TO CORRESPONDENTS.

Press, Volume LII, Issue 9125, 8 June 1895, Page 9

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

We cannot undertake to publish letters copies of which have been sent to any other journal. Correspondents desiring insertion of their communications should therefore send us a statement that they have not been and will not be forwarded to any other paper.

* FAILURE OF CO-OPERATIVE COMMUNISM. TO THE EDITOR OP THB PSESS. Slß,—lt is a lamentable thing tbat the New Australian expeiiment should have had such an ignominious ending, and the cause will be found to lie in the fact that no sect of founders could annul the laws of nature, and secure an equal distribution of health, wealth and happiness to every oue belonging to the community. In Democratic America there exists, along with enormous fortunes, the most abject poverty.

The greatest stigma attached to the Laneite settlement ia the treachery of one of the leaders absconding with the securities and land deeds. This comes of workingmen trusting frothy leaders of their own class, whose principal forte is talking and law-making, leaving any hard work severely alone. Somebody must be the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Charles Bradlaugh once said, "I am an Individualist, and if I were in Western Australia I should be still more Individualist." One hundred and twenty Socialistic Societies and schemes have been started in America alone, all more or less failures, and a writer on this in the Pall Mall Magazine observes—"No scheme of Socialism ever yet invented would prove a remedy for the poverty that exists, and believing as I do that these troubles are to a great extent wholly uncalled for by the economic cond tions, and are mainly due to financial reasons, it is impossible not to feel terrified a& the imminent danger which now exists of remedies being applied which, in their inevitable consequences, will intensely aggravate the disease."—Yours, &c, Waratah. Dunedin, June sth, 1895.