would achieve for a commune if some one would start him with a capital of half a million; and the fact that four years after he came to Nauvoo he should still have spent his time in such an impracticable dream, shows, I think, that he was not a fit leader for the enterprise. For nothing appears to me more certain than that a communistic society, to be successful, needs above all things to have the training, mental and physical, which comes out of a life of privation, spent in the patient accumulation of property by the labors of the members. Moreover, in Cabet's first paragraph he shows contempt for one of the vital principles of a communistic society. "If I had five hundred thousand dollars," he writes, "this would open to us an immense credit, and in this way vastly increase our means." But it is absolutely certain that debt is the bane of such societies; and the remnant of Icarians who have so tenaciously and bravely held together in Iowa would be the first to confess this, for they suffered hardships for years because of debt. If he had half a million, Cabet goes on to say, he would be able to establish his commune upon a broad and generous scale; and he draws a pretty picture of dwellings supplied with gas and hot and cold water; of factories fitted up on the largest scale; of fertile farms under the best culture; of schools, high and elementary; of theatres, and other places of amusement; of elegantly kept pleasure-grounds, and so on. Alas for the dreams of a dreamer! I turned over the leaves of his pamphlet while wandering through the muddy lanes of the present Icaria, on one chilly Sunday in March, with a keen sense of pain at the contrast between the comfort and elegance he so glowingly described and the dreary poverty of the life which a few determined men and women have there chosen to follow, for the sake of principles which they hold both true and valuable.