Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 June 1876 — Co-operative Housekeeping in Loudon. [ARTICLE]

Co-operative Housekeeping in Loudon.

There has arisen close to the St. James Park station of the District Railway within the last year a fantastic building, in a Brobdingnagian style of architecture, a dozen stories high. Here Mr. A. H. Hankey has spent, or is spending, a quarter of a million of money to induce Englishmen to abandon the axiom that each man’s house is his castle, by showing how man had better abide in flats than in either, houses or castles; and in educating a select number of our upper classes in the theory and practice of a refined socialism. There are, or are to be, 350 sets of apartments, each set distinct, at an average rent of SSOO a year; but with a common kitchen, common coffee-room, saloon and reading-room, servants supplied by the management, and fixed charges for everything. The experiment is a very interesting one, and ought to succeed, tried on such a scale, amid a population which affords such an area tor experiment as that of the wealthier, unsettled classes of London. The main difficulty will, we imagine, arise’in the organization of service. The Briton may relinquish his regard for his house, but will hold longer to the wish to have his own household about him. —London Spectator. The Philadelphia pickpockets say that they never knew people to hold to their wallets the way they do this centennial year. “ -Gladstone recently cut down a beech tree thirteen feet in circumference in six hours. That’s the sort of feller he is.