186 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
ported illnesses to collect their insurance. The entire experience
strengthened his determination to fight local autonomy with all
the resources at his command and to resist all proposals to settle
controversial issues by mere majority vote. He concluded that it
was his solemn duty to hold all authority in his own hands and
to provide unity through a constitution which would cover every
last detail.
Early in September, 1852, Weitling was seriously ill with ty
phoid fever, and he did not recover fully for several months. By
November, he was able to go to the farm of a friend at Forkland¬
ing, in New York State, to recuperate. Three weeks later, he
moved to Philadelphia to live in the Workers' Hall and to be near
his doctor, a homeopath. He became an ardent advocate of home
opathy, remarking on one occasion that it could do less harm than
other types of medical treatment, and that nature would have to
do the healing after all. He learned "how much a mere change of
scene can do for one suffering from his nerves" and presently re
ported to his friends that he was able to write again for two hours
a day, but that he could not yet walk any distance without be
coming completely exhausted. His health was not fully restored
until the end of December. Meantime, his movement was seriously
handicapped at a critical period in its history by his long illness.
Weitling made five additional trips into the West, mostly on
colony business. Part of the way he traveled on emigrant trains
filled with newly arrived Europeans on their way into the interior,
and thus he became interested in advocating better treatment for
emigrants. Without food and washrooms, this "homeless, traveling
proletariat" was packed into dirty cars and subjected en route to
all kinds of shameful treatment.
In the spring of 1853, Weitling addressed a labor rally in Louis
ville; in Cincinnati, he visited the Turner Hall and the rooms of
the Freimännerverein and baptized several children at Pentecost.
He sampled New Orleans claret in St. Louis and urged local so
cieties to stock it for their bars. Back in Philadelphia, he was
honored by a serenade from a chorus of fifty recruited from the