S Y B A R I S
AND OTHER
BY
EDWARD  E. HALE.
BOSTON:
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & aO.
1869.
HO ME S.
I:
I..".: 
Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1869, by
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
USNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & Co.,
CAMBRIDGE.
*ee- *ee 
0
DEDICATION.
-4
I DEDICATE this book to the
SUFFOLK UNION FOR CHRISTIAN WORK.
At the meeting which formed that Society the provision for better
homes in cities was publicly declared to be the first work of Christian
reform. At every meeting since some person has enforced the same
necessity.
EDWARD E. HALE.
SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCE, BOSTON,
September 18, 1869.
l fig
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-  
PREFACE.
THE reader will see that the papers in this book
have a single object, whether cast in the form of fiction, or whether statistical narratives of fact.  If I
should classify them as the papers were classified in
an earlier volume of this little series, the account of
Naguadavick is the account of what ought to be; the
account of Vineland is the account of what is; and
the account of Boston is the account of what ought
not to be.   In the narrative of Sybaris the reader
will find something of "if," something of " yes," something of " perhaps"; some possibility, much fact, and
some exaggeration.
I have, perhaps, a right to explain the earnestness
with which I try to enforce the necessity of better
homes for laboring men by stating a single circumstance in my  own history.   For nearly twenty-five
years I have been constantly engaged in the Christian ministry. About half that time was spent in
Worcester, Massachusetts; about half of it in Boston. When I went to Worcester it was a town of
about eight thousand people; when I left it, it had
three times that number. Boston is a crowded town
hi  Liz {   }  S.. 
PREFACE.
of a quarter-million inhabitants. It is impossible for
me not to notice, in every hour of my life, the contrast
between the homes of the working people in these
two places. I might almost say that there is no other
difference of importance between the social opportunities of the two places.   They are not far apart;
both are active places of business, employing in about
equal proportions people of enterprise and energy, in
the varied work of manufacture, commerce, and transportation. But in one of these places almost every
man can own his house, and half the men do.  In the
other hardly any man can own his house, and half
the people are crowded into quarters where no man
should be compelled to live.
To watch over and improve the charities of any
town is the special duty of the Christian ministry in
it, - to feed its hungry and clothe its naked, to open
the eyes of its blind and the ears of its deaf, to
make its lame walk, to cleanse its lepers, and to
preach good tidings to its poor. Will the reader imagilie to himself the position of the man engaged in
that duty, when he finds his sick in such tenements as
they must live in in our present system,- his blind,
for instance, born so, perhaps, in rooms with no window, and all his poor in such homes that the only truly
rood tidings are tidings which send them away from
him? Where a considerable part of the people live in
such homes our best devised charities, either for moral
culture or physical relief, work at terrible odds. Your
vi 
PREFACE.
City Missions, your Ministry at Large, your Industrial
Aid Society, or your Overseers of the Poor are all
working against the steady dead weight which, as we
all know, presses down and holds down the man who
is in an unhealthy or unhappy home.
hlie contrast in my own life between life in a small
manufacturing and commercial town and life in a large
one makes me feel the bitterness of these odds the
more.  I am sure that the suffering thus involved is
unnecessary, as I am sure the labor which tries to relieve its symptoms must be in large measure thrown
away. With an intense personal interest, therefore,
have I attempted to show in this book how these evils
may be remedied.
I do not know blc Colonel Ingham's suggestions as
to his imagined Sybaris may be thought too roseate
and ideal for our Western longitudes. They have
been already published in the Atlantic Monthly, and,
in his absence in Siberia, I have been once and again
favored with criticisms upon them. It is but fair to
him to say, that, so far as the paper refers to ancient
Sybaris or Thupii, it is a very careful study of the best
authorities regarding that interesting state, - a study
which I wish might be pushed further by somebody.
And I incorporate the paper in this volume because
it seems to me that we have a great deal to learn fiom
the ancient cities and from their methods of government, were it only the great lesson of the value of
training in administration.
ei
VII
v 
PREFACE.
There is a very odd habit of speech about republican government, which, like most careless habits of
speech, hurts our practice. When the theory of a
republic is discussed, everybody says that it worked
admirably in cities of compact territory, but that it
failed when it had to be extended over wider regions.
This is really a commonplace in the old-fashioned
sturdy books on political institutions. But when you
come to talk politics with practical people to-day, the
chances are nine in ten that they say, " Ah, republican institutions are admirable for the country at large;
they work perfectly for a scattered population; but
when you come to compact cities you want something
very different. Must have one head there, one head
there," &c., &c., &c. Now certainly this is very odd,
that just as we have all learned to repeat one of these
lessons from old Greek and Roman history, illustrated
in the history of Greek  and  Roman  colonies,  we
should all have to turn round and say exactly the
other thing. Is it not probable that there is some
misunderstanding?
I believe that a careful study of the history of the
Greek and Roman cities shows that their success is
largely due to their attention to the science of admninistration. The men who discharged specific functions
were trained to those functions, and knew how to discharge them. In the Roman cities no man could be
a candidate for the higher grades of service, unless he
had served so manv years in the lower. Any old Ro
viii 
PREFACE.
man, asked to vote in our city elections, would take it
for granted that no man could be an alderman who
had not been a common-council-man for a certain
number of years, nor a mayor unless he had been
an alderman for a certain number.   In Athens they
were even more careful, and all officers were as distinctly trained to their duties as with us civil engineers are or architects. What followed was, that
when the right man got into place, there was a reasonable probability that he stayed in.
In our elective city governments, on the other hand,
with a great deal of good feeling and a great deal of
public spirit, we find uncertainty, hurry sometimes, and
delay in others, frequent changes in system, shyness
about responsibility, and, in consequence, a great deal
of discomfort and grumbling.   I once asked a very
able and pure man, then Mayor of Boston, why
the city did not undertake a certain policy, which
seemed  important.   "fHow  should I know?" said
he, with a sigh.  "I was chosen to this place eight
months ago, with no experience in city affairs.   If
I am chosen again in December, I may have heart
to start on some such proposal as you name.   But
really, the first year of a man's service as Mayor
must be given to learning where he stands."  This
is perfectly true.
Now, at the end of the first.year who determines
whether such a man shall or shall not go on? Almost
always, five hundred men, united, can settle that thing
a*
ix 
PREFACE.
one way or another. If he have wounded the feelings
of the policemen, - if he have made a change in the
management of the fire companies, -if in any way
he have crossed the track of any compact organization,
he is put out and some other new man is.put in, for
his apprenticeship. I do not believe that this system
of neophyte mayors is necessary. And I believe that
whenever the public is roused to study it, it will be
changed.
It does not make so much difference in Boston,
however, because the Mayor has no great power, after
all. He is not much more than a chairman of selectmen. The same difficulty, as it seems to me, comes in
in the choice of the aldermen, who have, collectively,
some power. I read a great deal of insulting language
and bitter sneering about aldermen. I suppose there
are bad aldermen, as I know there are bad ministers,
bad painters, and bad bootmakers. But, in my experience, the aldermen with whom I have had to confer
on the affairs of the city have been hard-working,
upright, intelligent, public-spirited men, doing a great
deal of work, for which they got no pay and-no thanks;
and doing it, under our lumbering system, very well].
But they were all doing it by instinct, and not after
training.   They  had happened upon  the situation
which made them a directory of twelve, governing, in
nice details of administration, a city of a quarter-million people. They had never been trained in advance
to do that duty.  And, by the time they had learned
x 
PREFACE.
it, in presence of the enemy, they were heartily sick
of it, and were glad to resign.
It seems to me, that as long as we govern cities in
that way, we shall have bad lirse-cars, bad tenementhouses, bad streets, bad theatres, bad liquor-shops, and
a great many other bad things, which, in a city where
administration was a science, and no man chosen to
office until he had been trained to it, Colonel Ingham
did not find in Sybaris.
I observe that the newspapers are a good deal exercised when a committee of the city government, or
when any city officers, go to study the systems of some
other cities. For my part, I wish they went a great
deal oftener than they do, and studied such systems a
great deal more. I believe the city of Boston could
make no wiser expenditure than it would make in
sending to Europe, once in five years, an intelligent
officer from each great department to study French,
Eng,lish, German, Italian, and Russian administration
of streets; of hackney-coaches, omnibuses, and railroad
stations; of prisons, of the detective and'general
police;  of health;  of markets, and of education.
There is hardly a large city in the civilized world
which has not some hints of value which it could give
to every other city.
Colonel Inghlam has received many protests against
the arbitrary and unprincipled action of the government of Sybaris in compelling marriage among its people. He had already made his own protest, as lihe
.XI 
PREFACE.
could, in his journal. Nor would he wish to be understood as desiring to enforce anywhere statutes so
tyrannical. But, as I understand him, he is convinced, by what he has seen in Sybaris and in the
rest of the world, that every artificial obstacle to marriage is so much multiplication of all other evil in
the world, and whether that obstacle come in the
form of fashion, of custom, of sentiment, of gossip,
of political economy, or of law, it is to be deprecated
and set aside.
I may add that I do not know why such views have
not a larger place than they have in the current discussions of female suffrage.   The married  woman
and the married man being one, she now has suffrage.
How would it answer to withdraw suffrage from the
unmarried men? This would put them on an equality
with the unmarried women; and there would be a
possibility, if they are troubled by the loss, of their
regaining the privilege.
But I will not, in a preface, discuss the details of
any of the experiments in city administration here
suggested. My chief wish is accomplished, if I can
call attention to the delicacy and difficulty of these
questions, and to the necessity of studying them with
scientific and conscientious precision.  When our best
men study the details of local administration with the
care with which Themistocles, Aristides, and Pericles
studied them in Athens, - with which Metellus, the
Catos, Pompey  the Great, and Julius Cesar  were
*.
Xll 
PREFACE.
willing to study them in Rome, - we shall find, as I
believe, no difficulty in the republican government of
cities.
The shorter essays in this book are devoted to the
bingle subject of the homes of laborers at work in large
cities, and, as I trust, require no further explanation.
As the last sheets of this book leave my hands, the
watchful kindness of a friend enables me to add the
last word regarding Sybaris.
Under the title "De Paris a Sybaris," (Paris: A.
Lemerre, 1868,) M. L;on Palustre de Montifaut publishes his studies of art and literature in Rome and
Southern Italy. And here is his record of what he
saw of Sybaris.  He speaks first of Cassano, the last
Italian town which looks down upon the valley of
ancient Sybaris.
" Cassano, with its beautiful gardens, its tranquil
aspect, and its gray mountains, reminds one of the
ancient Sichem. It has its freshness and its poetry, if
it has not the same reminiscences.
" Still, I hastened my departure, for I was eager to
cross before night those broad and marshy expanses
over which the eye travelled without an obstacle, - a
vast semicircle cut into the thickness of the Apennine,
or fertile intervals left by the sea.
"And what was I going to see?  Not so much as a
ruin, - an uncertain region over which lay loose the
xiii 
PREFACE.
voluptuous name of Sybaris. And I had made a long
journey.. I had undergone incredible fatigue to give
myself this empty satisfaction. How the inhabitants
of this easy city would have laughed at me! They
could not understand, says Athenaus, why one should
quit his country.   For themselves they  gloried in
growing old where they first saw the light.  Yet this
people practised the broadest hospitality, and, contrary
to the policy of most of the Greek states, they readily admitted the colonists of other nations to the rank
of citizens.  May not this liberal spirit and the astonishing fertility of the soil explain the prosperity of this
prosperous town, which is so strangely kept in obscurity
by all antiquity? Varro tells us that wheat produced
a hundred-fold on the whole territory of Sybaris. At
the present timne the uplands produce the richest harvests."
And this, I am sorry to say, is the only contribution
to the history or topography of Sybaris made since the
date of Mr. Ingham's voyage.   Mons. Montifaut, alas
like all the others! hurried across the upland six miles
back from the sea. It is as if a traveller from Providence, coming up to Readville, should cross to Watertown and Waltham, and then, going through the Notch
of the White Mountains to Montreal, should publish
his observations on Boston.
And these notes, alas,as late as 1867, are dated like
Colonel Ingham's, on the 1st of April!
xiv 
CONTENTS.
PAGI
1
88
122
155
178
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS..
'OW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK
HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND..
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON, AND HOW THEY DIE THERE
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.....
E..    ~
i
193
APPENDIX 
I 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
FROM REV. FREDERIC INGHAM' S PAPERS.
IT is a great while since I first took an interest in
Sybaris. Sybarites have a bad name. But before I
had heard of them anywhere else, I had painfully
looked out the words in the three or four precious
anecdotes about Sybaris in the old Greek Reader;
and I had made up my boy's mind about the Sybarites.
When I came to know the name they had got elsewhere, I could not but say that the world had been
very unjust to them!
O dear! I can see it now, - the old Latin schoolroom, where we used to sit, and hammer over that
Greek, after the small boys had gone. They went at
eleven; we- because we were twelve or morestayed till twelve. From eleven to twelve we sat,
with only those small boys who had been "kept" for
their sins, and Mr. Dillaway. The room was long
and narrow; how long and how narrow you may see,
if you will go and examine M. Duchesne's model of
"Boston as it was," and pay twenty-five cents to the
Richmond schools. For all this is of the past; and in
the same spot in space where once a month the Exam
I
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
iner Club now meets at Parker's, and discusses the
difference between religion and superstition, the folly
of copyright, and the origin of things, the boys who
did not then belong to the Examiner Club, say Fox
and Clarke and Furness and Waldo Emerson, thumbed
their Greca Minora or their Greek Readers in " Boston as it was," and learned the truth about Sybaris!
A  long, narrow room, I say, whose walls, when  I
knew them first, were of that tawny orange wash
which is appropriated to kitchens. But, by a master
stroke of Mr. Dillaway's, these walls were made lilac
or purple one summer vacation. We sat, to recite, on
long settees, pea-green in color, which would teeter
slightly on the well-worn floor. There, for an hour
daily, while brighter boys than I recited, I sat an hour
musing, looking at the immense Jacobs's Greek Reader, and waiting my turn to come.  If you did not look
off your book much, no harm came to you.  So, in the
hour, you got fifty-three minutes and a few odd seconds of day-dream, for six minutes and two thirds of
reciting, unless, which was unusual, some fellow above
you broke down, and a question, passed along of a sudden, recalled you to modern life. I have been sitting
on that old green settee, and at the same time riding
on horseback in Virginia, through an open wooded
country, with one of Lord Fairfax's grandsons and two
pretty cousins of his, and a fallow deer has just ap peared in the distance, when, by the failure of Hutch inson or Wheeler, just above me, poor Mr. Dillaway
2 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
has had to ask me, "Ingham, what verbs omit the re duplication? "  Talk of war!  Where  is versatility,
otherwise called presence of mind, so needed as in
recitation at a public school?
Well, there, I say, I made acquaintance with Sybaris. Nay, strictly speaking, my first visits to Sybaris
were made there and then. What the Greek Reader
tells of Sybaris is in three or four anecdotes, woven
into that strange, incoherent patchwork of " Geography." In that place are patched together a statement
of Strabo and one of Atheneus about two things in
Sybaris which may have belonged some eight hundred
years apart. But what of that to a school-boy! Will
your descendants, dear reader, in the year 3579 A. D.,
be much troubled, if, in the English Reader of their
day, Queen Victoria shall be made to drink Spartan
black broth with William the Conqueror out of a
conch-shlell in New Zealand?
With regard to Sybaris, then, the old Jacobs's Greek
Reader tells the following stories:  "The  Sybarites
were distinguished for luxury.  They did not permit
the trades which made a loud noise, such as those of
brass-workers, carpenters, and the like, to be carried
on in the heart of the city, so that their sleep might be
wholly undisturbed by noise.... And  a Sybarite
who had gone to La.cedemon, and had been invited to
the public meal, after he had sat on their wooden
benches and partaken of their fare, said that he had
been astonished at the fearlessness of the Lacedemo
3
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
nians when he knew it only by report; but now that
he had seen them, he thought that they did not excel
other men, for he thought that any brave man had
muchl rather die than be obliged to live such a life as
they did." Then there is another story, among the
"miscellaneous anecdotes," of a Sybarite who was
asked if he had slept well. He said, No, that he believed he had a crumpled rose-leaf under him in the
night.  And there is yet another, of one of them who
said that it made his back ache to see another man
digging.
I have asked Polly, as I write, to look in Mark
Lemon's Jest-Book for these stories. They are not in
the index there. But I dare say they are in Cotton
Mather and Jeremy Taylor. Any way, they are bits
of very cheap Greek. Now it is on such stories that
the reputation of the Sybarites in modern times appears to depend.
Now look at them. This Sybarite at Sparta said,
that in war death was often easier than the hardships
of life. WVell, is not that true? Have not thousands
of brave men said it? When the English and French
got themselves established on the wrong side of Sebastopol, what did that engineer officer of the French say
to somebody who came to inspect his works? He was
talking of St. Arnaud, their first commander.  "Cunning dog," said he, "he went and died."  Death was
easier than life. But nobody ever said he was a coward or effeminate because he said this. Why, if our
4 
MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
purpose would permit an excursus of two hundred
pages here, on this theme, we would defer Sybaris to
the 1st of April, 1870, while we illustrated the Syba rite's manly epigram, which these stupid Spartans
could only gape at, but could not understand.
Then take the rose-leaf story.  Suppose by good
luck you were breakfasting with General Grant, or
Pelissier, or the Duke of Wellington. Suppose you
said, "I hope you slept welt," and the great soldier
said, "No, I did not; I think a rose-leaf must have
stood up edgewise under me." Would you go off and
say in your book of travels that the Americans, or the
French, or the English are all effeminate pleasureseekers, because one of them made this nice little joke?
Would  you like to have the name "American" go
down to all time, defined as Webster * defines Sybarite?
A-.ixR,I-CAN, n. [Fr. Americain, Lat. Americanus, from Lat. America,
a continent noted for the effemninacy and voluptuousness of its in  habitants.] A person devoted to luxury and pleasure.
Should you think that was quite fair for your greatgrandson's grandson's descendant in the twenty-seventh remove to read, who is going to be instructed
about Queen Victoria and William the Conqueror?
Worst of all, and most frequently quoted, is the
story of the coppersmiths.  The  Sybarites, it is said,
ordered that the coppersmiths and brass-founders should
all reside in one part of the city, and bang their re * I am writing in Westerly's snuggery, and in Providence they believe in Webster's Dictionary.  I dare say it is worse in Worcester's.
A good many things are.
5
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F. 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
spective metals where the neighbors had voluntarily
chosen to listen to banging.  What  if they  did?
Does not every manufacturing city practically do the
same thing? What did Nicholas Tillinghast use to
say to the boys and girls at Bridgewater?  " The tendency of cities is to resolve themselves into order."
Is not Wall Street at this hour a street of bankers?
Is not the Boston Pearl Street a street of leather men?
Is not the bridge at Florence given over to jewellers?
Was not my valise, there, bought in Rome at the
street of trunk-makers? Do not all booksellers like
to huddle together as long, as they can? And when
Ticknor and Fields move a few inches fromn Washington Street to Tremont Street, do not Russell and
Bates, and Childs and Jenks, and De Vries and Ibarra, follow them as soon as the shops can be got ready?
