inally founded by him in 1833), which was widely read by French workingmen, and from 1843 to 1847 he printed an Icarian almanac, a number of controversial pamphlets, a book on Christianity (Le vrai christianisme suivant Jésus Christ), which makes out Christ's mission to be to establish social equality, and contrasts primitive Christianity with modern ecclesiasticism to the disparagement of the latter, and a popular history of the French Revolutions from 1789 to 1830, in five volumes. In 1847 there were probably 400,000 adherents of the Icarian school, and Cabet turned his attention to a project for a real Icarian colony in America. Influenced by Owen he took a large tract of land in Texas, and sixty-nine men entered into a social contract, making Cabet the director-in-chief for the first ten years, and embarked from Havre, February 3, 1848, to take up land on the Red River in Texas. Cabet came later at the head of a second and smaller band. Texas did not prove to be the Utopia looked for, and, ravaged by disease, about one-third of the colonists returned to France, while the remainder went to Nauvoo in Hancock County, Ill., on a beautiful bend of the Mississippi River, where the Mormons had made a prosperous town before public opinion had driven them to Utah. The new community at Nauvoo prospered, but the location was regarded only as a temporary abiding-place, and Government land was acquired as early as 1852 in southwestern Iowa with a view to removing the community thither, which removal was finally accomplished in 1860 after a split in the community at Nauvoo, part going to Cheltenham, near Saint Louis. Cabet died suddenly of apoplexy in Saint Louis, November 8, 1856, a broken-hearted and disappointed man. He was the inspirer of modern communism at its best, and a writer of more literary merit and moral worth than the calumny which contemporaneous writers in France succeeded in weaving about his name would lead us to believe.
The failure of the Cheltenham colony, to which faction Cabet belonged, and which therefore was recognized in France as the true Icaria, came quickly, and the subsequent history of the Icarian community in Adams County, Iowa, was a record of struggle with debt until 1863, when war prices gave their agricultural products exceptional values. This temporary relief was followed by years of privation, declining numbers, and vanishing hopes. Another split occurred in 1879 between the younger and older members of the community, resulting in a division of the property, the younger element retaining the title and old habitat, while the ‘party of the elders’ accepted, with a bonus of $1500, the eastern division of the land, and organized a ‘New Icarian Community’ about one mile distant from the original village. Consult Shaw, Icaria: A Study in Communistic History (New York, 1884). See Communism.
CABINDA, kȧ-bēn′dȧ, or Kabinda. A seaport town of Portuguese West Africa, situated in latitude 5° 30′ S., and longitude 12° 10′ E., north of the estuary of the Congo (Map: Congo, etc., B 4). Since the introduction of a high tariff in Congo Free State, Cabinda has increased its commerce considerably. The name Cabinda is also applied to the entire portion of Portuguese West Africa situated north of the Congo.
CABINET (Fr. dim. of cabane, cabine, cabin, from Gael, and Irish caban, booth, hut, tent). Originally a small chamber set apart for some special purpose, such as private interviews, or study, or for collections of objects of art or curiosity. Sovereigns, ministers, and other high officials always had such cabinets in connection with larger reception-rooms. The term then came to be applied to the closets or show-cases in which the collections were kept in many such rooms; and even to the collections themselves. Cabinet collections are always supposed to be of small objects, and in this sense we speak of a cabinet picture. Cabinet-work is, by extension, the art of fine woodwork such as was used at one time largely in making the delicate decorative furniture for such rooms and collections.
CABINET (originally the closet or private apartment of a monarch, in which he consults with his most trusted advisers; hence, sometimes as a term of contempt, those who frequent the king's closet. See Cabinet above). The collective body of official advisers of the executive head of the State. In modern times the term is usually limited to the ministers, or heads of the great departments of State, in a constitutional government, but there is no reason for restricting it to such heads of departments, nor in refusing the title to the chosen advisers of an absolute monarch. The powers and functions of cabinets vary greatly, even in modern constitutional States.
In England the Cabinet is virtually a committee of the House of Commons, and it constitutes the supreme executive authority of the realm. In the United States the term is applied to the group of executive heads of the Federal Government, who have no authority outside of their several departments, and whose function as Cabinet ministers is purely an advisory one. The Cabinets of the two countries are alike in this respect, however, that they are composed exclusively of the members of the dominant political party—a result insured in England by the fact that the Cabinet, being a committee of the legislature, is dependent on a party majority for its continuance in office, and in the United States by the assumed obligation of the President to appoint only members of his own political party to the chief offices of the State. In the constitutional governments of the Continent of Europe and in Japan, as well as in the self-governing British colonies, the model of the English Cabinet has usually been followed. There being in those countries, with the exception of Finance and Switzerland, no opportunity for the popular will to express itself directly in the choice of the chief executive, popular government is conceived of as signifying parliamentary government, and the attempt is made, with varying degrees of success, to secure to the legislature a substantial measure of executive power through a responsible Cabinet, subject to its control. It is only in Great Britain that this transfer of executive power from the titular head of the State to the legislature has become complete, and that we find Cabinet Government in its most highly developed form. In France, however, it is practiced with a large measure of success, and is completely accepted in theory, whereas, in most of the Continental States which have adopted the device of the parliamentary Cabinet, it is still imperfectly accepted and applied.
