COMMUNISM.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XXXXI, Issue 7046, 6 October 1900, Page 2

COMMUNISM.

Some short time since we were informed that the communistic settlement on the Murray River had been found to be a total failure, and at the time we wondered why the fact had not been discovered much sooner. Those settlements, like every other run on communistic principles, bad, from the outset, no hope of long life, although having the State as a step -mother —perhaps a frigid one. When he visited the colony some years ago, Mr Michael Davitt, M.P., took a keen interest in these settlements, and his acute observations ; are given publicity in Ms book, " Life and Progress of Australasia." The inhabitants of the settlements were not carefully selected ; the result (it would have been the same in any case, probably) was disastrous. The laboring man and the city clerk went off together to carve out homes on virgin soD, and for a short tune they bore with each other under the novel conditions. Then, as always happens, there were little disagreements, and first one, then another, became dissatisfied, until they all discovered that the communistic nrinciple is very well in theory, * but that to put it into successful practice is a task beyond the power of man. Many attempts to found an " Utopia " have been made, but while men and women are built on the old plan such attempts can only end in failure. The most agreeable community (at the start) can in a short space be transformed into a bear garden by a single cantankerous individual, and, unfortunately, you oan always depend upon such an one being in evidence wherever you go. And once the seeds of dissension are sown a prolific harvest may be expected. The trouble may have trivial origin — a dispute, perhaps, over the communistic wheelbarrow, or shovel, !or pickaxe, , or something equally sublunary — but it becomes far-reaching in its effect; disintegration swiftly follows. While the world is a world we may look for chimerical schemes, but that there will ever be established a settlement the inhabitants of which will live harmoniously in common, is improbable, unless Providence supplies special men and women for the purpose.