sinians, looking across the street at nothing with their poor lacklustre eyes. What should they do? Mr. Nash had given them baths. But they could not swim all day! The city had given schools, but they could not go to school all the year! Poor wretches, afternoon had come, and supper-time had not come, what room was there in those heated tenements, what play for them out-doors? And these miserable, pseudo-Abyssinian children were of the same blood as Phelim and Honora and Owen. Nay, maybe they were their cousins. Maybe; and what is certain, dear reader, is that they were your brothers and sisters, and were mine!

So I drank Mary's tea from her wonderful new service of "chaney." I eat, in the right order, of bread, toast, gingerbread, pie, and tea-cake; I praised the children's berries and had a quart put up for Polly and the children; I kissed the little ones good by, I shook hands with the eldest, cried "All right !" to Phelim as he stopped the horse-car, entered it, crossed to the steam station, and in thirty-seven minutes and nineteen seconds, from house to house, I was at home in Polly's arms.

They did not sell season tickets on the Great Northern; they sold package tickets, and for his six hundred and twenty-four passages yearly Mike had to pay sixty-two dollars and forty cents. His interest money on his house was forty-six dollars and fifty cents. These two amounts made one hundred and eight dol

—་་་་་--[II- "-- ་ ་་-

120

SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.

lars and ninety cents a year against the three dollars a week which Mike used to pay for two nasty and deadly rooms over the open drain in Back-street-court-placé. He had, thrown in beside, the steady improvement in his property, his children's health, the value of their work, as it appeared in the garden and the results of the garden, and, above all, the feeling that no man was his master, that he was independent, was subduing the world, and in short was one of the governing classes. Mike was not the only workman in Naguadavick who saw the advantage of that line of life.

"This is certainly better," I said to myself, as I rode into town, "than having to crowd Mike and Mary and their friends as we did five years ago. All our ministry at large, and all our home missions, and all our provident associations, and all our relief organizations, and all our soup kitchens, were but a poor apology for such a success as this. We are getting back here on the true American principle, where every rood of ground supports its man,' woman, and child, nay, is it not the principle of the prophet: Every man shall sit under his own vine and figtree'?"

"We must have land enough too,” I said. (( In a circle of fifteen miles' radius around Naguadavick there are about four hundred and fifty thousand acres. So many acre homesteads, supposing an acre were the average. That gives homes for two million persons, and Naguadavick will not need two million inhabi

tants, while there are only one million people in the whole State."

And so I returned home.

To live thus, near Boston, and to let our laboring men live thus, we need to provide for the laboring men as carefully as we have already provided for the men who live on salaries. For this, we need express trains from points so distant that land is yet cheap. And we need unswerving regularity in the administration of these trains. These requisites granted, such an arrangement becomes a blessing to Boston, to the neighborhood, to the laborer, and to the railroad or common carrier, who intervenes among them all.

6

HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.

VINELAND is a village of about three thousand inhabitants, closely surrounded by farms, where there reside nine thousand more, thirty-five miles from Philadelphia, on the way to Cape May.

Eight years ago no person lived in the village thus occupied at the present time, and hardly six families on the lands now used for farms.

No extensive manufacture has called these people together. There has been no discovery of mines, mineral spring, or other marvel. The railroad gives them no new facility, or any which is not shared by a dozen other places. Nor is the soil any better than in a hundred others.

Vineland has become what it is, a busy, thriving place of twelve thousand people, by the steady development of two or three simple principles, which might be tried anywhere, if there were a scale sufficiently large for the experiment.

I contribute to this book, therefore, a brief study of these principles as they have been illustrated by the growth of Vineland. For I believe that in the application of such principles to the settlement of small towns as cities of refuge near our large cities is the

salvation of our large cities to be found. I believe these principles are of general application, and that the success of Vineland need be, by no means, exceptional. They are, substantially, the same principles, which, in the sketch here attempted of the life of the people of Naguadavick, are relied upon for the success of the colonies which they established in their railroad villages. As I am well aware, however, that the possibility of founding such villages on these principles will be doubted, I am glad to sustain it by a sketch of the origin and success of Vineland. I ask any person who is incredulous to go and visit that town.

First, and chiefly, Vineland relies,—as the imagined towns of Rosedale and Aboo Goosh rely, on what I may call the natural passion for holding LAND, and the beneficial effects of FREEHOLD on the Freeholder. We have forgotten these effects in America, simply because land was to be got for the asking in our fathers' days, and is to be got for the asking now in many regions. Therefore, in a social condition formed by men who were almost all freeholders, we neglect the advantages of FREEHOLD as we do those of air, water, light, and the salt sea. But, as we pile people together in cities, as we separate them from their mother earth, as we make them tenants of one and another landlord, we do our best to unmake the vir tues of two centuries' growth, which sprang from the holding of one's own home in fee-simple. The freeholders of New England, in 1775, were a different