"But it is the motive," pipes up the old gray ghost
of propriety, who started this abuse of the Sybarites
in some stupid Spartan black-broth shop (English that
for cafe), two thousand two hundred and twenty-two
years ago,- which ghost I am now belaboring,   " it
is the motive. The Sybarites moved the brass-founders, because they wanted to sleep after the brass-founders got up in the morning." What if they did, you
old rat in the arras? Is there any law, human or
divine, which says that at one and the same hour all
men shall rise from bed in this world? My excellent
milkman, Mr. Whit, rises from bed daily at two o'clock.
If he does not, my family, including Matthew, Mark,
6
11
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MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
Luke, John, and Acts, will not have their fresh milk
at 7.37, at which time we breakfast or pretend to.
But because he rises at two, must we all rise at two,
and sit wretchedly whining on our respective campstools, waiting for Mr. Whit to arrive with the gratefill beverage? Many is the time, when I have been
watching with a sick child at five in a summer morning, when the little fellow had just dropped into a
grateful morning doze, that I have listened and waited,
dreading the arrival of the Providence morning express. For I knew that, a mile and a half out of Boston, the engine would begin to blow its shrill whistle,
for the purpose, I believe, of calling the Boston stationmen to their duty. Three or four minutes of that
skre-e-e-e must there be, as that train swept by our
end of the town. And hoping and wishing never did
any good; the train would come, and the child would
wake. Is not that a magnificent power for one engine-man to have over the morning rest of fifty
thousand sleeping people, because you, old Spartan
croaker, who can't sleep easy underground it seems,
want to have everybody waked up at the same hour
in the morning? When I hear that whistle, and the
fifty other whistles of the factories that have since followed its wayward and unlicensed example, I have
wished more than once that we had in Boston a little
more of the firm government of Sybaris.
For if, as it would appear from these instances, Sybaris were a city which grew to wealth and strength
7 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
by tl:e recognition of the personal rights of each individual in the state,- if Sybaris were a republic, where
the individual was respected, had his righllts, and was
not left to the average chances of the majority of men,
-then Sybaris had found out something which no
modern city has found out, and which it is a pity we
have all forgotten.
I do not say that I went through all this speculation
at the Latin school.  I got no further there than to
see that the Sybarites had got a very bad name, and
that the causes did not appear in the Greek Reader.
I supposed there wvere causes somewhere, which it was
not proper to put into the Greek Reader. Perhaps
there were.  But if there were, I have never found
them since, -not being indeed very well acquainted
with the lines of reading in which those who wanted
to find them should look for them.
WHAT I did find of Sybaris, when I could read
Greek rather more easily, and could get access to
some decent atlases, was briefly this.
Well forward in the hollow of the arched foot of
the boot of Italy, two little rivers run into the Gulf
,of Tarentum.  One was once named Crathis, one was
named Sybaris. Here stood the ancient city of Sybaris, founded about the time of Romulus or Numa
Pomp)ilius, by a colony from Greece. For two hundred years and more,- almost as long, dear Atlantic,
as your beloved Boston has subsisted, - Sybaris flour
8
l 
MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
ished, and was the Rome of that region, ruling it from
sea to sea.
It was the capital of four states, - a sort of New
England, if you will observe, - and could send three
hundred thousand armed men into the field, more, I
will observe in passing, than New England has, as yet,
ever had occasion to send at one moment. The walls
of the city were six miles in circumference, while the
suburbs covered the banks of the Crathis for a space of
seven miles. At last the neighboring state of Crotona,
under the lead of Milon the Athlete (he of the calf
and ox and split log), the Hleenan or John Morrissey
of his day, vanquished the more refined Sybarites,
turned the waters of the Crathis upon their prosperous
city, and destroyed it. But the Sybarites had had
that thing happen too often to be discouraged.  Five
times, say the historians, had Sybaris been destroyed,
and five times they built it up again. This time the
Athenians sent ten vessels, with men to help them,
under Lampon and Xenocritus. And they, with those
who stood by the wreck, gave their new city the name
o f Thurii.    Among the new colonists were Herodotus,
and Lysias the orator, who was then a boy. Tie
spirit that had given Sybaris its comfort and its immense population appeared in the legislation of the
new state. It received its laws from CHARoNDAs,
one of the noblest legislators of the world. Study
these laws and you will see that in the young Sybaris
the individual had his rights, which the public pre
1*
9
I
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMIES.
served for him, though hlie were wholly in-a minority.
There is an evident determination that a man shall
live while he lives, and that, too, in no sensual interpretation of the words.
Of the laws made by Charondas for the new Sybaris a few are preserved.
1. A calumniator was marched round the city in
disgrace, crowned with tamarisk.  "In consequence,"
says the Scholiast, "they all left the city." O for
such a result, from whatever legislation, in our modern Pedlingtons, great or little
2. All persons were forbidden to associate with the
,bad.
3. "He made another law, better than these, and
neglected by the older legislators. For he enacted
that all the sons of the citizens should be instructed in
letters, the city paying the salaries of the teachers.
For he held that the poor, not being able to pay their
teachers from their own property, would be deprived
of the most valuable discipline." There is FREE EDUCATION for you, two thousand and seventy-six years
before the date of your first Massachusetts free school;
and the theory of free education completely stated.
4. Deserters or cowards in battle had to sit in women's dresses in the Forum three days.
- 5. With regard to the amendment of laws, any man
or woman who moved one did it with a noose round
his neck, and was hanged if the people refused it.
Only three laws were ever amended, therefore, all
10
i 
MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
which are recorded in the history. Observe that the
women might move amendments,-  and think of the
simplicity of legislation!
6. The law provided for cash payments, and the governlnent gave no protection for those who sold on credit.
7. Their communication with other nations was
perfectly free.
I might give more instances'. I should like to tell
some of the curious stories which illustrate this simple
legislation.  Poor Charondas himself fell a victim to
it. One of the laws provided that no man should
wear a sword into the public assembly. No Cromwells there!  Unfortunately, by accident, Charondas
wore his own there one day.  Brave fellow! when
the fault was pointed out, he killed himself with it.
Now, do you wonder that a city, where there were
no calumniators, no long credit, no bills at the grocers,
no fighting at town-meetings, no amendments to the
laws, no intentional and open association with profligates, and where everybody was educated by the state
to letters, proved a comfortable place to live in? It
is of the old Sybaris that the coppersmith and the roseleaf stories are told; and it was the new Sybaris that
made the laws.  But do you not see that there is one
spirit in the whole? Here was a nation which believed
that the highest work of a nation was to train its peo
ple. It did not believe in fight, like Milon or Hleenan
or the old Spartans; it did not believe in legislation,
like Massachusetts and New York; it did not believe
11
I 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
in commerce, like Carthage and England. It believed
in men and women. It respected men and women.
It educated men and women.  It gave their rights to
men and women. And so the Spartans called them
effeminate. And the Greek Reader made fun of them.
But perhaps the people who lived there were indifferent to the opinions of the Spartans and of the Greek
Reader. Herodotus lived there till he died; wrote
his history there, among other things.  Lysias, the
orator, took part in the administration.  It is not from
them, you may be sure, that you get the anecdotes
which ridicule the old city of Sybaris!
You and I would probably be satisfied with such
company as that of Herodotus and Charondas and
Lysias. So we hunt the history down to see if there
may be lodgings to let there this summer, but only
to find that it all pales out in the ignorance of our
modern days. The name gets changed into Lupiae;
but there it turns out that Pausanias made a "strange
mistake," and should  have written Copia,-  which
was perhaps  Cossa, or sometimes  Cosa,   Pyrrhus
appears, and H-drian rebuilds something, and the
"Oltramontani," whoever they may have been, ravage it, and finally the Saracens fire and sack it; and
so, in the latest Italian itinerary you can find, there is
no post-road goes near it, only a strada rotabile (wheeltrack) upon the hills; and, alas! even the rotabile
gives way at last, and all the map will own to is a
strada pedonale, or foot-path.  But the map is of the
12,
ff 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
less consequence, when you find that the man who
edited it had no later dates than the beginning of the
last century, when the family of Serra had transferred
the title to Sybaris to a Genoese family without a name,
who received from it forty thousand ducats yearly,
and would have received more, if their agents had
been more faithful. There the place fades out of history, and you find in your Swinburne, "that the
locality has never been thoroughly examined"; in your
Smith's Dictionary, that " the whole subject is very
obscure, and a careful examination still much needed";
in the Cyclopaedia, that the site of Sybaris is lost.
Craven saw the rivers Crathis and Sybaris. He seems
not to have seen the wall of Sybaris, which he supposed to be under water. He does say of Cassano,
the nearest town he came to, that "no other spot can
boast of such advantages."  In short, no man living
who has written any book about it dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for,
more than a hundred years.* If a man wanted to write
a mythical story, where could he find a better scene?
* The reader who cares to follow the detail is referred to Diodorus
Siculus, XII. 9 et seq.; Strabo, VI.; 2Elian, V. H. 9, c. 24; Athenoeus, XII. 518 -520; Plutarch in Pelopidas; Herodotus, V. and VI/
Compare Laurent's Geographical Notes, and Wheeler and Gaisford;
Pliny, III. 15, VII. 22, XVI. 33, VIII. 64, XXXI. 9, 10; Aristotle,
Polit. IV. 12, V. 3; Heyne's Opuscula, II. 74; Bentley's Phalaris,
367; Solinus, 2, ~ 10, "luxuries grossly exaggerated"; Scymnus, 337 -
360; Aristophanes, Vesp. 1427, 1436; Lycophron, Alex. 1079; Paus,anias at Lupias; Polybius, Gen. Hist. II. 3, on the confederation of
13
I
I 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
Now is not this a very remarkable thing? Here was
a city, which, under its two names of Sybaris or of
Thlurii, was for centuries the regnant city of all that
part of the world. It could call into the field three
hundred thousand men, - an army enough larger than
Athens ever furnished, or Sparta.  It was a far more
populous and powerful state than ever Athens was, or
Sparta, or the whole of Hellas. It invented and carried into effect free popular education,- a gift to the
administration of free government larger than ever
Rome rendered. It received and honored Charondas,
the great practical legislator, from whose laws no man
shall say how much has trickled down into the Code
Napoleon or the Revised Statutes of New York,
through the humble studies of the Roman jurists.
It maintained in peace, prosperity, happiness, and,
as its maligners say, in comfort, an immense population. If they had not been as comfortable as they
were, -if a tenth part of them had received alms
every year, and a tenth part were flogged in the public schools every year, and one in forty had been sent
to prison every year, as in the happy city which pub
Sybaris, Kroton, and Kaulonia,     "a perplexing statement," says
Grote, "showing that he must have conceived the history of Sybaris in
a very different form from that in which it is commonly represented";
third volume of De Non, who disagrees with Magnan as to the site
of Sybaris, and says the sea-shore is uninhabitable!   Tuccagni Orlandini, Vol. XI., Supplement, p. 294; besides the dictionaries and
books of travels, including Murray. I have availed myself, without
other reference, of most of these authorities.
14 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
lishes these humble studies,- then Sybaris, perhaps,
would never have  got its bad name  for  luxury.
Such a city lived, flourished, ruled, for hundreds of
years. Of such a city all that you know now with
certainty is, that its coin is "the most beautifully finished in the cabinets of ancient coinage"; and that
no traveller pretends to be sure that lie has been to
the site of it for more than a hundred years. That
speaks well for your nineteenth century.
Now the reader who has come thus far will understand that I, having come thus far, in twenty-odd
years since those days of teetering on the pea-green
settee, had always kept Sybaris in the background of
my head, as a problem to be solved, and an inquiry to
be followed to its completion. There could hardly
have been a man in the world better satisfied than I
to be the hero of the adventure which I am now
about to describe.
IF the reader remembers anything about Garibaldi's
triumphal entry into Porto Cavallo in Sicily in the
spring of 1859, he will remember that, between the
months of March and April in that year, the great
chieftain made, in that wretched little fishing haven, a
long pause, which was not at the time understood by
the journals or by their military critics, and which, indeed, to this hour has never been publicly explained. I
suppose I know as much about it as any man now living.
But I am not writing Garibaldi's memoirs, nor indeed,
15
I.I
t
11 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
my own, excepting so far as they relate to Sybaris;
and it is strictly nobody's business to inquire as to that
detention, unless it interest the ex-king of Naples, who
may write to me, if he chooses, addressing Frederic
Ingham, Esq., Waterville, N. H. Nor is it anybody's
business how long I had then been on Garibaldi's
staff. From the number of his staff-officers who have
since visited me in America, very much in want of a
pair of pantaloons, or a ticket to New York, or something with which they might buy a glass of whiskey, I
should think that his staff alone must have made up
a much more considerable army than Naples, or even
Sybaris, ever brought into the field. But where these
men were when I was with him, I do not know.   I
only know that there was but a handful of us then,
hard-worked fellows, good-natured, and not above our
duty. Of its military details we knew wretchedly
little. But as we had no artillery, ignorance was less
dangerous in the chief of artillery; as we had no
maps to draw, poor draftsmanship did not much embarrass the engineer in chief. For me, I was nothing
but an aid, and I was glad to do anything that fell to
me as well as I knew how. And, as usual in human
life, I found that a cool head, a steady resolve, a concentrated purpose, and an unselfish readiness to obey,
carried me a great way. I listened instead of talking,
and thus got a reputation for knowing a great deal.
When the time to act came, I acted without waiting
for the wave to recede; and thus I sprang into many
16 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
a boat dry-shod, while people who believed in what is
popularly called prudence missed their chance, and
either lost the boat or fell into the water.
This is by the way. It was under these circumstances that I received mny orders, wholly secret and
unexpected, to take a boat at once, pass the straits,
and cross the Bay of Tarentum, to communicate at
Gallipoli with - no matter whom. Perhaps I was
going to the "Castle of Otranto."  A  hundred years
hence anybody who chooses will know. Meanwhile,
if there should be a reaction in Otranto, I do not
choose to shorten anybody's neck for him.
Well, it was five in the afternoon,- near sundown
at that season.  I went to dear old Frank Chaney,the jolliest of jolly Englishmen, who was acting quartermaster-genieral,-  and told him I must have transportation. I can see him and hear him now,- as he
sat on his barrel-head, smoked his vile Tunisian tobacco
in his beloved short meerschaum, which was left to him
ever since he was at Bonn, as he pretended, a student
with Prince Albert. He did not swear,- I don't
think he ever did. But he looked perplexed enough
to swear. And very droll was the twinkle of his eye.
The truth was, that every sort of a thing that would
sail, and every wretch of a fisherman that could sail
her, had been, as he knew, and as I knew, sent off
that very morning to rendezvous at Carrara, for the
contingent which we were hoping had slipped through
Cavour's pretended neutrality. And here was an
B
17
L~ 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
order for him to furnish me "transportation" in exactly
the opposite direction.
"Do you know of anything, yourself, Fred?" said
he.
"Not a coffin," said I.
"Did the chief suggest anything?"
"Not a nutshell," said I.
"Could not you go by telegraph?" said Frank,
pointing up to the dumb old semaphore in whose tower
he had established himself.  "Or has not the chief
got a wishing carpet? Or can't you ride to Gallipoli?
Hiere are some excellent white-tailed mules, good
enough for Pindar, whom Colvocoressis has just brought
in from the monastery.'Transportation for one!'
Is there anything to be brought back? Nitre, powder, lead, junk, hard-tack, mules, horses, pigs; polenta,
or olla podrida, or other of the stores of war?"
No; there was nothing to bring back except my
self. Lucky enough if I came back to tell my own
story. And so we walked up on the tower deck to
take a look.
Blessed St. Lazarus, chief of Naples and of beggars!
a little felucca was just rounding the Horse Head and
coming into the bay, wing-wing. The fishermen in her
had no thought that they were ever going to get into the
Atlantic. Maybe they had never heard of the Ocean
or of the Monthly. Can that be possible? Frank
nodded, and I. He filled up with more Tunisian,
beckoned to an orderly, and we walked down to the
landing-jetty to meet them.
18
i', 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
" Vtiva Italia!" shouted Frank, as they drew near
enough to hear.
"Viva Garibaldi!" cried the skipper, as he let his
sheet fly and rounded to the well-worn stones.  A
good voyage had they made of it, he and his two
brown, ragged boys. Large fish and small, pink fish,
blue, yellow, orange, striped fish and mottled, wriggled
together, and flapped their tails in the well of the little boat.  There were even too many to lie there and
wriggle. The bottom of the boat was well covered
with them, and, if she had not shipped waves enough
to keep them cool, the boy Battista had bailed a plenty
on them.  Father and son hurried on shore, and Battista on board began to fling the scaly fellows out to
them.
A very small craft it was to double all those capes
in, run the straits, and stretch across the bay. If it
had been mine "to make reply," I should undoubtedly have made this, that I would see the quartermaster
hanged, and his superiors, before I risked myself in
any such rattletrap. But as, unfortunately, it was
mine to go where I was sent, I merely set the orderly
to throwing out fish with the boys, and began to talk
with the father.
Queer enough, just at that moment, there came
over me the feeling that, as a graduate of the University, it was my duty to put up those red, white, and
blue scaly fellows, who were flopping about there so
briskly, and send them in alcohol to Agassiz.   But
19
t
r, 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
there are so many duties of that kind which one neglects in a hard-worked world! As a graduate, it is
my duty to send annually to the College Librarian a
list of all the graduates who have died in the town I
live in, with their fathlers' and mothers' names, and
the motives that led them to College, with anecdotes
of their career, and the date of their death. There
are two thousand three hundred and forty-five of them
I believe, and I have never sent one-half anecdote
about one! Such failure in duty made me grimly
smile as I omitted to stop and put up these fish in alcohol, and as I plied the unconscious skipper with inquiries about his boat.  " Had she ever been outside?"
" O signor, she had been outside this very day. You
cannot catch tonno till you have passed both capes,least of all such fine fish as that is," -and lie kicked
the poor wretch.  Can it be true, as C        says, that
those dying flaps of theirs are exquisite luxury to
them, because for the first time they have their fill of
oxygen?   "Had he  ever  been  beyond  Peloro?"
"0 yes, signor; my wife, Catarina, was herself from
Messina," - and on great saints' days they had gone
there often. Poor fellow, his great saint's day sealed his
fate. I nodded to Frank, - Frank nodded to me, -
and Frank blandly informed him that, by order of
General Garibaldi, he would take the gentleman at
once on board, pass the strait with him, "and then go
where he tells you."
The Southern Italian has the reputation, derived
20
il 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
from Tom Moore, of being a coward. When I used
to speak at school,
"Ay, down to the dust with them, - slaves as they are! "
stamping my foot at "dust," I certainly thought they
were a very mean crew. But I dare say that Neapolitan school-boys have some similar school piece about
the risings of Tom Moore's countrymen, which certainly have not been much more successfill than the
poor little Neapolitan revolution which he was pleased
to satirize. Somehow or other, Victor Emanuel is, at
this hour, king of Naples. Coward or not, this fine
fellow of a fisherman did not flinch.  It is my private
opinion that he was not nearly as much afraid of the
enterprise as I was. I made this observation at the
moment with some satisfaction, sent Frank's man up
to my lodgings with a note ordering my own traps
sent down, and in an hour we were stretching out,
under the twilight, across the little bay.
