AN EXPERIMENT IN COMMUNISM.

Evening Post, Volume LVII, Issue 23, 28 January 1899, Page 10 (Supplement)

AN EXPERIMENT IN COMMUNISM.

An earnest attempt to maintain a practical Utopia has just come to a hopeless end at Newcastle-on-Tyne. Some years ago a party of Communists, many of them foreigners, and all of them strongly believing in the working theories of the Free Communist Association, purchased an extensive settlement at Clousden Hill. At one time there were 30 resident Communists here, and the little colony were long given ground for believing that theory and practise would come out triumphant. The chief anchor of hope was horticulture. The area under cultivation— on which, of course, every man would toi\ equally and share profits equally — must have been pretty extensive, for during the past season eight tons of tomatoes alone have been harvested, to say nothing of large areas devoted to cucumbers, roses, cabbages, etc. But the weak link in the chain has been the lack of capable management. Business has been going from bad to worse, and now the colony numbers only three survivors. This forlorn hope are making legal arrangements to pay off the shares in the property owned by their despairing comrades, and they will then run the concern on co-operative lines. As an experiment in " Free Communism " involving liberty, equality, a common store, a common kitchen, and equal sharing of profits, the Clousden Hill colony is a dead failure. Much interest has been centred upon the attempt at ideal industrialism in the North.