New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1872-05-01
TIE My MORING.

cumulative evidence of the inexpressible stu
pidity of man. 1t is hard to comprehend why
we should, in the first place, nourish passion
for doing foolish things; or why, at last, we
should do them in the foolishest possible way.
1t is a fixed fact that occasionally our places
of residence must be changed; but why, on or
about given day of given month, oil IN
doors should be turned outdoors, and families
should fit en- mdSSe, is what no system OF
philosophy OF of economy can give us reason
for. This May Moving with its enormous
cost, its incompatible annOyances, and lts
ruinous influence upon health and comfort, Is
a dspensation to which men could be brought
to submit only in droves, and because IL
has hardened into habit. The custom
is one which ought, in the nature of things,
to be specially abhorrent to all OF Anglo
Saxon lineage.
House and home are seldom separated
in our common speech, and in our ordi-
nary thought; but there arc thousands OF
families in this city who, while keeping up the
general features of a home by keeping to-
gether change those homes annually, if not
oftener. TO say nothing of the material waste,
of the physical Inconvenience, and of the
almost intolerable irritation, how can we help
deploring the lack of refined sentiment which
this Spring topsy furry impliesl We suffer
all the horrors of a cOn6agration without the
merits of maItyrdom; for, although we may
be partially ruined and in such need OF help
as to give us a claim upon the hberality or
our fellow creatures, we get no benefits at the
theater, and no sOlace from the purses OF the
benevolent. We weller in ruin, with the frag-
ments of our household gods heaped high
about us, and we are only laughed at for all
our sorrows. If our life had only been dislo-
Gated by an earthquake, succor would have
come to us from near and far. Meetings would
have been held in Our behalf, and resolutions
moved and seconded and rhetorically sup
ported and passed, mem. con. All the men OF
millions would have given us something; or,
if they had refused, would they not have been
execrated in the newspapers for their parsi-
mOny? But he who suffers by moving moves
nobody-not mschance Of his EFFORTS grOat
from the most liberal. He has been swindled
and robbed and miscellaneOusly humbugged
by profane and noisy carmen-and who con-
does with himf Books which he loved have
vanished; easy chairs to which he was at
tached have been dislOcated beyond the art of
the joiner; the picture of his grandmother has
cruel hole in it, and the rest of the
family gallery is reduced to state almost
beyond repairs; little articles of virtue and
bigOtry dear as mementOes of old friends, are
now good for nothing but to macadamize the
highway much is missing, and there is much
which it would have been pleasanter to miss
altogether. The dietetic regularity Of the
house Is gone forever. For many nights there
is no balminess, at least upon a bedstead.
The largest hole promises to be that which
has been made in the purse. 1t may be May
again before all these ravages are repaired.
1t may be June before tradesmen find out
where you, their most liberal customer, reside;
and the stupidity of the butcher, the baker,
and the milkman will give you ideas, not at
all to its credit. of the human intellect, and
especially of the faculty of memory; your
friends, after uncivilly neglecting you,
will confidently plead ignorance of your
and only the duns and the bores
and distant connections from tho rural
districts will find you out In the Summer
you will go to the seaside. In the Fall
you will be driven crazy by stove-and-fuel
for cold weather. In the Winter,
all your children will have the measles. In
the Spring you will move again. What were
the sufierings of Kion to theseq
We have now set forth, to the best of our
ability the minor miseries of moving; but to
the moral points of the case we feel that we
can do but spare justice. Our opinion is that
a house is not like home until we have
lived in it long enough to love it, and
specially to affect particular apartments and
corners and exterior aspects OF the familiar
room in which you have SO
often broken bread with the best beloved;
the room in which you have, evening after
evening, gathered about you the children; the
room to which they were sent for their inno-
cent slumbers the room in which they were
born, or in which, alas some of them died:
or to leave the interior, the outside physiognomy
of the house, the windows, the stOOp, the street,
the vis-a-piS structure of your neighbOr-your
neighbOr still, albeit you know not his name,
hardly his person, not at all his calling. A
man need not have much of sentiment in his
nature to feel little touched as he turns
away from all these features of an accus-
toned place, and follows to strange regions
cart, high heaped with tables and
chairs which really look a little shabby now
that they have come out into the glaring day
light. Fortunately, perhaps, the brief leases of
the city hardly give even the cats chance
to become positively and permanently domi-
ciled. II we are not. absolutely nomadic, we
come near to it. Only, move as often as we
may, whether to points distant or near, the heart
will go back to this deserted
point or the other inseparably associated with
the glad and the sad which make up our life.
And amid the hustle and the crash, the break
ing up and the breaking down, and all the
mseries of the annual mutation, it is some
10 Inn hot hall a..