No! I spare you the voyage.  Sybaris is what we 
are after, all this time, if we can only get there. Very 
easy it would be for me to give you cheap scholarship
from the Eneid, about Palinurus and Scylla and
Charybdis. Neither Scylla nor Charybdis bothered
me,- as we passed wing-wing between them before a
smart north wind. I had a little Hunter's Virgil with
me, and read the whole voyage, - and confused Battista utterly by trying to make him remember something about Palinuro, of whom he had never heard.
21
t
rr I 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
It was much as I afterwards asked my negro waiter
at Fort Monroe about General Washington at Yorktown.  "Never heard of him, sir,-  was he in the
Regular army?" So Battista thought Palinuro must
have fished in the Italian fleet, with which the Sicilian
boatmen were not well acquainted. Messina made no
objections to us. Perhaps, if the sloop of war which
lay there had known who was lying in the boat under
her guns, I might not be writing these words to-day.
Battista went ashore, got lemons, macaroni, hard
bread, polenta, for themselves, the Giornale di 2Messina for me, and more Tunisian; and, not to lose that
splendid breeze, we cracked on all day, passed Reggio,
hugged the shore bravely, though it was rough, ran
close under those cliffs which are the very end of the
Apennines, - will it shock the modest reader if I say
the very toe-nails of the Italian foot? - hauled more
and more eastward, made Spartivento blue in the distance, made it purple, made it brown, made it green,
still running admirably, - ten knots an hour we must
have got between four and five that afternoon,- and,
by the time the lighthouse at Spartivento was well
ablaze, we were abreast of it, and might begin to haul
more northward, so that, though we had a long course
before us, we should at last be sailing almost directly
towards our voyage's end, Gallipoli.
At that moment -as in any sea often happens, if
you come out from the more land-locked channel into
the larger body of water- the wind appeared to
22 
MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
change. Really, I suppose, we came into the steady
southwest wind which had probably been drawing all
day up toward the Adriatic. In two hours more we
made the lighthouse of Stilo, and I was then tired
enough to crawl down into the fearfully smelling little
cuddy, and, wrapping Battista's heavy storm-jacket
round my feet, I caught some sort of sleep.
But not for very long. I struck my watch at three
in the morning. And the air was so unworthy of that
name,- it was such a thick paste, seeming to me
more like a mixture of tar and oil and fresh fish and
decayed fish and bilge-water than air itself,- that I
voted three morning, and crawled up into the clear
starlight,- how wonderful it was, and the fresh wet
breeze that washed my face so cheerily! -and I bade
Battista take his turn below, while I would lie there
and mind the helm. If- if hlie had done what I proposed, I suppose I should not be writing these lines;
but his father, good fellow, said: "No,  signor, not
yet. We leave the shore now for the broad bay, you
see; and if the wind haul southward, we may need to
go on the other tack. We will all stay here, till we
see what the deep-sea wind may be." So we lay
there, humming, singing, and telling stories, still this
rampant southwest wind behind, as if all the powers
of the Mediterranean meant to favor my mission to
Gallipoli. The boat was now running straight before
it. We stretched out bravely into the gulf; but, before the wind, it was astonishing how easily the lugger
23
Vn.
I 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMIES.
ran.  He said to me at last, however, that on that
course we were running to leeward of our object; but
that it was the best point for his boat, and if the wind
held, he would keep on so an hour longer, and trust
to the land breeze in the morning to run down the
opposite shore of the bay.
"If" again.  The wind did not keep on.  Either
the pole-star, and the dipper, and all the rest of them,
had rebelled and were drifting westward,- and so it
seemed; or this steady southwest gale was giving out;
or, as I said before, we had come into the sweep of a current even stronger, pouring from the Levantine shores
of the Mediterranean full up the Gulf of Tarentum.
Not ten minutes after the skipper spoke, it was clear
enough to both of us that the boat must go about,
whether we wanted to or not, and we waked the other
boy, to send him forward, before we accepted the
necessity. Half asleep, he got up, courteously declined my effort to help him by me as he crossed the
boat, stepped round on the gunwale behind me as I
sat, and then, either in a lurch or in some misstep,
caught his foot in the tiller as his father held it firm,
and pitched down directly behind Battista himself,
and, as I thought, into the sea. I sprang to leeward
to throw something after him, and found him in the
sea indeed, but hanging by both hands to the gunwale,
safe enough, and in a minute, with Battista's help and
mine, on board again.  I remember how pleased I was
that his father did not swear at him, but only laughed
24
',. 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
prettily, and bade him be quick, and step forward;
and then turning to the helm, wlhicll he had left free
for the moment, he did not swear indeed, but he did
cry " Santa Madre!" when he found there was no
tiller there.  The boy's foot had fairly wrenched it,
not only from his father's hand, but from the rudderhead,- and it was gone!
We held the old fellow firmly by his feet and legs,
as hle lay over the stern of the boat, head down, examining the condition of the rudder-head. The report
wvas not favorable.  I renewed the investigation myself
in the same uncomfortable attitude. The phosphorescence of the sea was but an unsteady light, but light
enough there was to reveal what daylight made hardly
more certain, - that the wrench which had been given
to the rotten old fixtures, shaky enough at best, had
split the head of the rudder, so that the pintle hung
but loosely in its bed, and that there was nothing available for us to rig a jury tiller on. This discovery, as it
became more and more clear to each of us four in succession, abated successively the volleys of advice which
we were offering, and sent us back to our more quiet
"Santa Madres" or to meditations on " what was
next to best."
Meanwhile the boat was flying, under the sail she
had before, straight before the wind, up the Gulf of
Tarentum.
If you cannot have what you like, it is best, in a
finite world, to like what you have.  And while the
2
-t
P.
25 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
old man brought up from the cuddy his wretched and
worthless stock of staves, rope-ends, and bits of iron,
and contemplated them ruefully, as if asking them
which would like to assume the shape of a rudderhead and tiller, if his fairy godmother would appear
on the top of the mast for a moment, I was plying the
boys with questions, - what would happen to us if
we held on at this tearing rate, and rushed up the bay
to the head thereof. The boys knew no more than
they knew of Palinuro. Far enough, indeed, were
we from their parish. The old man at last laid down
the bit of brass which he had saved from some old
waif, and listened to me as I pointed out to them on
my map the course we were making, and, without
answering me a word, fell on his knees and broke into
most voluble prayer,- only interrupted by sobs of
undisguised agony.  The boys were almost as much
surprised as I was.  And as he prayed and sobbed,
the boat rushed on!
Santa Madre, San Giovanni, and Sant' Antonio,we needed all their help, if it were  only to keep
him quiet; and when at last he rose from his knees,
and came to himself enough to tend the sheets a little,
I asked, as modestly as I could, what put this keen
edge on his grief or his devotions. Then came such
stories of hobgoblins, witches, devils, giants, elves, and
fairies, at this head of the bay! -no man ever returned who landed there; his father and his father's
father had charged him, and his brothers and his
26
'I,' —
— F-. 
MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
cousins, never to be lured to make a voyage there,
and never to run for those coves, though schools of
golden fish should lead the way.  It was not till this
moment, that, tryii(ng to make him look upon the map,
I read myself there the words, at the mouth of the
Crathis River, "Sybari Ruine."
Surely enough, this howling Euroclydon- for Euroclydon it now was-  was bearing  me  and mine
directly to Sybaris!
And here was this devout old fisherman confirming
the words of Smith's Dictionary, when it said that
nobody had been there and returned, for generation
upon generation.
At a dozen knots an hour, as things were, I was
going to Sybaris!  Nor was I many  hours from it.
For at that moment we cannot have been more than
five-and-thirty miles from the beach, where, in less
than five hours, Euroclydon flung us on shore.
The memory of the old green settees, and of Hutchinson and Wheeler and the other Latin-school boys,
sustained me beneath the calamity which impended.
Nor do I think at heart the boys felt so bad as their
father about the djins and the devils, the powers of
the earth and the powers of the air. Is there, perliaps, in the youthful mind, rather a passion for " seeing the folly" of life a little in that direction?  None
the less did we join him in rigging out the longest
sweep we had aft, lashing it tight under the little rail
which we had been leaning on, and trying gentle ex
27
I 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
perimnents, how far this extemporized rudder might
bring the boat round to the wind. Nonsense the
whole!  By that time Euroclydon was on us, so that
I would never have tried to put her about if we had
had the best gear I ever handled, and our experiments
only succeeded far enough to show that we were as
utterly powerless as men could be. Meanwhile day
was just beginning to break. I soothed the old man
with such devout expressions as heretic might venture.
I tried to turn him from the coming evil to the present
necessity. I counselled with him whether it might
not be safer to take in sail and drift along. But from
this he dissented. Time enough to take in sail when
we knew what shore we were coming to.  He had no
kedge or grapple or cord, indeed, that would pretend
to hold this boat against this gale. We would beach
her, if it pleased the Virgin; and if we could not,shaking his head, - why, that would please the Virgin, too.
And so Euroclydon hurried us on to Sybaris.
The sun rose, O how magnificenltly! Is there anywhere to see sunrise like the Mediterranean? And
if one may not be on the top of Katahdin, is there any
place for sunrise like the very level of the sea? Already the Calabrian mountains of our western horizon
were gray against the sky. One or another of us was
forward all the time, trying to make out by what
slopes the hills descended to the sea. Was it cliff of
basalt, or was it reedy swamp, that was to receive us?
28
I ,
t 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
I insisted at last on his reducing sail. For I felt sure
that he was driving on under a sort of fatality which
made himn dare the worst.  I was wholly right, for the
boat now rose easier on the water, and was much more
dry.
Perhaps the wind flagged a little as the sun rose.
At all events, he took courage, which I had never lost.
I made his boy find us some oranges. I made them
laugh by eating their cold polenta with them. I even
made himn confess, when I called him aft and sent Battista forward, that the shore we were nearing looked
low. For we were near enough now to see stonepines and chestnut-trees. Did anybody see the towers
of Sybaris?
Not a tower! But, on the other hand, not a gnome,
witch, Norna's Head, or other intimation of the underworld.   The shore looked like many other Italian
shores. It looked not very unlike what we Yankees
call salt-marsh. At all events, we should not break
our heads against a wall! Nor will I draw out the
story of our anxieties, varying as the waves did on
which we rose and fell so easily. As she forged on, it
was clear at last that to some wanderers, at least,
Sybaris  had  some  hospitality.   A  long, low  spit
made out into the sea, with never a house on it, but
brown  withl  storm-worn shrubs, above  the line of
which were the stone-pines and chestnuts which
had first given character to the shore. Hard for us,
if we had been flung on the outside of this spit. But
29 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
we were not. Else I had not been writing here to-day.
We passed it by fifty fathom clear. Of course under its
lee was our harbor. Battista let go the halyards in a
moment, and the wet sails came rattling down. The
old mnan, the boy, Battista, and I seized the best
sweeps he had left. Two of us at each, working on
the same side, we brought her head round as fast as she
would bear it in that fearful sea.  Inch by inch we
wrought along to the smoother water, and breathed
free at last as we came under the partial protection of
the friendly shore.
Battista and his brother then hauled up the sail
enough to give such headway to the boat as we
thought our sweeps would control. And we crept
along the shore for an hour, seeing nothing but reeds,
and now and then a distant buffalo, when at last a very
hard knock on a rock the boy ahead had not seen
under water started the planks so that we knew that
was dangerous play; and, without more solicitation,
the old man beached the boat in a little cove where
the reeds gave place for a trickling stream.   I told
them they might land or not, as they pleased.   I
would go ashore and get assistance or information.
The old man clearly thought I was going to ask my
assistance from the father of lies himself.  But he was
resigned to my will, - said he would wait for my return. I stripped and waded ashore with my clothes
upon my  head, dressed as quickly as I could, and
pushed up from the beach to the low upland.
30
.t 
MY YISIT TO SYBARIS.
Clearly enough I was in a civilized country.  Not
that there was a gallows, as the old joke says; but
there were tracks in the shingle of the beach showing
where wheels had been, and these led me to a cart-track
between high growths of that Mediterranean reed which
grows all along in those low flats.  There is one of
the reeds on the hooks above my gun in the hall as
you came in. I followed up the track, but without
seeing barn, house, horse, or man, for a quarter of a
mile, perhaps, when behold,  Not the footprint of a man! as to Robinson Cru
soe;  Not a gallows and man hanging! as in the sailor
story above named;
But a railroad track! Evidently a horse-railroad.
" A  horse-railroad in Italy!" said I, aloud.  "A
horse-railroad in Sybaris!  It must have  changed
since the days of the coppersmiths!"  And I flung
myself on a heap of reeds which lay there, and waited.
In two minutes I heard the fast step of horses, as I
supposed; in a minute more four mules rounded the
corner, and a " horse-car" came dashing along the
road. I stepped forward and waved my hand, but the
driver bowed respectfully, pointed back, and then to a
board on top of his car, and I read, as he dashed by
me, the word
displayed full above him; as one may read Complet on
a Paris omnibus.
31
L.
]TX'77pe, 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
Now II>Xpes is the Greek for full.  "In Sybaris
they do not let the horse-railroads grind the faces of
the passengers," said I.   " Not  so wholly changed
since the coppersmiths."   And, within the minute,
more quadrupedantal noises, more mules, and another
car, which  stopped at my  signal.   I entered, and
found a dozen or more passengers, sitting back to
back on a seat which ran up the middle of the car, as
you might ride in an Irish jauntiiig-car.  In this way
it was impossible for the conductor to smuggle ill a
standing passenger, impossible for a passenger to catch
cold from a cracked window, and possible for a passenger to see the scenery from the window.  " Can it be
possible," said I, "that the traditions of Sybaris really
linger here?"
I sat quite in the front of the car, so that I could
see the fate of my first friend IZl'pes    the full car.
In a very few minutes it switched off from our track,
leaving us still to pick up our complement, and then I
saw that it dropped its mules, and was attached, on a
side track, to an endless chain, which took it along at
a much greater rapidity, so that it was soon out of
sight.  I addressed my next neighbor on the subject,
in Greek which would have made my fortune in those
old days of the pea-green settees.   But he did not
seem to make much of that, but in sufficiently good
Italian told me, that as soon as we were full, we should
be attached in the same way to the chain, which was
driven by stationary engines five or six stadia apart,
32
"t
r
iL 
M MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
and so indeed it proved.   We p)icked up one or two
niarket-wvomen, a yotllng artist or two, and a little lboy.
WVliien tlhe chlild got ill, tlhere  vas a nodl and snilue oil
people's faces; ilily iiext neigldihor sai(t to ilie, HIXpEi,
as if wvithl an air of relief; aid sure enouglhi, ill a niillute more, we were flying along at a 2.20 )pace, with
neither mule nor enginie ill si,ght, stol)l)ing about once
a mile to drop) passeiigers, if tlilerc was need, and evidently ap)proac(llilc Sy.)aris.
All alog ii()ow  were holosts, etll witl  itts pretty
garden of perhap)s an acre, no fences, because no cattle
at large.  I wonder if tlhe Viielad )e(ple know tChey
caught that idea from Sybaris!  All the houses were
of one story, -  stretching out as you reineniber Pliny's
villa did, if Ware  aid( Van Blrirunt ever sllowed you
thle plans, -  or as lE,rastus Biigelow builds fitetories at
Clinton.   I learned afterwards tlilt sttaii-builders and
slaveliolders are forbidden to live in Svbaris by tlhe
same article in the ftindamiie(iital ]law.  r'I'lis accounlts,
witih othler tlings, for tlhe vig,rlouls lealtl (t' thleir wo len.  I sIIppos(d(1 that thllis was a  ere stIbtirl.)a  Jltiii it, and, tlhough the houses caine  e.arer an( nearer, yet
as no two liouses touclle(l in a block, 1 (lid not know
we hlad come into the city till all the passengers left
the ear, an   tlhe con)ductor courteously told me we
were at our journey's end(1.
WI'.eil this Ial)ppens to yoti in Boston, alid you leave
your car, you findl(l yourself llti(itlle(l on a steel), slop)ing
sidewalk, uiider the rain or snow, withl  a hlundred or
33
2 *
c 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
more other passengers, all eager, all wondering, all unprovided for. But I found in Sybaris a large glassroofed station, from which the other lines of neighborhood cars radiated, in which women and even little
children were passing from route to route, under the
guidance of civil and intelligent persons, who, strange
enough, made it their business to conduct these people
to and fro, and did not consider it their duty to insult
the traveller. For a moment mny mind reverted to
the contrast at home; but not long.  As I stood admiring and amused at once, a bright, brisk little fellow
stepped up to me, and asked what my purpose was,
and which way I would go. He spoke in Greek first,
but, seeing I did not catch his meaning, relapsed into
very passable Italian, quite as good as mine.
I told him that I was shipwrecked, and had come
into town for assistance.  Hie expressed sympathy, but 
wasted not a moment, led me to his chief at an office t
on one side, who gave me a card with the address of
an officer whose duty it was to see to strangers, and
said that he would in turn introduce me to the chief
of the boat-builders; and then said, as if in apology
for his promptness,
Xp' telvov 7raIpEova tXELv, c'OEX)ov-ra 8E' 7rE47rEtv, -
"Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."
He called to me a conductor of the red line, said
me'V o, which we translate guest, but which I found in
this case means "dead-head," or "1 free," bowed, and I
saw him no more.
34 
MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
"Strange country have I come to, indeed," said I,
as I thought of the passports of Civita Vecchia, of the
indifference of Scollay's Buildings, and of the surliness
of Springfield.  "And this is Sybaris!"
WVF sent down a tug to the cove which I indicated
on their topographical map, and to the terror of the
old fisherman and his sons, to whom I had sent a note,
which they could not read, our boat was towed up to
the city quay, and was put under repairs. That last
thump on the hidden rock was her worst injury, and
it was a week before I could get away. It was in this
time that I got the information I am now to give, partly from my own observations, partly from what George
the Proxenus or his brother Philip told me, -more
from what I got from a very pleasing person, the wife
of another brother, at whose house I used to visit
freely, and whose boys, fine fellows, were very fond
of talking about America with me. They spoke English very funnily, and like little school-books. The
ship-carpenter, a man named Alexander, was a very
intelligent person; and, indeed, the whole social arrangement of the place was so simple, that it seemed
to me that I got on very fast, and knew a great deal
of them in a very short time.
At this point I will, for greater convenience, quote
directly from my journal. It has the fault which all
journals have, that their memoranda are apt to be fullest when one has the most time to write, and that they
35
L 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
are therefore most barren just at those points of crisis
when the writer really has most to tell. This remark
will be found near the beginning of "John Adams's
Journal," of which it is signally true.   I will, however, copy what there is in mille. When I find that
it fails, I will do my best to supply the deficiency.
JOURNAL.
