The Durham daily globe., 1894-09-19

| tney 90 IN IAe CIO"ueu IcAeueutS Va III
east side of the town; but they like tn
situation better than the free air of th
country The philanthrophy of richie
Jews, excited by the squalor of their sur
roundings in New York, has been activ'
| in devising schemes to withdraw then
from such apparent wretchedness to rura
colonies organized for their benefit; bu
even when with difficulty they are in
duced to make the change, they usually
soon tire of it, and return TO the socia
tenements Physically and morally they
are better off here, as the comparative
vital statistics indicate.
The Jews are not alone in this prefer
ence for crowded towns 1t exists
throughout civilization al this time
Everywhere the cities are increasing in
population at a much more rapid rate
than the country. Even during the
greatest business depression of last sum
mer, when New York contained more
unemployed labor proportionately than
in manvyears before, the farmers in many
parts of the country, some of them not
far from the town, found it difficult to
obtain a sufficiency of labor for their i'm.
mediate and pressing needs, and comm G
hither seeking the supply, they were OBJ
liged to get it chiefly from among the
freshly arrived immigrants, the most of
whom could not speak our language
The deniZens of the town, no matter how
poor they are, prefer TO remain where
open country to the crowded town. Rural
monotony is more irksome to them than
the narrow quarters they must occupy in
to enjoy the crowding. Even the inhab
tants of the town who are able to 90 into
the country for summer vacations, US
ually prefer to be packed in great hotels
and boarding houses. They want to be
together. They want the stimulation of
social friction, finding solitude depressing g
and hateful The more crowded a sum
mer resort like Saratoga, for instance, the
more attractive it is. The greater the
crowd the surer it is 10 increase. Thou
sands of people leave spacious houses
and apartments in New York during the
summer to pack themselves into con-
tracted rooms at country hotels, and the
larger the crowd about them the greater
their enjoyment. They want hustle, and
quiet is intolerable to them.
The crowding of New York, moreover,
does not cause the moral deterioration
assumed by the sociological theorists
The worst examples of depravity at the
Elmira reformatory, as its year book
shows, come from the country. The
criminals from the town are brighter in
tellectually and not so sodden morally
They have had larger variety of inter
ests to keep them from absorption in de-
pravity. Moreover, the tenement house
crowding acts as moral restraint. The
people are drder the constant observa-
tiOn of their neighbors, and that has
healthy consequence. They are where
they can be reached most readily by the
public supervisors of health; and the op
portunity for moral contagion is offset by
the facilities for the example and exer-
else of beneficial moral and religious in.
huences
The tenement house system of New
York is very far from being the evil it is
imagined to be by those who have not
studied its consequences by actual inves
tigation. The vital statistics prove that
it is not inconsistent with public health,
and the order of the community, less dis
turbed by riotous social rebellion than
any other great capital of civilization,
shows that it is not morally disadyan-
tagious.
Tariff Tinkering.
News and Observer.
In his West Virginia speech, ex-Presi-