Chapter 6: return to New York journalism
- Continued confidence in socialistic experiments -- praises Kossuth -- MacREADYeady riots -- antislavery agitation -- General Taylor elected president -- Greeley, Dana, and the tribune -- Opposes carpenters' strike -- favors free speech and free press -- protective tariff -- land reform -- Pacific Railroad
Dana arrived at New York in March, 1849, by the steamship United States, which was twenty-eight days on the passage, and this gave rise to the fear that she was lost. Shortly after his return he expressed the hope, in some notes for the Tribune, that certain French industrial associations, which were thought to embody the better part of the revolution, would survive, but one after another they disappeared, and were finally followed by the failure of Icaria, a socialistic society established by a Frenchman named Cabet, near Nauvoo, in Illinois. The fatal defects in all these societies, like that of Brook Farm, were insufficient capital and an insufficient number of the right kind of socialists. But Dana, although discouraged, did not give up his interest in the subject. In an editorial on the approaching election in France, he wrote:1
Let no man be frightened by the terms “social” and “Socialist” as adopted by the Democratic journals of France. They are Socialists not as propagandists of any societary theory or system, but as believers together, that the condition of the toiling, suffering millions ought to be, may be