The rpo':evo~, Proxenus, as this officer is called,
(officer whose business is to care for strangers, quite
after the old Athenian system,) was very civil, though
a short-metre kind of person, used evidently to affairs in the time of affairs, and to nothing else. He
offered Greek at first for talk, as the man had done at
the station; but, finding I preferred Italian, fell into
that readily.   I am  too tired to-night, not to say
sleepy, to try to write out much of what he told me,
or I told him. He was very expeditious, when he
heard about the boat, in sending to her relief. He led
me to a good map of the city and harbor which hung
on the office wall, and in five minutes had sent a despatch which he said would fit out a tug which would
bring the old man and the boys up to the city. I
offered to go with them. But he said no, - that I
should be of no use there, - or rather of none which
a note from me would not serve as well; and that, as
I must have had a fatiguing, night, I should be much
better off at my inn. I observed he used the telegraph
constantly, even sending his own despatches by his
36
I
I' 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
own instrument, at his office desk, - writing as readily so as I do these words. In answer to a question
of mine, he said there were delivery offices almost
everywhere, and that they hardly ever had occasion
to use a special messenger. But, when he wanted to
send my note to the tug, and afterwards to send me
here, he beckoned to his son, a tall, pleasant-looking
boy, who brought me, to show me the way.*
The inn covers a good deal of ground for the number of rooms, but there is not a staircase in it. It is
not larger than a generous private house. The whole
is of onfe story, as is every other house I have so far
seen in Sybaris. The mistress is a jolly-looking person, who for all her jollity seems careful and thoughtful, and desirous to be of service; and, without worrying me, she has really made me very comfortable.
She knocked just now herself, and, in quite a studied
speech, said that I was the first American she had ever
had here; that she was wholly unacquainted with our
customs, but that she would be much obliged to me if
* After I knew the Proxenus better, I told him that this ready and
constant use of the telegraph was one of the first of their conveniences I noticed. He said the telegraph was an old affair with
them, and he wondered other nations had been so slow in copying it;
that they used it as long ago as what he called their day of horrors,
when Sybaris was crushed by the Crotoniates, more than five centuries
before Christ. I was amazed at this, but in their public library afterwards I found in Pliny that that defeat was known at Olympia in
Greece on the day it happened, and the same statement is in Cicero
De Naturd Deorum. See Pliny, VII. 22. (I), and compare Plutarch in
Paulus,milius, where he names four such incidents.
37
F" 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
I would indicate to her any improvements which the
inns of my own country might suggest to me. The
poor soul had been at the pains to look up "United
States" in some book of travels, and had even writ
ten to the Proxenus to ask how she should cook pork
and beans for me, and what she should give me instead of salt codfish. HIe had written her a funny
note, which she showed me, in which he said that I
should be satisfied with pheasants and quails for a day,
and that the next day he would tell her.
Experience of my  own country indeed!  There
was not a fly in the room where the table d'hAte is
served, nor is there in this apartment. This consists
of a pretty, airy sitting-room with a veranda opening
from it, and in the next room the bed and its appurtenances. I found on the table pen, ink, and paper, which
I never found ready in my own room at the Brevoort; I
found in the bedroom a foot-tub, a shower-bath, more
towels than I could count, and hot and cold water ready
to run for me. I have not smelled a smell since I came v
into the house, excepting the savory breakfast and dinner which she gave me, and these lovely Italian violets which stand on the writing-table; and, of course,
my cigar on the veranda. But I shall write no more.
Now we will see if there are any smooth rose-leaves in
the beds of Sybaris.
That is the end of that day's entry.
The Proxenus came round to see me that first even
88
I
9.1
t
T,
I
i
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MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
ing, and we sat, smoking, on the piazza together. I
remember I spoke with pleasure of the horse-railroad
management, and asked as to the methods they took
to secure such personal comfort.
He said that my question cut pretty low down, for
that the answer really involved the study of their
whole system.  "I have thought of it a good deal,"
said he, "when I have been in St. Petersburg, and in
England and America; and as far as I can find out,
our peculiarity in everything is, that we respect -
I have sometimes thought we almost worshipped —
the rights, even the notions or whims, of the individual citizen. With us the first object of the state, as
an organization, is to care for the individual citizen, be
he man, woman, or child.  We  consider the state to
be made for the better and higher training of men,
much as your divines say that the Church is. Instead
of our lumping our citizens, therefore, and treating
Jenny Lind and Tom Heenan to the same dose of public schooling, - instead of saying that what is sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander, - we try to see
that each individual is protected in the enjoyment,
not of what the majority likes, but of what he chooses,
so long as his choice injures no other man."
I thought, in one whiff, of Stuart Mill, and of the
coppersmiths.
"Our horse-railroad system grew out of this the ory," continued he.  "As  long ago as Herodotus,
people lived here in houses one story highl, with these
39 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
gardens between. But some generations ago, a young
fellow named Apollidorus, who  had been  to Edinburgh, pulled down his father's house and built a block
of what you call houses on the site of it. They were
five stories high, had basements, and so on, with windows fore and aft, and, of course, none on the sides.
The old fogies looked aghast. But he found plenty
of fools to hire them. But the tenants had not been
in a week when the Kategoros, district attorney, had
him up' for taking away from a citizen what he could
not restore.'   This, you must know, is one of the
severest charges in our criminal code.
"Of course, it was easy enough to show that the
tenants went willingly; he showed dumb-waiters, and
I know not what infernal contrivances of convenience
within. But he could not show that the tenants had
north windows and south windows, because they did
not. The government, on their side, showed that
men were made to breathe fresh air, and that he could
not ventilate his houses as if they were open on all
sides; they showed that women were not made to
climb up and down ladders, and to live on stages at
the tops of them; and he tried in vain to persuade the
jury that this climbing was good for little children.
Hie had lured these citizens into places dangerous for
health, growth, strength, and comfort. And so he was
compelled to erect a statue typical of strength, and a
small hospital for infants, as his penalty. That spirited Hercules, which stands in front of the market,
was a part of his fine.
40
, k4
t'.
-11,
Il 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
" Of course, after a decision like this, cqncentration
of inhabitants was out of the question. Every pulpit
in Sybaris blazed with sermons on the text,' Every
man shall sit under his vine and under his fig-tree.'
Everybody saw that a house without its own garden
was an abomination, and  easy communication  with
the suburbs was a necessity.
"It was, indeed, easy enough to show, as the city
engineer did, that the power wasted in lifting people
up, and, for that matter, down stairs, in a five-story
house, in one day, would carry all those people I do
not know how many miles on a level railroad track in
less time.  What you call horse-railroads, therefore,
became a necessity."
I said they made a great row with us.
"Yes," said he, " I saw they did.  With us the government owns and repairs the track, as you do the track
of any common road. We never have any difficulty.
"You see," he added after a pause, "with us, if
a conductor sprains the ankle of a citizen, it is a matter the state looks after. With you, the citizen must
himself be the prosecutor, and virtually never is. Did
you notice a pretty winged Mercury outside the station-house you came to?"
I had noticed it.
"That was put up, I don't know how long ago, in
the infancy of these things. They took a car off one
night, without public notice beforehand. One old
man was corning in onl it, to his daughter's wedding.
41
r 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
He missed his connection out at Little Krastis, and
lost half an hour. Down came the Kategoros. The
company had taken from a citizen what they could
not restore, namely, half an hour."
George  lighted another cigar, and laughed very
heartily.  "That's a great case in our reports," he said.
" The company ventured to go to trial on it. They
hoped they might overturn the old decisions, which
were so old that nobody knows when they were made,
- as old as the dancing horses," said he, laughing.
"They said time was not a thing,-  it was a relation
of ideas; that it did not exist in heaven; that they
could not be made to suffer because they did not deliver back what no man ever saw, or touched, or tasted.
What was half an hour?  But the jury was pitiless.
A  lot of business men, you know, -they knew the
value of time. What did they care for the metaphysics?  And the company was bidden to put up an
appropriate statue worth ten talents in front of their
station-house, as a reminder to all their people that a
citizen's time was worth something."
I observed a queer thing two or three times in this
visit of the Proxenus.  Just at this point he rose rather
suddenly and bade me good evening. I begged him
to stay, but had to repeat my invitation twice. His
hand was on the handle of the door before hlie turned
back.  Then he sat down, and we went on talking;
but before long he did the same thing again, and then
again.
42
, L
t
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I 
MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
At last I was provoked, and said: "What is the
custom of your country? Do you have to take a walk
every eleven minutes and a quarter?"
George laughed again, and indeed blushed.  " Do
you know what a bore is?" said he.
"Alas! I do," said I.
Well," said he, " the universal custom here is,
that an uninvited guest, who calls on another man on
his own business, rises at the end of eleven minutes,
and offers to go.. And the courts have ruled, very
firmly, that there must be a bona fide effort. We get
into such a habit of it, that, with you, I really did it
unawares.   The  custom  is as old as Cleisthenes
and his wedding. But some of the decisions are not
more than two or three centuries old, and they are
very funny.
"On the whole," hlie added, "I think it works well.
Of course, between friends, it is absurd, but it is a
great protection against a class of people who think
their own concerns are the only things of value. You
see you have only to say, when a man comes in, that
you thank him for coming, that you wish he would
stay, or to take his hat or his stick, - you have only
to make him an invited guest, -and then the rule
does not hold."
"Ah!" said I; "then I invite you to spend every
evening with me while I am here."
" Take care," said he; " the Government Almanac
is printed and distributed gratuitously from the fines
43 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
on bores. Their funds arq getting very low up at the
department, and they will be very sharp on your
friends. So you need not be profuse in your invitations.
THIS conversation was a clew to a good many
things which I saw while I was in the city.  I never
was in a place where there were so many tasteful,
pretty little conveniences  for everybody.   At  the
quadrants, where the streets cross, there was always a
pretty little sheltered seat for four or five people, -
shaded, stuffed, dry, and always the morning and
evening papers, and an advertisement of the times of
boats and trains, for any one who milght be waiting for
a car or for a friend.  Sometimes these were votive
offering,s, where public spirit had spoken in gratitude.
More often they had been ordered at the cost of some
one who had taken from a citizen what he could not
repay. The private citizen might often hesitate about
prosecuting a bore, or a nuisance, or a conceited company officer. But the Kategoroi made no bones about
it. They called the citizen as a witness, and gave
the criminal a reminder which posterity held in awe.
Their point, as they always explained it to me, is, that
the citizen's health and strength are essential to the
state. The state cannot afford to have him maimed,
any more than it can afford to have him  drunk or
ignorant.   The individual, of course, cannot be following up his separate grievances with people  who
44
I
.li
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MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
abridge his rights. But the public accuser can and
does.
With us, public servants, who know they are public
.crvants, are always obliging and civil.   I would not
sk better treatment in my own home than I am sure
of in Capitol, State-house, or city hall. It is only
when you get to some miserable sub-bureau, where
the servant of the servant of a creature of the state
can bully you, that you come to grief.  For instance,
the State of Massachusetts just now forbids corporations to work children more than ten hours a day.
The corporations obey. But the overseers in the
rooms, whom the corporations employ, work children
eleven hours, or as many as they choose.  They would
not stand that in Sybaris.
Such were my first day's observations. I now resume the Journal of which I have spoken.
Friday, 9th Kal. Oap7yqXtov,. - Everything seems
to be new here. Place, language, and all are changed,
- and so my old book for these memoranda gave out
last night, and I have had to rummage up another
from my stores.  Fortunately the traps came up from
the boat even before I was awake this morning. One
does sleep well in such a bed, - without steam-whistles or cockerels or brass-founders. It was as quiet as
the mid-country.
The calendar is as new as the book (of which the
paper is not half as good as the old was). It seems
45
r-l 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMNIES.
an odd mixture of Italian and Greek, and I do not
yet understand it.  But I put at the top of tle p)age
what the Proxenus tells me to, were it only for practice.  Tllis is, he says, tlhe iintli- of thle Kl.tleids of
Tllargelion, but hle counts it Friday, as I did.  For
my )parit, I tlhougilt the Greeks had no Kalenids; but
it would seem that tlhe Sybarites have.
It has been a rainy day, but I have mana,ged( with
t]lheir convenient arrangements  here to do about ten
times as much as I should have done at holne.  If I
do not get too sleepy, I will go into a little more detail
than I have been apt to do since the campaig,n began.
The peculiarity of tlhis place seems to be, that everybody has )lenlty of time.
I slept ltte after the excitement of the night before,
and if the  (lady Myrtis's nice mattresses are made of
rose-leaves, none of the leaves were  crumpled.  I
rang, as I had been bidd(len, as soon as I woke; and a
ravislingll  cup of coffee a)peared almost on the momenit, on the strengthll of which I dressed slowly, and
went (down to the table d'hdte.  Breakfast was very
nicely served; but I do not stop to describe it, because
some rainy day I will make a chapter on the cookery
of Sylbaris, so dliferent from that of our Sicilian allies;
alas! so (lifterent firom  the taverns of mny beloved
Newv E,gla-d(l.  While I was at breakfast tlhere cainme
in tlhis clever little note in this pretty Greek IIf)tLdschrijt friom the lProxenus, whlose name, it all)ears, is
Geor,ge:
46 
MIY VISIT 1TO0 SYBARIS.
[Tran1it;,,i.]
OFFICE OF TIIE PROXE,US,
Syba-ris, 9th Kal. Thiar.
COI,ONEL INGIIAM, &-C.)  &C.:  I),Rl Siit, -  Thle  rel)ort fiomn PIylades, chlief of
boat-builders, is tlhat your boat will req(lIire a new
stern-post  as well  as rui(lder, and  that one  whole
streak on lher larboard side must be renewed.  Slle
was ordered to the grovernment works last  ighlit, and
the men undoubtedly wient to work  on her tisi morn
ing.
I slhall hlave the I)leasure of callijng on you at seven
minutes after nooli, wlleii I shlall be relieve(l froni  office duty hlere.   If you  lhave llo pleasanLter el,ngageinent, let me  take  you  iin imy carriag.e  to see our
granite quarries aid to batlhe.   WVe can (lo tlhis before
dinner.   Mly wife will be very  1ai)l)y if you will join
our family party at fotur.
14arewell,
GEORGE, the Proxenl?s.
Wlat his otier name is, I do not yet know.   They
seem to sign like Englishi bislo)s.
I stray.ed round a little before 110oo1, and made a little.,ketcll of a seat for passeingers aiting for tlte st,eet
rail(),ad cars.   A't twelv e I relered liiy.self on tile
hotel veranda, alud at sevein iiiiittes past tlie 1roxenills drove up in a pretty coveredi l)tigy, witll -a nice
little trotting mare.   He  apologized( for the cover;
47 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
said, if the day had been fine he could have shown me
more of the country, but as it rained, whly, we must
e'en bear it as we could.
We drove first to the granite quarries, which are
worked witlh great p)recision by a fine-lookiing set of
men, who have much more of tile Lombard, not to
say Yankee, look about them in their promptness of
movement than I have seen anywhere else in Southern Italy. Then the Proxenus asked me if I were
used to swimming as early as this in the season.
When I said there were few seasons and few waters in
which I did not swim, and that I should greatly enjoy
a plunge, he turned his hlorse's lhead, and we drove, by
a charming up-and-down-lill drive, I should think six
miles, down the old course of the Crastis River till we
came to a signial-station, - what one might call Watch
Hill, - where was a beautiful view of the gulf, grand
bluffs, smooth beaches, and a fine surf for bathlers. It
almost seemed as if we had been expected.  A quaint
old fisherman fastened the horse to a fence, provid(led
towels, pointed out two little sheds for undressinig, and
we had a brisk swim in the surf.  HIow delicious this
Mediterranean water is, swept off the Syrtes by that
tremendous Euroclydon! I hardly thloulght yesterday
morningi that I should be speaking of it so good  naturedly.
lHome  to dinner.   Tile  Proxenus  said his wife
would excuse my firock-coat. And at his house, at
dinner, and in tile garden, and on the veranda, I have
48 
It was not exac-tly tile f        1ht rily )arty wlillc  ttle liote
,1r,llised.   Tlihe Cllief Justic( Nwas tlere, -   -llo, it' I
,,i,der.tand, is thle cousin  of? my  liostess, -alid h iis
.,retty wife; a youing  iaii,  named  Joannes Isocra.tes,
wiloIn I accused of beingi  a (reat-(grat(lisoIi of the orator; aud Pliilil), the brotlier of tlhe I'roxlenus.  It was
a iroundl talle for twelve.   St)mie of tlhe cllil(lden hadl
to  sit at a si(le tal)e, ai,d  tell(y  wcle  very  iimerry
tl~ere.
The talk w"s very ready and fr'ee, -   generally general; but sometimnes I (got off ijuto a seI)arate l)r,ivate
talk withl IIleone -as I sliall begin to call Georg(,e's
wsifet -  ad with the ClIief Justice's wite.  1ier liusLan.iid calls lier L,ois.   l~e sat lolng at table, sp)en(ding
il,ore tlhan half tlle timne  ovei' Li, fi uit aid eofie.
There was no wine.   The dessert, hlowever, had been
3
D 
SYBARIS AND OTHER IIOMES,.
served in another room  than that we  ate thle  ineats
in.   We  passed  from  room  to room, as we  used to
when we  dined with  Hlowqua,  at Calltoll.    And  in
the  new room  we  did  not take  the same places as
before.
I said, ill the course of talk, that eithler they were
all very mnuchl  at leisure here, or tlhat I llad talikcin al
uncoiiscioiiable amount of Georg,e's time....
ie laug,lled, and said he could well believe that, as
I had said that I was broulght up in 13ostoii.  "   lien
I was  there," said he, " I could see that your pcol)le
were all hospitable enough, but tllat the pcol)le wlio
were good for anything were made to do all tlhe work
of the vauriens, and really had no tiime for f"iendsllip
or hosp)itality.   I rcnmeml)er an llistoi'iaii of yours, N,ho
crossed wvitll mie, said that thlere sllould b)e a motto
stretclle(l across Bloston 1)I y, fi'oi one fort to anotller,
w ithl the woirds,' No admiitt.al(e, exceplt on lbusiness.'
I did llot iiiore tllan llalf like tlhis cli,,liiig at Bostoii., and asked h'ow tlhey nIa.gcd thlings iii Syb)is.
"Wlily, you see," said lie, " we  holld  )reCtty stitffly to
tlhe ol(l Cliaron(dial laws, of wllicl I)erli,Il)s you know
sometliin(; lire's a cop)y of thle code  if you w oul(l
like to look over it," ali(l lie to(ok olle out ot' llis pocket.   " AVec  ire still veriy (,llii-y al)out amiie(lIniiellts to
statutes, so tlit vely little tinlie is sl)ent ill le,gislattioll;
we lave l no bIills at sllos, alI([ hLut little del)t, a   td tlitt
is all on  lioiioi, so  tlhat tlhere  is not miuclh  -ltotilntkeeping  or  litig,atioii; you  kinowv  whlat ]ll) l(s  t)
50
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i 
~M    VISIT T1 O'SYIBA1IIS.
gossips, -  gossip) takes a goo( deleal of time elsewhiere,
-and sonmeliowN eveiryb)dy (loes lIis sllare of *r()ik, s,)
that all of us do liave a good deal of wlfat you call
leisure.'   Wletiler,"  lie  added pensively,  " in  a
world God  put us into tlhat we niglt love each other,
and learn to love, - whether the timne we spend in
society, or thle tine we spend caged belindi our office
desks, is tlhe time whichl slhouhl( be called devoted to
the' business of life,' that remainiis to be seen."
