Twenty heads of families were notified to quit February 1, 1827; March 21 there was an exodus of about eighty persons, who took a steamboat for the upper Ohio, and March 28 the _Gazette_ contained an editorial admitting the failure of New Harmony, the central community, but maintaining that the auxiliary societies were successful. The reason assigned for the collapse was that “the members were too various in their feelings, and too dissimilar in their habits, to govern themselves harmoniously as one community.” Owen delivered a farewell address to the citizens, May 26. He spoke with patient forbearance of the element that had joined the community merely to become a burden upon him; but he was severe upon his associates who had undertaken the educational work of the society but had failed to organize such schools as he had expected. He had wished the children to be “educated in similar habits, dispositions, and feelings, and be brought up truly as members of one large family, without a single discordant feeling.” If the schools had not proved ineffectual, he believed that even with the heterogeneous mass that had collected on his lands a successful society could have been founded. However, turning from these unpleasant reflections, with characteristic optimism, he declared that “the social system is now firmly established; the natural and easy means of forming communities have been developed by your past experience.... New Harmony is now, therefore, literally surrounded by independent communities, and applications are made almost daily by persons who come from far and near to be permitted to establish themselves in a similar manner.” The eight communities referred to were probably little more than tentative colonies, planted on Owen’s lands under lease. There is no evidence that a community organization was maintained for any length of time at Macluria or Feiba Peveli after the collapse at New Harmony village, and of the remainder of the eight to which Owen referred there is no further record. They vanished with the others, and presently passed to individual owners or lessees. Brown summarizes the disappearance of communism and the return of the old order in these words: “The greater part of the town was now resolved into individual lots; a grocery was established opposite the tavern; painted sign boards began to be stuck up on the buildings, pointing out places of manufacture and trade; a sort of wax figure and puppet show was opened at one of the boarding-houses, charging twenty-five cents for adults and twelve and a half for children; and everything went on in the old style.”