The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-01-10
POOR A HELP TO CITIES
DON'T TRY TO SEND THEM TO FARMS,
 SAYS PROF. GUNTON.

Progress in Sanitation and in Other Inn provements in Social Life Has Come Through Dealing With the Poor in Cities Not Desirable to Have the Poor Own Their Homes.
 Whenever times are hard and man. ual laborers have their wages cut or are thrown out of employment the cry goes up:
 Send them to the counry. There they can raise their own food on their own ground, can own their little homes and will be much better off in every way"
 But it ends mostly in talk, for there Is no organization which can colonize the poor in rural districts, and it is doubtful if they would go, even if they could be made legally to leave the cities.
 There is one man in New York who thinks they ought not to be sent to the country. He is Prof. George Gunton, president of the Gunton Institute of Social Economics and Political Science, and editor of Guntons Magazine. He says that the poor help the cities and the cities help the poor, and he has no patience with any schemes for getting rid of them. He believes that all efforts to move the poor into the country are not economical, and, Furthermore, are i'm Drq ntico h1a pd iy1pnc sib1a
 When asked by Sun reporter to make known his objections to moving the poor into the country, and his req sons for thinking them a benefit to the cities and the cities benefit to them, Prof. Gunton said:
 @In almost every depression in cities we look for relief by sending people to the country. That is probably due to the fact that there is a constant ten dency of population to congest in the cities. There is a reason for this; it is because people would rather live in the city. Whenever we see a tendency in society that keeps up for generations, we may know there is something in it, whether you can see 1t or not. Popula- tion does not tend toward China from Europe, nor to southern Europe from here, except on pleasure trips. We see that the migratory tendency of popula- tion is from the lowest points of civili- zation to the higher. It is from the lower parts of Europe to the higher and to the better parts. At one time there was such a tendency of continental la bor-all except French-toward Eng land that they have several times dis cussed a law restricting immigration. KY "It has been the problem for half dozen centuries to keep people from go- ing to London. Ever since the time of Richard III people have done so. I might except Manchester or Liverpool, or some few other large cities, but they kept drifting toward London. The req son for that is, in the first place, be- cause in the large cities there are more opportunities to misfit people to pick up the stray shillings, and in a city like -.Sthat there are thousands of them, thou sands of misfit people. In the rural country there is no money, there is no variety, there are no amusements. You have your little lot and you squat on it and grow your potatoes and cabbages, and must be content with that, for you have no other opportunities In the city there are, on the contrary, constant opportunities for picking up stray shil- 1ings. The next fact is that most peo- pie would rather live in the city. The reason is that when they once get to the city there is more life, more va riety, more amusements and they come in contact with more people and see more new things than they did in the country. The consequence is that the trend keeps right on. No matter what statesmen say or what ministers say or editors say, and they all rail about peo- pie leaving the farms and coming to the city, the trends keep on.
 Edward Atkinson has gotten up col- @Slization schemes to go into the coun- try, take along a man as cook, and have a small heaven on earth, and he could x not get dozen people go with him if the land were free. The reason is that they have learned city life, and they have learned a city occupation Take for instance, a carpenter who is out of work. He may be expert at carpenter ing, but he is a dunce at farming, and we suggest sending him back almost to the predatory stage. He will starve be- fore he will try to do farming, about which he knows so little. This is at tribnted to perverseness, but it is not perverseness at all. It is the fact that we are trying to set him on lower rung in the ladder of civilization, to put him in an environment that has less of the attractive in it. There has never been power among statesmen or in religious impulses, or even epidemics to disperse population. It is reversal of the or der of social tendency, it is like trying to push back the times The main req son for this tendency is that it moves toward the point of highest opportunity.
 Probably the highest point of oppor- tunity for earning a living is Manhat- tan Island. Without doubt there is nothing like it anywhere on the earth; :; that is, taken in It's entirety One would not go to Delancey street or into the Jewish quarter and say, This is New York city But, take it all in all, high rents and everything, the promise of occupation, the opportunities for getting work and shifting from one occupation to another, and what can be obtained for the dollar we earn, all are probably greater in New York than in any other spot on earth. There are plenty of places where one can get a living with