"Ilow caine you to Boston," sai(l 1, " and iwhen?"
" 0, we all have to travel," said George, "if we
mean to go into the administration.  And I liked administration.   r observe  that you app)oint a foreitgn
aml)assador because lie can make a good stuimp spee(:li
i  In Kentucky.   But, since Cliaroidas's time, trainingc
lias been at the bottom of our systeii.  Aii(l lo mali
could offer hlimiseIf  ere to serve on tlhe schlool coini1ittee, unless lie knew  how othier nations maniaged(
tl,eir selools."
Not  if lie had  lhimself made  school-books?
said I.
"No!" lau(ghed George, "for lie mirghlt introduce
thlem.  Withl  us no professor mray teach from a textI..,k lie has made limnself, unless tlle lhigllest council
(of etXlication ordler it; aiid, oin tle same princil)le, we
slh)ould nlever choose a bookseller on the sclhool coinnittee.  And  so, to go ba(ck," 1ie said, " when Im~
fittler found that administration was iiiy I)assion, lie
sent me the grand tour.   I learned a great deal in
51 
SYBARIS AND OTIIER IIOMIES.
America, and am very fond of the Americans.   But I
never saw one l)ere before."
I did not ask what lie learned in America, for I was
more anxious to learn myself how they adminiistered
government in Sybaris.
Thle Clhief Justice said that hle  thougllt George
hardly answered my question.   ie said that their systein compelled everybody to do  l,what lie could do best,
and to a large extent secured tlhis by invitinig people
to do whlat they could do best.  A  messenger in a
public office, for instance, is invariably a manl who 1-has
leg,s and a totngue, but who has no arms.   That is, if
such a place is vacant, search is at once made for sonme
person who shlall fill this )place well; and if lie can
show that tlhere is no other place hle can fill, on tlhat
shlowing he is almost sure of the appl)ointment.  " We
hlave not a copyiiig-clerk in tlle Court-Hiouse," said
the Chlief Justice, " who has two legs.  Alost of tllem,
in fact, fhave no  tongues, wlli(  is a conveiineience."
Starting from this, as George had sai(l, it followed tllat
there were no vauriens, and of course tlhe amount of
work fell ligllter on each.  But thlis is not thle whole.
Custom in part, statute in part, and in part this terri1,le verdict which they all so dread, - the verdict of
atp7raytol thiey call it,* - have so wrought on them
* The ver(lict of dpiraylio' is that alluded to above.  It is given on
an indli(-tinc'et broighlit by the state's attorney in a criminal court.  It
means,'" Ie hais taken from a citizen what he cannot restore."  The
derivation reminds one of our action of assumtpsit, but they carry it
further than we do.
t
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MIY  VISIT TO  SYBAI:IS.
tlhat they destroy very  little  wlli(l  they have once
created.   " Time   oill (o tllat for is," said  Plilil),
la1gliling.   "   y rtear w'll   tumibles doN-ii flast enoughl
witllout my llell)ing tile ithll."
I said I reiiieinl)ered tlhat Judg(,e   Ierrick said tlhat,
if the tliousand million imen n-)ow in the world  could
l)e set to work  in  iIitelli(rett organized  labor  tlhey
could(l in a generation  (duIl)licate  the present loilnIUnients of tie race of men.   Thle existilg fatrms, road(s,
bridg(es, sliI)s, 1piers, cities, villges, and a.ll tlie rest,
could( be 1)prod(uced in one geleration.  All the otlher
generations  hlave  been  spelnt in men's cuttiIin  e.'l
othier's thlroats, and in destroying whlat  oti-her p)eol)le
lhave beenf at work 1upon.
The Chiief Justice said tliis was undoubtedly true.
They tried as falr as thley coul(I to prevent such waste
of life, and to a large extent lIe tlouglit they succeeded.
Tile solidity of tlieir buildingl is such  that thley lave
(llwelling-liouses wlic1l hlave been occup)ied as such for
two thiousand years.
I said( thiat in lo(id(lon tley hiad told me thieir houses
tumibled downi iii eiIghty.
41IExactly,"  said the Chief  Justice, "and whiat a
waste thlat is!  Wlien my faither was in London, thley
were greatly deliglited wvitli a system of sewers tlhey
It(l jiust turnied into the T'il.ramnes.   xI, len I was tlhere,
tiley were as muchi tieliglited, because they hlad discoiered a method of leading their contents away from
the Thames."
53 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
"When  my  father was in Boston," said George,
"they were all very proud to show him their success
in dig(ing doown their high,est lill.  Wlhen I was thlere
they were buiildiiig it up to the old lieig,lt, to make a
reservoir on topl) of it."
" We have co)lne to thle enelusioi," said the (Cliief
Justice, " tlhat it is rather dangerous interferilrg mu-ntch
wvitlh naturie.  Thlat is to say, wlieii a large body of men
lhave nestled dovnI in a regCionl, it was probably about
what they wanted.  If one of them tries to mend, lie
is apt to mar.   We  had a fellow over on the Crastis
there, wlho was stingy about usii)g steam-power; so lhe
made a great ligll dam on the river,-  iand, by Jupiter, Colonel Ill(lalm, five llundred tllousand pcol)le lost
tlheir fish because tlhat fellow (chose to si)in cotton a
ten-mnilliontli part of a draclima clcapler than the rest
of mankind."'
lie got ap7ra71yJo  with a vengeance," growled
Plilip, who is a little touchly.
" I-e got (ip7ratLo'," said the Chief Justiee, "and
lie 1had to put in fishl-ways.   You must takle our fi-iend
out to see the fisll go uip his stairways, George.   But
wlhat  happened  at  Paostum  was  worse  tlhan  that.
Tlley v lad somle salt marshles tlhere, -  what tlhey call
flats.  Tlhey undertook to fill tlhemn  ip so as to get
land in la;e of water.   Tlhey  got imore  tlhan  they
batrg:,iiii(L[ fi(o.  Tlef( disturbed tlhe natural flow of the
*ui.reiits, aiid they lost tiheir harbor.  ILand is p)lelity
i11 PestuIn now.   The last time I was there the popu
54 
bl11it, ab LU L I. U L li  tIt'y t Itt II Lv)   tLUJ )IIt It JJjttL L  L  It:
Sliij) systeiI.  1Every (-;Iii(1 Imust b)e tatiglit to d(() sonietlitilig.  If tlhe  1).ircuits Clll!lOt +tas.l, bomcel)()bly elso
(()es;'Tlie otlier difh('Lulty lie 11had( seenll il tiavclling,
tbut lie (did niot i)clievc it was llecessary.  TlIl(y lave
liere  but few very  la(rge fortuiles  tIransiiiitte(  fi'oi
fittlier to sonI.   Tiley lave no  sucli tIraiisimission by
will, aid( unless a mim,  lias given  avay  his prop)erty
)efore his deathi  tlhe state becomes his exe(ctitor.   Of
course in practice, excel)t iii cases of suddeti  deathl,
people  are  their own  executors.   rTllein  tlhey  give
every man and woman who is over sixty-five a small
)enlsionii,', -eiiougli  to  save  anybody  firom  al,solutte
waillt.   Tlley insist on it tlhat tlhis is the most  coln'venient arrangement.   Tliey  knio()v  almtost  notlii<ig of
dnlinkenness; and  wlat  follovws  is, t]hat  everybody
does somnethingc somelwhere.
As  tlhe chlief explained tis to me, I saw hlis wife
and Plhilip were lauglhingi about somethlingc, and when 
SYBARIS AND OTHIER HOMES.
thle learned talk was done Philip made hler tell me
whlat it was.   It was the story of' one of tlheir attempts
to save time, wlicli lad not succeeded so well.   Tvo
or three enterl>risiing fellowNs, iii thiose arts wliich  rank
as the disagrieeable necessities, went into partniersl)ip,),
offering to their customiers thle savii(g of time gainied
by gettiig( tlliotiglli the linor liI  iseries togetlier.   Y()i
sat in a clid.ir to yive  our ]hair cut, an(t a (denitist at
tile  s.l te timie lille(l yoilr te(tli.*'I'liCi  you  were
pernitted at the salle tilne to l}ave aniy Iniil uli) wlio
wanted to read his p)oems to you, and you could ]lear
themn as you sat.   Wliile the dentist was rolling, u)
thle gol(, tlley lhad a )pliotograp)ll manl ready to take
your  likeness.   Lois declared she would slhow  mie a
likeness of ler hlusband tlhat was so savagce slle was
sure it was taken tliere.  l]!ut of course tlhis was rtunnilig,
tlle tlhin(, ilto tlhe grionn(l.  It was only an ex.aggeratioin, and (1li(l not last aftca' tle njovelty was gone.
I said tlhey certillly llad(  got tlie righit men ili the
righlt llaces iill a illistration, as fair as I lia(1 seen,
bowingv( to the Proxellus.
Ile parrie(l tlhe conpliiiient i)y p)retendicng to thlink
I nmeant thle railroad I~eol)le, and said I was rig(lt there,
flat tiey liad a very good stafft in tlhe traspl)ortation
delpartmnent.
I sai(l tli.t we  had trie(l the experiment, in some
cases, of  )lacing idliots ill cliai,ge of  thle iniior rail
* I 1)elieve a 1)prt of thie plin wV:Is to 1have a c hiioipodist look at your
t;ct; but at table tlhey did not speak of tlihat
56 
iIY VISIT TO SYBIARIS.
way stations, and to drive the little railway caos or
flies from suchl stations.  lie said lie had observed tlhis
in America, but  ihe shlould not tliik it would  woik
well.   I said tlhe passeng,ers generally knew wliat tlley
wanted, -that we  had an excellent class of meci as
traini conductors, and that thlese  idiots intist be 1)utt
sonmewhlere.   Yes, lie said, but tlhat you never cotuld
tell wlhat station  bit  e iliiil[Jii,ait; tlJat I tiliglit
depend  il)oii1 it it w,.is.i:al)crin t' l,g r t to l t  Ilve
a man competelit for the fhll c()iieeiv.il)le (duty of the
,-lce, even if we hiad to )ay lii  soiii(tliiiig mnore.
About eiglht o'clock I bowe(l myself out.   George
Nwalked home witlh  me, and again we lhad a cigar on
tlhe veranda.   They raise their own  tobacco, in some
cross valleys they lhave, ruiningr east and west, and the
cigars are splendid, -  real Vuelta d'Abajo, I should
lhave tliouight theml.   13ut of course, ulderr stlch laws,
no iaii can smoke in the streets or iii a crow'd.
S-aturdty, eapy7qxt r, 8th 1itl. - A fine day.  But
I fiiel olle d(oes not rise vely early iii thle li)oriiii)g.
Spent the morning from  nine to twelve  witl  the
Chief Justice in court.  Business very prompt, very
ilnteresting, of whichl more at another time.  I lav-e full
notes of all the cases, in the printed briefs which the
Judge gave me.   At twelve  the court closed with
abl)solute promptness. All their public offices of admini.,tratit)n work four public hours, as they say.   But an
,iffice -where one calls for information- as the Post
3 *
5T
. AA,;  - 
SYBARIS AND OTHER lIOiES.
Office, tle PIublic ILibrary, or any of thle clharities -
is open nighit and day the century round.   Tlie PiIblic Library hlas not been closed, they say, since -lerodotus wrote thlere.  Thley shlowed(  me  his I,eii, and
the place wliere hlie sat.'Th'lis seems a little niytliical.
Of course the same people are not on  duty.   But
they say there is no harm in chlang,ing, clerks on duty.
There can be no secrets then, no false accounts, no
peculation, and no ruts.  At all events, tlhey say, that
if a man chooses to go and read at tlhree in the minorniing, he has a right to; and  that the  Post-Office is
established for the convelnience of the citizen, and not
for that of the clerks, which certainly seems true.
Tlje Chlief Justice, at twelve, said be was at my
service; and at my request hlie took me to tile Plublic
Libiary, wvlire we sp)eilt a couple of hours,- of Nwhiclh
at another timie. We thlen called at hlis louse, whlere
we found  his wife an(d datgliteis just eiteriing tiheir
carria(e.  NTe did not leave Ihis little -wagon, bulit all
drove off tog(etlher.   The object was  again  a batlh,
witlh a chowder an(l fishi dinner at a little extemporized
sea-sliore li)lace.  The drive was cliarniingr, and tile
bathl Elysium.  Tlhe ladies blatlhed( witih us.  I complliinented IMrs. Lois, as I led hler dlown inIto the siurf, on
their 1)tinctuality, -  saying tiiat thiey lhad not kept us
waiting an instant.   IlBit she hardly unlderstood me.
Wliy slloul(l we hlave keplt you? " said shle.  " I llad
a despatch at noon  fiom my  ihusba(nd, proposing that
we should all start at two."   Aiid wlieni  I asked if
58
I 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
they had been waitilig, " Why should we have been
waiting?" said she.  "We all knew you were not to
be at home before two."  Tlie'Iief J utice laughed
and-said: "People are so used to punctuality here,
that Lois, who is a home-body, hardly knows what
you are talking about.  The truth is, that, if she had
kept you thirty seconds, while she went back for her
gloves, she would have been afraid of aap7ra7yos;
and these girls, -  why, if one of their watches had
been a twenty-tliousaiidtli part of a second wrong  when
the ball fell at noon to-day, I should have had no peace
till I had bought such a love of a diamond-mnounted
little repeater that there is at Archlippus's." And lihe
laughed at his joke heartily, and the girls said, " 0
papa!"
Girls and boys, men and women, all swim  like
fishes,- taught at a very early age.  No scholar is
permitted to go forward in any school after seven years
of age, unless hlie can swim, just as we require vacci nation.  "If you mean to be at the charge of train ing them," said the Chlief Justice, " it is a pity to lhave
them drowned, just wheni  they are fit for anything."'
And so we had a brisk, jolly swim, and dressed, and
went to old Styepsiades's little cabin, where were fish
baked, fish broiled, fish cooked in every which way con ceivable, hot from the coals, and we with the real sea
appetite. We lounged round on the bluffs and shore for
an hour or two, the girls sketched and botanized a little,
and by another pretty drive we came home. I took
59 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMIES.
a cup of tea with them, came ba.k here to dress, and
they then called for me and took me to a pretty danciig-party. But I am too tired to write it out to-nighlit.
Xa~pe.
Sunday, 7th Kal. Tlarg. - WYe have a lovely morning.   I hleave this pretty little note fiom the clarming
Kleone, asking me whietlier I will go to thleir little
parislh clhurchl or to the more grand cathedral service.
Of course I hleave elected the parishli church with them
at eleven.  Meanwhile, I seize this half-hour to fill
out one or two gaps above.
I see I hlave said nothing about their going and
coining.  The sidewalks are all well lai(l; and I lhove
tlhus far been nowhere wliere, on one side of the way
at least, tihere was not one in perfect order. But I
can see that tlivey are very much tempted not to walk;
and(  I think tlhey get their exercise nmore iii rowing,
swimiiniig, riding, drill, and so on.  This shows itself
in the fine chests of boys and girls, men and women.
Not only are the public conveyances admirable, and
dog-chleap,- very rapid too, so that you feel as if you
could hardly afford to walk, -  but they have any number of little steam dog-carts, which ran on the public
rail, or, if necessary, on the hard Macadam road.
Tlhe firel is naplitlia, or what we call petroleum; the
elilgiles are really higlh-pressure, but the disclarge)il)e opens into a chamber kept very cold by freezing
mixtures, Which you can chlange at any inn.  Philip
il
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60
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MIY VISITr TO SYBARIS.
who told me  about these things, says they are used,
not so much  as being better tlian lhorses, but as an
economy for that immense class of peol)le who kee)
1no servants, do not chloose to l)e slaves to a coachman,
lhave no olne to care for a l]orse, or indeed do not want
tlhe bothler.  This little steam-wagron stands in a shed
at tlhe back of tlhe house.  Whloever fills the other
lauips fills and trims tlhe wicklis of their burners. When
you sit down to breakfast, you li(gllt the lampls.  And
when your breakfast is done, steamn is ul), alid you can
drive directly to your store or office.  While you are
there, it stands a monthl if you cioose, and is a bill of
expense to nobody.  It gives the roads a very brisk
look to see these little things, spiinling along, everywhere.
The party last night was chlarming in tl)e freshness
and variety and ease of the whlole thing.  I hope tlhe
host and hostess enjoyed it as much as I did, and thley
seemed to. How queer thle effect of tllis individuality
is when you come to see it in costume!  Of course
the whole thing was Greek.   You  saw tihat, fi'omii tile
girls' faces down to the buckles of tlheir slil)l)ers.  But
then the individual righlt, to which everytliing I ]leave
seen in Sybaris seems dedicated, ap)peared all through,
and fairly made the wllole seem like a falncy ball.  If
I thoughlt of Gell's Greek  costumes, it was only to
tliink how he would hlave stared( if anybod(ly liad told
him that a hundred and fifty miles fromn Nal)les, would
he only risk thle cutting of his thlroat by brigallds, lie
61 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMNIES.
miiglit see the tlhing illustrated so prettily. I danced
withl -       I'hililp las conme to take Inm  to clhurclh.
.Finished the same evening. -  It was a pretty little
clhurcl), - quite open and airy it would seem to us,excellent chllance to see dancingc vines, or flying birds,
or falling rains, or other "meteors outside," if the
preacher proved dull or the hlymns undevout.   But
I found my attention was wvell held within.  Not that
the preaching was anytlhingc to be repeated.   Thle sermon was short, unpretending, but alive and devout.
It was a sonnet, all on one theme; that theme pressed,
and pressed, and pressed again, and, of a sudden, thle
preachler was done. " You say you know God loves
you," lie said.  "I hope you d(lo, but I am going to
tell you once more that lie loves you, and once more
and once more."   Wliat pleased me in it all was a
certain unity of service, from thle beginning to the end.
Tile cong,regation's  singinc seemed to suggest the
prayer; thie prayer seemed(l to continue in thle syml)i(olly of tlhe oirgan; and, wlhile I was in revery, thle
orgaln ceased; but as it was ordered, the sermion took
up the thleme of my revery, and so that one theme ran
tli-oulll tile whlole.  Tlie service was not ten things,
like the ten parts of a concert, it was one act of coniniiiiion or worsllip.. Part of this was due, I guess, to
this, tllat we were in a small church, sitting or kneeling
near each otlher, close eno(ughl to get tlhe feeling of communion, -  not parted, indeed, in any way.   We had
62 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
been talkling togetlier, as we stood( in tlle chrc     r
before tle; s(rvice bgegan, anl 1wllcl we ass(Illlih       ill
tlhe chlurchl tlhe sense of syiIl)atlIy continued.    I told
Kleone that I liked thle hlome feelilng of tlhe cliurcli,
and shle was  )leased.   Shle said shle was afraid I slould
l]ave preferred thle catlledral.   There were four l-arge
catlied(rals, open, as tlhe cliurclhes were, to all the town;
and all the clergy, of whlatever order, took turns in
conductingr tlhe service in thlem.   There were seven
successive services in eachl of tlhem that Sunday. But
eachl  clergyman lia(lI  his own special cl iarge besi(le, I should tllink of not more  tlhan a hundred families.
