The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-01-10

| those luXurieS. If rich man is reduc- | ed in circumstances, say from million | to thousand a year in income, he | will not be short of food, nor of ordi- nary clothing and place to sleep, but i the whole community will come and | sympathize with him because he will have to forego the qualification of his social taste. I will say, therefore, that it is an economic impossibility to get | the people to leave the cities and go on farms. Furthermore, it would be an actual disadvantage to civilization.
 If it were easy to get the people to leave the cities and disperse with every return of industrial depression or of a little enforced idleness the newspapers and the philanthropists, and the conom- ists and the capitalists would all agree that the people would be shipped out on to farms as the means of escaping what they think would be social prob- lem. That would be an easy way of solving social problem. For instance; there is strike and lot of people are out of work; get them all on the land. The result would be to make the reduc- ing of wages easy. Bring this alterna- tive to the attention of the capitalist, and it would be like moving in the line of least resistance. They would take that way of cutting the Gordian knot. If we should ship the laborers away from the educating influences which make for civilization, away from all the environment that cultivates and stim- ulates and broadens, practically we should wipe out the little progress that has taken place. As matter of fact, the real progress of the world takes place in the cities All the improve ments in taste, in art, in general cul- ture, in architecture, in sanitation, in science, in literature, in manufacture, all public improvements generally, takes place in the city, because the city creates the necessity for the application of science.
 Send people to the country and they will get typhoid fever, created by the bad sanitation. Send people to the coun- try and they would be reverted back to crudity and stagnation. But in the city, every time little pressure is felt, or when disturbances come, the labor CTS create problem, and that problem forces science and craftsmanship to consider the question.
 | That is problem-a city problem. It never would have been created if we could ship people to the country. It may be asked Would it not be better if that problem never had been created? No; the tenement house problem is really an evolution toward giving the poor people the best there is in sanita- ton and domestic appointments. At the beginning they do not have this. The beginning of everything is more or less poor. We have had bad tenements, but we are not building bad tenements now The capitalists who invest money in tenement house property, or any sort of apartment house property, have to keep making them better and better in order to get tenants, and in every new apartment house that goes up there is an effort to provide an extra room, more light, open plumbing, a bathroom in order that better return for the money can be had. The result is that the laborer keeps moving into the new tenements and deserting the poorer ones, and so what at first only the wealthy have in the line of sanitation and appointments percolates down in to the tenements, and it has got so now that our vital statistics show that the mortality is lower in the tenement house than in the middle class houses, where every person is his own landlord.
 When you ask the question---and it is often brought up in this connection--- Is is not nice to have the laborers own their own homes? answer with the somewhat startling negative. No; 1t is for the laborer's advantage not to own his own home. The wage earner who earns below s4,OO0 and $500O year has not money enough to buy a good home. He begins with a sort of hut with as little sanitation as the law allows, and he is everlastingly afraid to spend anything. If the citizens of the town want to put in main sewer, or make any Improvements of any kind, he is opposed because it will Increase his tax es. At the end of thirty years he will have house no better than he had in the beginning of the generation. To own their own houses practically makes the quality of the homes of the laborers static.
 Another phase of the question, when there is movement in favor of strike | who own their own homes that will de- feat that movement They won't join the union nor the movement, because they could not leave the town if they were to get blacklisted or discharged; {; they could not leave without losing their little equity. I have seen in New Eng land several important labor struggles defeated by the small proportion of . those who partly owned their own homes. If the business of the town be- , comes slack they cannot move to the . next town. To own their own homes prevents them from joining the pro- cession. It destroys the mobility of the laborers. The tendency is to come to the center. The owning of homes blocks this tendency.
 Another thought in regard to the board of health. We want the board of ; health to be active, and when a person owns his own house, if he is poor, he 1 cheats the board of health He is reluc- tant to make improvements because oi the added expense I know a woman who bought piece of property from a E family who were in the middle group sort of hanging on the fringe to keep up in their grade-and when she bought