And  thllese falnilies, generally neig,llbors in the town
indeed, seemed, naturally enou,gli, to grow into very
familiar personal relations withl  eaclh  otlLer.
Fatlher Tliomas, as thley all call him, took me lhome
to hiis hlouse to (,liner.  Il  hlad one of those little
steam-waronis whicll I lhave described, of whichl  there
were sixty-five standing in  tlhe grouids around tlhe
chlurchl.  IIis wife and lchild(ren went home in a larcge
one.  As  soon as tile doxology waI5s stll(g and, tle' l)en  (ediction pronounced, tlhe sextoni  went round w-itl] a
lantern an      d lighted their l.inps, an(l  liile we  stood
round talking in tihe porchI, tlie steamij was got up-), so
that I supI)pose everybody was off in twenty minutes.
Fatlier Thomas  said the talk then and  thlere, in tlle
church and in the porchl, *was one of the most satis  factory parts of the whlole service, and was pleased
when I quoted /                         7iv'7r'7vvafyPCot'j
63 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
'avTwV.* I said I had never heard tfie Greek of thle
Greek Testament read in service before. Hle said
that thle people all followed, witli entire interest and
understanding of it, though it is not as near tlheir
Greek as our Bible is to modern English, and probably
iiever would  be.   For they regard tllheir Greek.as
being better tl,tan the Attic Greek of Demostlienes's
timne, - and of course they will not cede an iIl(,l
towards the Alexandrianisms of late centuries.  "IIl(leed," said hlie, "the Academy and the Aristarclis are
a deal too stiff about it. They are very hard on us
theologues, and seem to me absurd."  -
Father Thomas's house is one such as they say there
are a great  iaiily of, whlich show their only concession
to a community system.  WitlH  all tlhis intense inidividualisin,  one  can see that Robert  Owen  would
lianglliimself hlere.  But Fathler Trliomias says this ar.rangelienlt works well, and is a great economy bothl in
time and( money.   Four houses, each with its hlalf-acre
garden, st.tlndinii) near eachl otlher, there is built, just on
tlhe corner wlere the lots meet, a central 1house,peok'ca, tli(y call it,- for the common  purposes of
the four.  Tlhere is one kitchen, and they ulite in
]irinng one cook, whlo gets up all the meals for the four
several filmilies in their own homes, according to their
several directions.  There is one large playroom for
the clhildien.  I asked if there were one nurse; but
lie said, not generatlly, though  families settled that as
*' Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together."
64 
M31Y VISIT TO SYBAPRIS.
they chlose.   Whlat  he  laid most stress on  was  one
book-room or library for thle four.  And certaiiilyl) tliis
was a lovely roomi.'i'liere were  four  bookcases, one on each side, -  wlich  liel(1 severally tle books of
thle four f-imilies.  All Fiattlier Tllominas's were togetlher.
But, in the long run, it llappened that none of tllei
dutllicated the othler's l)ooks, so f:tr as thley kel)t tllem
in tllis room.   Tiere woul  be but one  Ilerod(otus,
one Ilante, one Slmtkesj)eare, one French  I)ietionary,
for thle four.   Tlilen tllis roo-ii  made a  )le.tsant l)laece
of reunion ainoig tlie f'ifmilies, witllhout hlutual invita tion, and witlhout thle feeling that you migllt be boriiig
the otlers. Indeed, I s)elit thle evening, thlere, -  as
will apl)ear, if this nlarrative  ever comes down to the
eveniiing.
Iii the afternoon  I hlad a long walk  wvitlh  Fattller
Thomas  iin his parishl.    Ve  went fiist to olne of tlie
four catlle(dil.ls, vlwhere lie.had tle tllree o'clo(ck ser,vice.   The  con)igregatioIi  was  from  all j)arts of  tihe
town  and lneig,lborliod, -  iiiany  Ipelole  attenldig
thlere, lie said, whlo  never wetlt to anlly of tllhe iaIrisli
chultrches.   Thle  different clerg ynien  talke  tllese ser
vices in order.   I should tlink.tlhere wvere four or fivo
thlousand persons hlere.  TrIe service laste(l an  llotij,
and lie tlhen took me fiom ljlace to               NNlaee witl llim,
showing( me, as lie said, low l)(eol)le live(l.  And so I
hlave  hlad, in very shlort tiime, iiisiglit into a  wider
range of  hlomes  tliaii I hl-ve ever  had ill Europe.
Everywliere comfort, and the most  curious illustrations of whlat comfort is.                          E
65 
SYBARIS AND OTIHER HOMIES.
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Their system seemns to give more definiteness to the
work  of the clergy and of the chlurclles  tliaii ours
(loes.  Tlhus Fatlier Tllonias p)reaclles regutlarly il tlle
church I was ill this moriling( (7T'j ZoS  al'ovt'ou is its
lame, -  tlhe Clhurcll(   of  Life 1   Etern l).   Tre gatller
plerlhaps a hundred fltiilies, fi'oii all l)arts of tllhe city
and neighlborlhood.   An(l, as I understand it, his relatiols to tlhemn are much like tlhose of one of our Congregational ministers to his flock,-  say Ilaliburton's
to his in Cairo, or mine to my people wlhen I w-as settied in Naguadavick.   But this is rather a personal
relation between him and these people, who lave, so to
speak, gravitated towards  him.    ie preaclhes  there
usually once every Sunday, and, as I understand it,
our practice of exchanging pull)its is wholly iikiikownii.
Tl1hey wotild be as liucli surprised, onl goillg into the
iChlurchl  of Ilife Eterna,l," to find any minister but
Fatlier T'lioinas, as they would be, onl goilng into court
lor tlhec trial of a case, to find that thle counlsel tley lh(ad
cngagile(l ha d na(le ani "exc(lalge'" withl sonme otlier
aniii, whlo h-ad collie to lead(l in llis i,lace.   As I lhave
sai(l, the service lhere seems  to be  re(rarde(l, at law at
least, as a secondary part of the matter. Thlis Cliulicli
of Iife Eternal   is regarded as in a tllousand ways respl)ollsil)le for a whnlole vopo'g or territorial district, in
otlie corner of wllicll, indeed, it sttleld;.  It is exactly
like tlhe tlh(eoryi (of our territorial pirisli; but they do
not use tlie wo)rd " larisl!,"  rapot,,ca, or rather they
tIse it f)or a different thing.  Everybody in the  inomos
I
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MIY  VISIT' TO  SY1iARlIS.
of " Life Eternal," inumberiing say four hun(lred( families, is under tle oversig,lit, not so mu(ch  of Fatller
Thomas, as of all the committees, visitors, deacons,
deaconesses, and peol)e wvitil names unknown to ine,
whlo are tlhe workers of tlhis chulrcll.  "UtI(ler thle
oversi,llt" means tlhat tlhis  lllrcll would  )( (li,isgra(e(
if there were a tylhus-fever district in this ilionos, or
if a family starved( to deatlh  lere, or if there were a
drunken row.   It would be considered tlhat the clhurch
of the noos was  iin(-)t d(loing, the  tlhing, for wbhici
churchles are est-ablisled lhere.
Fathler Tlhomas reminded Ime tlhat, in the newspaper reports of crimiiial trials, 1 always see, i)ext tile
name  of the offender, thle  nailme  of his nomos, as
Soutl Co(ngregational," " St. O'.l's,"    01ld Nortlh,"
" Disciples',"-  "I L,ife Eterial," said lie, " if we lliad
been so unlucky.  Blit none of our peol)le hlave teen
before the court for thirity-one yeairs.  In colseq(lence,"
lie said, "if su(ch a misfortune (til lia)l)ou tto 1us, I
shiould not hear tlhe last of it for a mo()nti.   Every
man I met in tile street woul(  stopl) me to siiympatliz(i
withi me; and I shiould( know tlat p)eol)le conlsidered
that we had made some ba(d mistake in our arratlgements, if we should hlave a series of sicl thilgs lhap pen.  Of course, we cannot  Ihelp pol)le's tlirowi(ng
thlemselves away.   But it is spl)l)osed( tlhat, if' Claris tianity means anytliiiirg, it mnenas tliat Jesus Cirist
canne to take away the sins of tle wo'ldt; and this
clurchl is reg,arded as his llreprlesenlltative, at least so far
67 
SY.BARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
as that vulgar or concrete form of sin goes which men
call crime."
I take it thlis arrangement by whichl  a fixed organization is responsible in every locality for the prevention of pI)overty and tile prevenltion of crime has a
great deal to d(o withi the curious insig,nificanice of their
criiniii.tl businiess in the courts.
I ami teririblyl tired, but fe(l as if I lunderstood thiem
a little better thlan I did yesterday. Xalpe.
21Ionday, 6th. -A busy day; but, warned by yesterday, I hlave not fagged myself out as I (lid tlhen.
Or, rathler, I ol(lit to say, I hlave taken their a(lvice,
ilstea(l of livilg ill ny own fasliioni.   I am  really becoliiling a Sybalrite mnyself, and tlierefore sit down lhere
at 9.30 at lighrlt, not dead  kiocked( lip by thle d(lay's
work, as a Yaiikee (would be, and as I was yester(lay.
TrhIe programne was, breakfatst witll thle boat-l)uilder
Pyla(ldes; tlheni to go tlhrouglh tle schiools witih  Kleone,
w-l"o takes a go)od deal of interest in tlhem; to (drive
and b)atle witl Pliilip)'s people; to dine withl  thle Allnge,lides,-  nice peol)le whomin I met  at the party, Friday,-  and witl tihemi go to their thieatre, whiere thieir
dlugllteis were  to act.   All  thiis is over, and  I am
liier  at 9.30, as l)efore said.
Tl iey m.lke  m.Ilic account of l)reakfilst parties.   I
noticed(l  on S.Lttilr.ayv, tlhat the  Chief Justice said lihe
liked  to see 1)el)le befi(re they liad begun to go to
sleelp, and that most peop)le did begin to go to sleep at
68 
MIY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
noon.  Ihere was, at ei(ght o'clock ill thle mornling, a
cllarming party, just eveuly divi(Ied )etween men aii(l
vwomeni, rou(nd a hu,irc, circular talle, iii a I)eitiftil
room  ol)eningi on a veratnda.  Trlle table blaze(l with
flowers, and even withl  early fi'uit from) tlhe forcinghlouses.   I took out Kleoiie, but tlle talk was  g,eneral.
I asked Plilil) liowv long his blotller would remain
in  the  office  of Proxenus.   IPlill?  tuv,iied a  little
sliarply on me, and asked if I had any complaints to
make.  I soothled lim by expl)laining that all tlhat I
asked about was the term of office in their systenm,
and lie -apologized.
"' Ie will b)e in as long as lie clloo.ses, prol)babl)ly. In
theory hlie remains in until a m..joiity of tlhe voters,
whlich is to say thle adult men and w()olmei, joiln in a
petition for his removal.  Theien lie will be removed at
ollce.  The government will appoitit a teimlporary substitute, and order an election of lhis successor."
" Do you mean there is no fixed election-daiy?"
None at all,"' said Phlilip.      " We are always voting.  When  I left you yester(lay afternoon I went in
to vote for an alderman of our ward(l, in I)lace of a man
whlo hlas resigned.   I wishl  I lhad takecn you in witlh
me, thlough  there was notliiiig to see.  Only tlhree or
fior great books, eachl headed witlh the name of a can(li(late.  I wrote miy name in Andrew  Seconl('s book.
lIt is, on the whlole, the best man. The books wvill be
open tliree months. - No one, of course, can vote more
69 
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SYBARIS AND OTITER IIOMIES.
than once, and at the end of that time there will be a
count, and a proclamation will be made.  Then about
removal; any one who is dissatisfied with a public offi cer puts his namne up at the head of a book in the elec tioIl office.  Of course there are dozens of books all
the time.  But unless thlere is real incapacity, no)bod(ly
cares.  Sometimies, lwhen  one  man  wants  anotler's
ilace, lie gets lip a great breeze, the Inewspal)l)ers g(et
1ol1(1 of it,-andl( evcerybody is canvassed  lo (.1llC be g(rot
to the spot.  13ut it is very hard to turn out a c()in)eteIit
officer.  If in three months, however, at all the reg,-istries, a majority of thle voters express a wish  for a
man's removal, hle has to go out.  Practically, I look
in once a veek at tlhat office to see what is goilig on..
It is sometlig, as you vote at your clubs."
"I)i(t you say women as well as men? " said I.
0  yes," said Pliilip, " unless a woman or a m,an
hlas fi'ormnally witli(Iirawn from tllhe roll.  You see(, the
roll is tlhe list,  not only of voters, but of sol(liers. For
a man to witlhdraw, is to say lie is a coward and dires
not take his chance in war.  Sometimes a woman does
not like military service, and if she takes lher name off
I do not think the public feelingc about it is quite the
same as withl a man.  She may have things to do at
hoille."
]ltit do yol- mean that most of the women serve
in tlle arinv?" said I.
"Ot c(iiise they do," said he.   "Tlley wanted to
vote, so  ve )put them  onl the roll.   You  do not see
. 0
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tary telegrapl.-Is.   They keep  secrets well.   Ttie  blind(
mien serve iii the bani(ls. And the enei witliotit le("s
ride- in  baronclies  in  state processions.   E Nc-i-ybody
serv,es somewvlere."
"TIliat is atlwNays  the  r-eas,-on,"  s,ii(l I, N'vitli a si~,li,
whIN]-y evei-yl-o(1y lhas so miuchI time iii Sylbai-is! 
Beiiig, so  imtucl  witli lileoiie,-   p'IlI,ildel
,an hiour quietly at thivir hlouls-,'.Aiter otir s(-l)()ld ti-aInii,
antd be —fore'we -%%ent to 1.)atlie,   (-,I gt a (aneto a1
-ler al)otlt liolisell(]ld,i(1iiliiiistra,,tioii.  I1 (11(.1 not  kiiow
w11e~tler  tlhings (11(1 go  as easily  as  tliey  seellle(1, or
,%%,ictller, as wvitli most liousel)(Ids-, wh,Ieni straliigers a. —(ivisiting~ for a tiime(, thiey seeiiit(Id to go e.,isier thanIl  tll(,y
41(1.   14uit I tlintk  thierecalo li 1)i1(~ I  (ice(;)tio)il
ilbout it.' Kleoiie  is not  hi  the  least an  aeti-ess, -,II)([
5110- certainly woindered that I tlioiglit tliere could I)
so muchel diffictilty.;Slie finllaIy took [no out iIito lier  
SYBARIS AND OTIIER HOMIES.
kitchen, pantry, and so on, and showed me the whole
machine.
I do not understand it a great deal better tllan I (lid
before.  But liere are a few celntral facts.  First, no
washing of clotlhes is (lone in any private hlouse.   For
every tllirty or forty families there is one laundr(y,kovTpOJv they call it; a(nd thle l)eol)le there send twice
a week for tlle s()ile(d linen, and return it clean at thle
en(l of forty-eight llours.  Kleone said that these establishlinents were so small that shle knew all thle workpeople at that near hlers; and if she Iiad any special
directions to give, she ran in and told whlat she wauted.
Of course tlley could  have all tle mechlanisin  tlhey
wanted,    large  mangles,  steam-dryers, foldi,g-mnachinies, and so on.   Next, I slould tlink tlleir p)ublic
bakilng estal)lishltmeneIts must be better tliaii ours.   Kleone  )o inore tlhougllt of makilg hler own bread tllan
my Polly tlhinks of inkinkg h lier own candles.   " I c~.ii
make it," saidl slie, w itll a pretty air; " but what  s
tlhe good (T~(, KaX(q,), wlhen I know tlley (do it as well
as I?"   For otller  provant, tlierle is tlhc universal
trattoria systemn of all Italy, carried on withl the neatness  and  care of individual righlt, not to say whim,
wli(ll I filld everywhllere here.
I took care to ask specially about servants, and the
case or  (diffi(.ulty of finlding and of training  thlem.
hlere JtKleiie was puzzled.  It was evidelt she had
ieveir tliotillit of thle matter at all, any more than slhe
]iad tliougl,lt of water-suipply, or of wlo kept thlle streets
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72 
IlY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
clean.   But, after a good deal of pump)ing and crossquestioiiiig, I caime at some  notion of whliy tlhis was
all so easy.   In  the first I)lace, there is not a very
great  amount of what we call menial service to be
done in est-ablislnhments wlere tlhere are no10 stairs, no
washling, no ironing, no bakingr, no moving, few lamps
to  fill, little dusting or sweeping (because all roads
and streets liere are watered(l), few errands, and little
sickness.                  But Kleone d i d not in thle least wink out
of sight thle fact th           at tl er e   was regular service to
lbe                   done, and tlat it (l i d no t  do    itself.  But, as slhe
s a id, "as no girl g(oes to s(tlool     betveeni fourteen all
ei      ghlteen,          alnd no boy or giri e ver,oes to school niore
t    h     a    n half the time,          - as no, girl under eig,lteen or
lboy under  twenty-one is perm      litte(d to work iii the facto         rie               s,CS       or indeed ana'ywhere uil less at lhome, -  there is
an                     immense force of oiyoung f,lks who must b)e doing
so()ll   etlinig,  and must be      t     rained to (do  sometllin(r.
You                     see," Said Kleotic,', n o  girl is niarlie(l l)efore
slie                   is eigihteen, and  pelliaps s hie    may n(ot )be narried
lI)fo re she is twetwnty-fi        ve.  Iro(ili tlilse iiuniarrield woItien, who are of age after tlley are eighteen, we many
l]ire servants.   And  we  may  receive ilito our lioutses
,,irls under tlhat age, if onlyw   e(xact  no  d(uties of
tlhem but those of lhome.   Nonw, ift you will tlinkt,"
si(id slle, "in any circle of a huld(lre(l p)eol)le, -  say
il ainy filmilx of brothiers, sisters, and(l cousins, -  tlil(re
are enough youlig, peol)le to (do all tllis work you ask
about.  -All  we  liave to do  is to exchlaige  a little.
4
73 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMIES.
That pretty girl who let you in at the door is a cousinl
of my husband's who is making a long three months'
visit here, - glad to come, indeed, for it is a little
quiet, I think, at Troezene, where her people live.  I
do not pretend to be a notable housekeeper you know;
but if I were, I should have  any number of girls'
mothers asking me if I would not have them here to
stay, and they would do most of my dusting and bedmaking for me.  Elizabeth, whom I believe you have
not seen, is the only person I hire, in the house.  She
will be married next year, but there are plenty more
when she goes."
Speaking of Sophia's letting me  in at the door,
there is a pretty custom about door-bells.   To save
you from fumbling round of a dark evening, tlhe bell pulls are made from pihosphlorescent wood, or some of
them of glass with a glow-worm on a leaf inside, so
that you always see this little knob, and know where
to put your halnd.
The plays were as good and bright as they could be.
The theatre is small, but large enougli for ordinary
voices and ordinary eyes.  There are ever so mnainy
of them.  Then the actors and actresses were these
very people whom I have been meetinig, or tlheir chil  dren, or their friends.   The Cllief Justice llimnself
took a little part this evening, and that pretty Lydia,
his dauiglter, sang imagnificen-tly.  She would be a
primat dloi;a assolutai over at Naples yonder.  lFatlier
Tliomnas's d.iighliter is a contralto.  Shle does not silngr
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MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
so well. I do not suppose the Chief is often on the
stage; but he was there to-night, just as he might be
at a Christmas party in his own house.  He said to
me, as he walked home with me   "We are not going
to let this thing slip into the hands of a lot of irresponsible people. As it stands, it brings the children
pleasantly together; and they always have their entertainments where their fathers and mothers do."
A  funny thing happened as we left the play.  A
sudden April shower had sprung up, and so we found
the porches and passage-ways lined with close-stacked
umbrellas; they looked like muskets in an armory.
Every gentleman took one, and those of the ladies who
needed. Angelides handed one to me. It seems that
the city owns and provides the umbrellas. When I
came to the inn, I put mine in the hall, and that was
the last I shall see of it. But I have inquired, and it
seems that, as soon as the rain is over, the agent for this
district will come round in a wagon and collect them.
If it rain any day when I am here, a waiter from the
inn will run and fetch me one. I shall carry it till the
rain is over, and then leave it anywhere I choose.
The agent for that district will pick it up, and place
it in the umbrella-stand for the noinos. In case of a
sudden shower, as this to-night, it is, of course, their
business to supply churches or theatres.
I have noticed another good thing about umbrellas.
A man in front of me that day it rained had a letter
to post at a box which was on a street-lamp. If he
75
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
had had to hold his umbrella with one hand, - to open
the box with another, and to drop in the letter with a
third, it would have been awkward, for he had but two
hands. So they had made the cover of the box with a
ring handle, - lie opened it with his umbrella hand,
catching the ring with the hook of the umbrella, -
and posted his letter with his other hand.
Tuesday, 5th. -  Fine again.  I have been with the
boys a good deal to-day. They took me to one or
two of the gymnasiums, to one of the swimmingschools, to the market for their nomos, and afterwards
to an up-town market, to the picture-gallery, 7rtvaKo0'K, and museum of yet another nomnos, which they
thought was finer than theirs, and to their own sculpture-gallery.
As we walked I asked one of them if I was not
keeping him from school.
" No," said he, " this is my off-term."
" Pray, what is that?"
"Don't you know?  We  only go to school three
months in winter and three in summer. I thought
you did so in America. I know Mr. Webster did. I
read it in his Life."
I was on the point of saying that we knew now how
to train more powerful men than Mr. Webster, but
the words stuck in my throat, and the boy rattled on.
"-The teachers have to be there all the time, except
when they go in retreat. They take turns about re
76
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MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
treat. But we are in two choroi; I am choros-boy
now, James is anti-choros.   Choros have school in
January, February, March, July, August, September.
Next year I shall be anti-choros."
"Which do you like best,-  off-term or school?"
said I.
"0, both is as good as one.  When either begins,
we like it. We get rather sick of either before the
three months are over."
"What do you do in your off-terms?" said I,
"go fishing?"
"No, of course not," said he, "except Strep, and
Hipp, and Chal, and those boys, because their fathers
are fishermen. No, we have to be in our fathers' offices, we big boys; the little fellows, they let them
stay at home. If I was here without you now, that
truant-officer we passed just now would have had me
at home before this time. Well, you see they think we
learn about business, and I guess we do. I know I do,"
said he, "and sometimes I think I should like to be a
Proxenus when I am grown up, but I do not know."
I asked George about this, this evening.  He said
the boy was pretty nearly right about it. They had
come round to the determination that the employment
of children, merely because their wages were lower than
men's, was very dangerous economy.   The chances
were that the children were overworked, and that
their constitution was fatally impaired.  "We  do not
want any Manchester-trained children here." Then
77
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
they had found that steady brain-work on girls, at the
growing age, was pretty nearly slow murder in the
long run.  They did not let girls go to school with
any persistency after they were twelve or fourteen.
After they were twenty they might study what they
chose.
"But the main difference between our schools and
yours," said he, "is that your teacher is only expected
to hear the lesson recited. Our teacher is expected to
teach it also. You have in America, therefore, sixty
scholars to one teacher. We do not pretend to have
more than twenty to one teacher. We do this the
easier because we let no child go to school more than
half the time; nor, even with the strongest, more than
four hours a day.
"Why," said he, "I was at a college in America
once, where, with splendid mathematicians, they had
had but one man teach any mathematics for thirty
years. And he was travelling in Europe when I was
there. The others only heard the recitations of those
who could learn without being taught."
"I was once there," said I.
.... We bathed in the public bath for this nomos,
which is not the same as George's. The boys took
me home with them to dine, and George came round
here thisyvening.  We  have had pleasant talk with
some lemon and orange farmers from the country.
I have not said anywhere that their aequajuoli are
78
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MY  VISIT TO SYBARIS.
everywhere in the streets; and a little acid in the
water, with plenty of ice and snow, seems to take
away the mania for wine or liquor, just as it does in
Naples. The temperance of Naples is due, not to the
sour wine people talk of, for the laboring men do not
drink that, but to the attractive provision made of
other drinks. And it is very much so here. These
acquajuoli are just like those in Naples.
But here no street cuts another at right angles.
There is always a curve at the corner, with a chord
of a full hundred feet. This enables them to have
narrower streets,-no street is more than fifty feet
between the sidewalks,- and it gives pretty stands
for the fruit-sellers and lemonade-sellers at the quadrants. There is iced water free everywhere, and delicious coffee almost free.
Wednesday, 4th. -As soon as breakfast was over,
I went down to Pylades, the boat-builder. I own it,
I am distressed to say that he is exactly in time, and
the boat, to all purposes, is repaired. She is a much
better boat than she ever was before. They know no
such thing as a mechanic being an hour late in his performance of a contract.  "The  man does not know
his business, if he cannot tell when he will be done,"
said Pylades to me. And when I asked what would
have happened if his men had not finished this job in
time, he shook his head and said" "ap7ra'yLo'.  I should
have taken from a citizen what I could not restore,
79
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
namely, the time you had to wait beyond my promise." I said it was very kind in him to count me as a
citizen.
As to that, he said  ereYa, or the duties of hospitality
were even more sacred than those of citizenship; and
he quoted the Greek proverb, which I had noticed
on the city seal: Ao'tXv'vq 7ro'ecos 7roh'Tc a-apta, The shame of the city is the fault of the citizen."
I cannot see that there is any sort of excuse for my
loitering here longer than to-morrow. The paint will
be dry and the stores (what a contrast to what I sailed
with!) will be on board to-night.  Among them all,
I believe they will sink her with oranges and cigars,
sent as personal presents to me by my friends.
Andrew took me through some of the registration
offices. They carry their statistics out to a charm; I
could not but think how fascinated Dr. Jarvis would
be. But they say, and truly enough, that nothing
can be well done in administration unless you know
the facts. Take railroads, for instance; if you know
exactly how many people are going to come down
town from a particular nomos, you can provide for
them. But if you do not, they must trust to chance.
They know here, and can show you, how many men
they have who are twenty-three years and seven days
old, or any other age; and every night, of course,
they know what is the population of the country in
every ward of the whole government.
By appointment, I met the Chief Justice as he ad
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MY VISIT TO-SYBARIS.
journed the court, and we rode to the Pier for our
last bathl. Delicious surf!
I asked him about something which Kleone said,
which had surprised me. She said no woman was
married till she was eighteen, and that she might not be
till she was twenty-five. I did not like to question her;
but hlie tells me everything, and I asked him. He
went into the whole history of the matter in his reply,
and the system is certainly very curious.
'HIe bade me remember the fundamental importance,
as long ago as the laws of Charondas, of marriage in
tl e state.  "The unit with us," he said, "is the'one
flesh,' the married man and women. We consider no
unmarried man as more than a half, and so with'
woman." Then he went on to say that they had
formerly a hopeless imbroglio of suits,- breach-ofpromise cases, divorce cases, cases of gossip, and so
on, which had resulted in the present system; and,
without quoting words, I will try to describe it.  Kleone was right.  No woman may marry before she is
eighteen'. They hold it as certain that, before she is
twenty-five, she will have met her destiny. They say
that, if no gossip, or manoeuvring, or misunderstanding
intervene, it is certain that before she is twenty-five,
i:l a simple state of society like this, which places no
tar on the fiee companionship of men and women, the
lhusband appointed for her in heaven will have seen
le.er and made himself known to her. They say that
there is no unfair compulsion to his free-will, if they
4'                              F
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
intimate to him that he must do this within a certain
time. If it happen that she do not find this man before that age, she must travel away from Sybaris for
thirty years, or until she has married abroad. They
regard this as exile, which these people, so used to a
comfortable life, consider the most horrible of punishments. To tell the truth, I do not wonder. Practically, however, it appears that the punishment is never
pronounced. More male children are born into the
state than female.  This alone indicates that the age
of marriage for men must be somewhat higher than
that of women.  Their custom is, keeping the maximum
age of men's marriage at thirty, for the Statistical
Board to issue every three months a bulletin, stating
what is the minimum age. Just now it is twentythree years, one month, and eleven days. If a man
does not choose to marry here when he is thirty, he
spends thirty years in travel, looking for the wife he
has not found at home.  But, as I say of the women,
practically no one goes.
I said that I thought this was a very stern statute,
and that it interfered completely with the right of the
individual citizen, which they pretend was at the bottom of their systemn. The Chief Justice said, in reply,
that everybody said so.  " L'Estrange said so to me in
England, and Kleber said so to me in Germany, and
,Chenowith said so to me ill America, and Juarez said so
to me in Bolivia. But the truth is, that it is absolutely
certain that before a woman is twenty-five, and before
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MY VISIT TO SYBARIS&
a man is thirty, each of them has met his destiny or
hers. If the two destinies do not run into one, it is
because some infernal gossip, or misunderstanding, or
ignorance, or other cause,-  I care not what,- intervenes.  Now," said he, " you know how hard we are
)n gossip, since Charondas's time.'No  tale-bearer
shall live.' What is left is to see that sentiment, or
modesty, or self-denial, or the other curse, as above,
shall not intervene to defeat the will of Heaven. For
in heaven this thing is done. I can assure you," said
he, " that this calm, steady pressure of an expressed
determination that people shall carry out their destiny, saves myriads of people from misunderstand-.
ing and misery; and that, in practice, no individual
right is sacrificed. I know it," he added, after a moment, "for I am the person who must know it.  It is
not true that all marriages are made here by the Lord
Chancellor, -  as Dr. Johnson proposed.   But it is
true that I send into exile the people who will not
marry. How many do you think I have exiled, now,
in thirteen years?"
I guessed, for a guess' sake, five hundred.
"Not one," said the Chief Justice.  " No, nor ever
seemed to come near it but once. Every three months
there is a special day set apart when the Statistical
Board shall send me the lists. For a fortnight before
the day there are a great many marriages. When
the day comes, I go, Colonel Ingham, into an empty
court-room, and sit there for three hours. No officers
83
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SYBAP'-J AND OTHER HOMES.
of court are permitted to be present but myself. Once
it happened that when I went in I found a fine young
officer, a man whom I knew by sight, sitting there
waiting his sentence. I bowed, but said nothing. I
took my papers, and asked him if he would come in again
at eleven. At half past ten came in a woman whom
I had watched since she was a child, - one of those
calm, even-balanced people, who are capable of blessing the world, but are so unselfish that they may be
pushed one side into washing dishes for beggars. She
had her veil down, but walked to the bench, and laid
her card before me. I pointed her a seat, and went
on with my writing. As the clock struck eleven, I
asked her to excuse me for a moment, and I withdrew.
I stayed in my private room an hour.  I came back at
noon, - and my lieutenant-colonel and my queenly
Hebe were both gone. It was the victory of a young
love.  He had worshipped her since they were at
school together, and she him. But some tattling aunt
-she died just in time to save herself from the galleys - put in Come spoke or other, I know not what,
that blocked their wheels; she had calmly said "No "'
to-a hundred men, and he had passed like a blind,
deaf man among a thousand women. Both of them
were ready to go into exile, rather than surrender the
true loyalty of youth. But I had the wit to leave
them to each other. They were married that afternoon and all is well!"
84
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AND to-morrow night I shall be jotting my entries
here as the sea pitches me up and down in the gulf.
When shall I see all these nice friends again? I feel
as if I had known them since we were born.  I cannot yet analyze the charm. I believe I do not want
to. They certainly do not pretend to be saints. They
have rather the complete self-respect of people who
do not think of themselves at all.  The state cares for
the citizen, and for nothing else. There is no thought
of conquest; nay, they court separation from the world
outside. But, on the other hand, the citizen cares for
the state, -seems to see that he is lost if this majestic administration is not watching over him and
defending him. Because the law guards their individual rights, even their individual caprices, there is
certainly less tyranny of Mrs. Grundy and of fashion.
But yet I never lived among people who had so
little to say about their own  success, -about " I
said," "I told him," or "my way," or "I told my
wife."
When I spoke to the chief the other day of their
hlomage to individual right, he said they made the citizen strong because they would make the state strong,
and made the state strong that it might make the citizen strong. I quoted Fichte: " The human race is
the individual, of which men and women are the separate members."  "Fichte got it from Paul," said he.
"If you mean to have a sound mind in a sound body,
you must have a sound little finger and a clear eye.
85
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
But you will not have a clear eye, or a sound little flnger, unless you have a sound mind in a sound body.
Colonel Ingham,- Love is the whole!"
It has been a pretty bleak evening. I have been
running round with George to say good by. Kleone
asked me, so prettily, when I would come with Map~a8ozv.  It was half a minute before I reflected that
Mapta'8Sov is Greek for Polly!
Thursday, 3d Kal. eap7vX.- At the boat at 8.30.
The old man was there without the boys.  He said
they wanted to stay here.
"Among the devils?" said I.
The old man confessed that the place for poor men
was the best place he ever saw; the markets were
cheap, the work was light, the inns were neat, the
people were civil, the music was good, the clhurches
were free, and the priests did not lie. Hie believed the
reason that nobody ever came back from Sybaris was,
that nobody wanted to.
The Proxenus nodded, well pleased.
"So Battista and his brother would like to stay a
few months; and he found he might bring Caterina
too, when my Excellency had returned from Gallipoli;
or did my Excellency think that, when Garibaldi had
driven out the Bourbons, all the world would be like
Sybaris?"
My Excellency hoped so; but did not dare prom
ise.
86
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41 
MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.
"'You see now," said George, " why you hear so
little of Sybaris.  Enoughi people come to us.  But
you are the only man I ever saw leave Sybaris wlho
did not mean to return."
"And I," said I,- "do you think I am never coming here again?"
"You found it a hard harbor to make," said the
Proxenus.  "We have published no sailing directions
since St. Paul touched here, and those which he wrote
-he sent them to the Corinthians yonder- neither
they nor any one else have seemed to understand."
"Good by."
"God bless you! Good by." And I sailed for
Gallipoli.
Wind N. N. W., strong. I have been pretty blue
all day. And the old man is too. It is just 7.30
P. M.   The lights of the Castle of Otranto are in
sight, and I shall turn in. Xa~pe.
87
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HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
FROM REV. FREDERIC INGHAM'S PAPERS.
I.
NAGUADAVICK was in itself, of nature, like any
other town, only a good deal worse. I mean that the
lake took up all one side of it, so nobody could live
there.  Then on the river front nobody would live if
he could. Out on the roads to Assabet' and Plimquoddy you could get no water that anybody would
drink. So it happened that in the town proper everybody had to live on the north side. This made land
there dear, and would have made rents very high if
we had not found out a much better way to live,- of
which I am now going to give you the history.
"In balloons?"
Not a bit of it. There is no word of nonsense in
what I am going to tell you. It is only a thing perfectly practicable in every spirited American town
which needs it, and the only wonder is that it was not
done in every such town long ago.  It has been tried
for, everywhere, ill a fashion, and it only needs brains,
and enterprise, and faith in men, to carry it out everywhere with success.
It all began at a meeting of their Union. " Trade's
L
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HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
Union?" Not exactly. In a Trade's Union only
one trade meets. This was a meeting of all sorts
of people, with trades and without, with money and
without, - some with one idea and some with seven,
a union which they used to have in a decent sort of
club-house they had. Men and women could go, and
did.  You played checkers, or euchre, or billiards,
or you went up stairs and danced, - or you read in
the reading-room, or you talked in the drawing-room.
And in the comnmittee-room there was almost every
evening what they called a Section, where something
or other was up,- maybe a tableau, maybe a debating-club, maybe a paper on the legs of cockcliafers.
They called it all the "Union for Christian Work."
Well, one night in the committee-room they had had
rather a dreary powwow about the future of Naguadavick. Pretty much all of themn agreed Naguadavick
was going to the dogs. They could not raise pineapples, and it was evidently unhealthy for cats. All
the merchants went to Boston for their spring and fall
supplies, instead of buying them of each other. Tlhe
manufacture of horn gun-flints had proved successful,
but they cost more when they were made than the
stone ones; and, worst of all, as I have remarked,
there was no chance for anybody to live anywhere, if
the population of the town should enlarge by one.
For every house was occupied, and it was known to
the presiding officer that at Mrs. Varnum's boardinghouse, the mistress had that day refused to receive a
89
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
family from out of town because they had eleven children.
So it was generally agreed that Naguadavick was
going to the dogs as fast as it could go. I never was
in but one thoroughly prosperous town that was not,
if you could trust the talking kind.
Meanwhile, in fact, Naguadavick was a driving,
thriving, striving, hiving, wiving, and living town of
23,456 people by the last United States census, with
"probably at the present time rising 36,000, if only
the beggarly and miserly city council had not refused
to take a special count when they levied the tax last
spring."
Ogden went home from that meeting red-hot, he
was so mad. He told his wife all they had said, and
said he could not stand it. She said she should not
think he could.  He said it was all nonsense.  She
said it certainly was, but she wished he would not
swear so. He said he would not again, but it was
enough to make the minister swear and burn his books
too.  She said she hoped the minister would not burn
Consuelo till she had a chance to finish it. This made
Ogden  laugh, -it was  old Elkanah's nephew; did
youknow him? and they went to bed.  But Ogden
was thoroughly mad this time; he said he would not
stand it, and he would not have any more such talk
at the Union. And he did not. They have talked
nonsense there since. But they never talked this
same nonsense.  And this was the way he managced it.
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HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
As soon as he had read his letters the next morning
at thile mill, and had just walked through all the rooms,
(Ogden made whips for export, - Boothlia Felix, -
imnmense demand for sea-hiorses,) lie told his boy he
should be out for two hours, went across to the offices
of the Great Eastern Railway, and charged right in
on Greenleaf. Capital fellow, Greenle(af, the best man,
I think, and the most spirited and most spiritual, and
the most to be loved, of all men I have ever known.
Greenleaf had done his letters too;-had seen all his
heads of department, -and he put down the Advertiser, -gave Ogden two chairs,- and put his feet in
one.
"Why did you not stay in the Section Room, last
night?" said Ogden.
You  know,"  said  Greenleaf.   " Why -  did
you?"
"Why  indeed," said Ogden again, "unless to see
how far the infernal tomfoolery of croaking may lead
men.   It seems to be  literally and really supposed
that these people, who have known  enough to dam
this river, where there is a quicksand bottom, - who
know enough to make fine sewing,-thread in air so dry
that it sparkles, - who know enough to split a flint
into ten thousand million billion flinders no bigger than
the mustache of a mosquito,- don't know how to
live, and will go off to Deathl's Hollow, because the
boarding-houses are full.  Jove!  Why  don't they
send us all back to the Lincolnshire Fens and to
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
what you call it -old Brewster's place, Ansterfield
Scrooby- in the edge of York, to-morrow! Why, 
the monkeys know more, for they know enough, if
they can't live in one place, to live in another I"
Thus far, remembering his wife's warning, Ogden
went on, and sinned not with his tongue, nor weakened the force of what he said, by any profane exaggeration.
Greenleaf laughed, and said he had not heard so
much twaddle as he heard in the five minutes he was
there, and Ogden was much comforted.
So soothed, he began again.  "Now, Frank, I want I
to stop all this. If it goes on, it may do serious injury. In the first place, such talk will ruin the Union.
Who is going there if that whining, canting, drivelelling old fool is going to talk such stuff? What's
worse is, it will get into the papers.  They would not;
put it in the Spy; but old Martin at the Courant is just
ass enough to put in sometring about the decline of
our population, and the unhealthy condition of the
muskrats who live under the long dike. I had to go
round there this morning to stop him off this time.
Well, of course, nobody reads their trash; but, after
they have put it in a few million times, it gets copied
somewhere, and it sticks, and then people will really
think this place has gone up, and not an owl or a
jackal will come here to rear jackets or owlets! "
" Who is croaking now? "said Greenleaf, laughing.
"You did not come here to say that."
92
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HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
"No," said Ogden, standing up, "I did not." And
hlie walked to the large scale map of the Great Eastern
road. " I came here to show you this." And he
pointed out a spot eleven miles from Naguadavick, on
the line of that road.   "What could you buy the
Lemon property here for?"
" House and land,- there are four hundred acres;
I suppose thirty-five thousand dollars would be the
asking price."
"Yes,-  and out here, - the Gregory place?"
Greenleaf said that was not worth so much. There
was more land, but it was poor land, and the house
had been burned down.  Ogden said he did not care
how poor the land was, and he sat down again.
i Tell your directors to buy those two places tomorrow.  If you have not got any money, issue some
bonds and get some. Open a new station where the
Su(Ibury road crosses yours.   Cut up the nine hundred
acres into lots of a quarter-acre, a half-acre, and an
acre, say, in all, two thousand lots. These lots will
cost you rather less than fifty dollars apiece, on the
average. Fix the price of each lot on your lithograph
plan, and never vary from it. Then advertise that
for twenty years you will run special trains in, from
your new station, at 6, 6.30, and 7 in the morning,
and as many  more as you  chloose, - that you  will
run them out at 6, 6.30, 7, and 8 ill the evening,
and as many more as you choose.   Not one train
shall stop on the way,-  and  every man  shall be
93
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SYBARIS AND OTlIER HOIES.
opened stations wilere no  people lived,-   aind  then
sold no tickets.   I hlave  leard of new towns opened
at %way sta.tions,-  ai(1d peo)1le di(d not choose to  cliurn
aloligr in snut)ly old accolnmmodation trains.   But I lhave
never heard of a place wilere a mall was sure of four
faist trains every miorningi and four more every nighit,
that (lid not fill U1) in no timie."
Down  at tihe Union, one iIi(t,it, Ogden got talking
abtout tile -new!)iace, and soinel)()(ly told llimi  tlhe Parisia-ns  voul(l not sleep out of Paris.   "No," said lie,
lior will the people of this place sleep outside of
N-.guiadavi(k, if sleeping outside means  that tli(ly are
to hlave no fin out tlhere.  If thlere are to be ll0o )arties, no theatre, no concert, no  Union, no chance to
croak together, nobody is going to live tlhere.  That is
anotler reason wlhy you must  begiii onl  a large scale.
You must  lhave  peol)le enoughll  to imakle  it worth
(   eenleaf's whllile  to run  four falst trains for you,
lllorluigl(  and evening.   If you  hlave them, you will
llave peol,le ein(oig(ll to persuade  Ilitz to juggl(e for
yol, Irs.  \WNood( to silng to  you,  W1enl(lell  PI'illip)s
aIli(  lIeniy  -leecller to lecture  for  you, aind  tlhe
IFreiieli company to act for you.   The  )eol)le who
will go to thlis Ilace to live are exactly tile sort, of
l)eol)le whlo  w ill  put  all that  tilii,g  tlroughi.  You
will ]have a  better  pulblic hall tihere  than we  have
got here."    lIi(l so, indeed, it lproved.
I was at tliat tine tl-e inilister of thle Sandemnanian
(1llur11  at Nitguadavick.   I believed in Greenleaf, and
I
t %,,.,
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IIOW TIlEY L,IVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
indeed I ratlier believed in this -thling(. So I'went
round olle d(iy and asked lliln if' thley dlid not mean to
reserve lots  lor  liil'Clis, and if tlhey would( not let
Ime secure one.   "L I,ook at the plan, Mr. Illilam,"
said  Greenleaf.   "You  will see some  red  crosses
there oin half-acre lots, whichl will be convenient for
churches."
I looked, compared, and called his attention to one
whichl seemed to inme tlhe best.   I said I (lid not know
if we could or woul (lo anytlin(g atbout it, but would
tlhey not (give us a dee(l of tlhat lot, on  condition we
would use it for a hlouse of worl:sp.
"We  will give you a deed," said Greenleaf,  " on
exactly the samie terms as we  would give the governinent one for a post-office.   Thlose terums youi will find
iii brief on thle plan.  Thlat lot is worthl one hundred
and twenty dollars, anld for that sum tllhe Sandenianian
Consistory can hlave it.  Loolk  here, IMr. IiglianiI,"
said lie, " religion, as I understand it, is the most
essential reality in eartit or in heaven.  The institutionlis of relig,ion tlen, as clilurelles or Stii(lay s(clools,
will in no wise put tihemiselves on tlhe )lane of iiiferior
organizations, as if tliey must beg for a living or for
right to be.   Tlhey will assert their rig,lht.  We slall
treat all institutions of religioii witlh p)recisely equal
respect.   And  I believe that the Sandemanians will
find it desirable to buy a lot here now, while they can,
to build by aind by, wlieii tlihey want to."
I told him lie was quite right; that the Sandema
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SYBARIS AND  OTHEII 1I0OIES.
nian cnurch, at least, was in no position to ask almis like
a begg,ar.  And so thle next Sulnday morniing I spoke
of the thling from  the pul)it.  I said it seenmed to Inc
we oulght to secure a lot there, before the iiiost available situations were taken up1) by otlhers.  I satid tlhat
any money I found ill thle cli.irity buvxes tlhat cvenilg
aftter tlie two services, would be a)l)plicd to tlHis  )urpose.  And, as it hapll)ened, I found one luniidred and
nineteen dollars and nineteen cents tlhere.  Polly llad
eiglhty-one cents lying by, whlichl  slie added, and we
bought the lot the next  morning.  A  very curious
thing followed. The Spy and thle Courant nime)tioned(
this faict, and, before a fortnight was over, thle Unitarians, and thle Universalists, and thle Metllod(lists, and
Free Will Bal)tists, and Orthlodox Congregationalists,
and  Baptists, and  Ep)iscol)aliaIIs, and even  IRomtan
Cathlolics, lad( eachl bo,ughlt lots.   "1 Tllcy  (lid not
mean," thley said,  "to hlave those  )proselyting Sandeinaiiiaiis  stel)ping  in  before  tlem."   So   thlere
seemed to be 110no dager but  Aboo-Goosli, as  they
called the new  town, would hlave enoughl  religious
privileges.
III.
ELKANA1I O(GDEN talked so muchl about thle "Suburb
of IEase(  " at tle Uiiion, and iii.11  social circles, le
exl)l]tillcd awNlay so imany difficulties, and l)ool-l)oolicd(
down  so mially objections, that lihe canme to  be coiisidered as a sort of godfathler to the plan; and all sorts
98
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IIOW TllElY LIVED AT 1qAGUADAVICK.
of lpeople consulted himn about it.  After the litio graphic planis were printed by tlhe Gre,)t Eastern, anid
the demand for tlheir hlouse-lots  became very sl)irited,
peol)le begani to wake up wllo had beenii very drowsy
before, or had said it was all nonsense, and  tlJat niotliing could ever conie of it.  And(l all soris of contrivers
came to Ogden with their plans, and bored him awfully.
Among others there came in one day an old farmer,
whom Ogden did not know from Ad(lam.   But lie supposed he had seeli himn before; so lie said, "Good
mnorning, MIr. Jones.   Take a chair."
But the old manii said,  "My name is not Jones.  I
live next the Jones falm.  MAy  name is Tenny, Elbridge Tenny.   I live out in Knox."
Elkanali apologized.
Then the old iman said thlat lie lia(l come to talk to 111)
about his')lace.  It was a beautiful farm, hlie said, sloping  (down each side of the nortlh  hr'in(, wllich el'ln
right throughll the place.   Putting his fittler's I)laee
and  his together, and thlirowin(r il  the joi nture prol)erty, there was nigh seven lIundred acres in all.  iBy
this time  Ogden understood thlat here was another
Iian who would like to sell by the foot what had beeii
bought by the acre.
' You see," said thle old man, "if you want horsecars, the grade is l,eautiful fri'n e,e cli side down to tle
Great Northern Road, and the flat, where the stream
bends, is just the place for a station."
11)9 
SYBARIS AND OT11LER IIOMES.
"I  dare  say, Mlr. Jones," said Ogden.   "I beg
your pardoln, Mr. Eldridge, I dare say.   But all this
depends on wliat the' Great Nortlieirn' says.   I hlave
never found tlhem very bright, or, whlichl is muclltl  the
same thiii,, very liiin-,tne."
AMr' Tcniny sai(d llis niamie wvas not EI(1ri(lge, and(
Ogden apologized again.   Teinny lhad not been to the
Great Northlern peo)le; lie hlad beg,un  by drawing
out llis )lant for streets, wlhich I)perill)s Ogde(n  ould
like to see.  A,ud tlieii lie had tlhoughlt lie wotild( come
and consult Mr. Ogden before hlie went any furtlher.
"WVell, sir," said Elkaiali, "I amn very much obliged
to you. Now I tell you that your firin may be as
beautiful as the Garden of Eden, and as well laid out
as Alexander's city in Eg,ypt, but unless tlhe Great
Nortlhern  does the ri(ght thling(, whlicll is to say the
lhandsome thiig,, you can do nothingi with the fiurm in
t1is way.  Aol()re than thlat, Mr. Tenny [tliis tinme, lo
-was quite correct], more tlhan  tlhat, tl}ey may be as
'1,t(l,so()mie as -  as -  the Clhevalier Criel,toli, and if
you, uI) tlhere, are the least bit short-sighlted, or try to
skin  tllhese workin(gmen  whlom  you wantt  to  plant
thlere, the whole thling fails again.  As  I hiave said
forty times, the enterprise is one combined enterprise,
wlhich seeks everybody's good.  It seeks the good of
the lhonest day-laborer, who is now pIaying a dollar a
week for hiis tenement here, it seeks the good of his
children not yet born, it seeks the good of thle Great
NortHierni Railroad and all its stockholders, and it seeks
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100
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HOW THEY IVED) AT NAGUA1)AVICK.
your good.   But if any one of thle parties undertakes
to overreach any of the othlers, the whole thling fails,
and deserves to fail."
By tlhis timne Ogd,(en was uln(luly excited, and Mr.
Teiny -was a little:la rtmed.   But le declared tlhat lie
felt all this also, and( only wanated to'make a re.asoniable
profit in the business, wlhich lie was willing everybody
else concerned should share.  Ogden cooled down, and
told Jiim  that the merit of the enterprise was that it
offbred, Inot toltllltvus p1 fylit to an,yb,(l, ilt a l)eift(tlly
steady and sure remtuniieiation, -steady an(l sure, as lie
proposed to shlow.  So tlhey walked( over to(gethler to
the house of the president of the Great Northern.  It
was  afternoon, and they knew lie would not  be at
the office.   They also klnew thlat in tliat'establishlilent
responsibility was very  badly divided,  and  that  lie
-would take it very ill if any such l)ropl)osal as tlhis were
made to any of ]!is sil)orlinaites before lie lad liear(l of
it.  In faict, if hlie coiul(l be perstiaded, I)befoie thle week
were over, tlhat lic lhad dlevise(l tlle whlole tlhingr, tlitlt
would be best of all.
It was very slow work, and, to a person as imnpetuous as Elkanahl, very tedious.   But hle kept his teni1)er like a saint, knowin,g how much depend(led on tlat.
lIe let the president ramble off into endless histories
of his own former successes iii dealing,s with  lumblermen,  with  politicians,  and  withl  owners  of  waterpower, --  in all of wlii(h, lie, beiiig tlhe painter of the
picture, came off victorious, and these several lions
t
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101 
SYBARIS AND OTHtER HOMIES.
(iouclIe(d.lt lis feet.   After,n,ny of thlese ramblles
iiito tlhe foi('sts of fi(,ts,iltle(   y ni,enlorly, lie said,
well )lelascd -:
" Tllen yotlr ol)ject is to perslla(le u.s to open a new
station at thle B-ates Crossiing?  We niiillt I)erliaps let
tlhe milk-tr-ains stop thiere,- and tlle Aontaigt,le special.
h(,w woui(l tlhat answer?  Thlat wolil(l give you two
trains in -wiitei, and tllree in suinnier each way."
El.)ri(l,ge Teiny looked round( (ule(somie onii Elkahali O,gden, and this timne Elkanall blazed away.
It would not answer at all, Mr. Cliauncey.   Thlis
is one of tllose enterprises, lwhere you must do everytlhing, or nothling.   Tlle railroads of tis part of the
counitry liave steadily cut off  their best revenue, -
thle iiiost reliable because not subject to competition,by tli.t policy of leaving tlheir suburb travel to their
accommod(lation trains.  Unless we can hlave at least
three morning expresses and tlhree in tlhe eveningt, we
cain do notlingr."
It was a wonder MIr. Chauncey did not f.tint away,
or show tlhemn tlhe door as ma(dmen.   But OgdCien had
expected, even had intended, this surprise.
"The people who are to come and go on  these
trains, Mr. Cliauncey," said lie, " are not women goiiig a slIopl)ing,, to wlhom  ten minutes miore or less is
of no accoiunt. -Tliey are not even bank clerks, or drygoods d(ealers, to whiom all is gained if tihey are on
the street here at nine in the morning.  We  want to
provide for the day-laborer, who must get to his work
102 
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at ciglt i,, tlhe wiiter and at seven in the summer.  We
iiiea,n to lave hiin, and I,is empl)loyer, as certain that lie
will be tlhee, as if lie had olnly to walk, in fifteen minutes from  his lhomne.  You cainnot give liin tlhat certainty, if lie must wait till your Alontaigne train hias made
its connections above, and comne down to Bates's.  Besides tlhis, we walt to p)romise lhim a seat sure,-  while
hle goes and wliile lie comes. Hie must not be dependent on the chlances of your up-travel.  And  wheni he
takes his np,l) -  if lie chooses to, riding out,- lie is
not to be waked at six or eight way stations.   He is
to be put thlrol,,gh."
Mr. Cliauincey smiled,    sublime, amused, and incredulous.   But thle smile faded wlhen Ogden  proceeded:  "These fist traiiis are promised by thle Great
Easterti for tlhe next twenty years, to people who take
lots at Aboo Goosli, and that is the reason  that they
have alread(y sold seveii hundred( lots.  Offer notliing
but way traiiis, stol)l)ii(,,g at all your,car stations, and
IMr. Tenny here need take no trouble about surveyillg
his lands.   lie will not sell five acres!
The  President  became  more  thloughtful at this.
" lave you thloughlt what you should offer us? " said
lihe; " whlat boius would be reasonable to iin(luce us to
try tlhe experitnnet?   We  migil,t ptt (oii oie cexpress
for thlree monthls, and see hlow it wot(ld woi,k."
' And  you  would(l  not  iave  passeligers  enough
to pay for your oil," replied Elkanatli.   "No,  Mr.
Cliaancey, it is a twenty years' business, or it is noth
HOW THEY LIVEI) AT NA(;UADAVICK.
103 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
ing, that we propose to you.  There is nobody now at
Bates's but Mr. Eldridge here, and he and his family
will not want many tickets.  This business is to be
made. When it is made, it is sure."
"And what inducement do you suggest?" said the
President again, blandly.
"Simply what I have named.   Mr. Eldridge here
will be glad to sell you land for your station, at exactly the same price that he will sell nme mine for my cottage, or the Widow Coniley for hers.  On the other
hand, if he sells his two thousand lots, and sees his
two thousand houses go up in the next ten years, you
can guess how many tickets you will sell daily."
" But they are tickets sold at a reduced price," persisted Mr. Chauncev.  "I hate these excursions!"
"Pardon me," said Ogden, "there is no reason whly
you should put them at a reduced price.  Put them at
the price that will pay you best on the whole. Only >
announce the price before Mr. Tenny [name right
this timune] puts a surveyor on the land, and never
change it for twenty years.   The system is everything."
"Where is not the system everything?" said the
President, pleased with himself for saying something. And he promised to think of it carefully, for
in three hours he had really got interested in the prospects the plan unfolded, and his visitors withdrew.
Two days after, Mr. Chauncey went down to the
office and had a long talk with Plinlimmon, his super
104 
HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
intendent, and Pariss, his treasurer. Plinlimmon was
fretting to death, as he heard from day to day about
Aboo Goosh, and thought what golden chances the
Great Northern was losing. But he knew it would be
madness for him to broach any such plan. Imagine
his relief when, after infinite preface and explanation,
Mr. Chauncey told him how he had been long wishing
that they might build up a local business of their own,
so that they should not be so dependent on those cutthroats of the Mad River line and the Canadian connection; how he had turned over many plans, and
finally had concluded that if they established a station
with several fast trains, say at Bates's cross-roads, they
mnight build up really a large town there; how lihe
had talked with that Mr. Tenny, whom they had to
compromise with, about the land at the Sias cutting,
and found him well disposed to such an undertaking;
and in short, how he, Chauncey, had now come
down to talk it over with him, Plinlimmon, arnd him,
Pariss, and if he, Pariss, and he, Plinlimmon, saw no
objections, which did not occur to him, Chauncey,
he, Chauncey, believed he should send Mr. Stephenon up to make a little survey, and should  bring it
before the Board the next Monday. The two young
mene were immensely interested, immensely sympathetic, asked very intelligent questions, proposed very
modest objections, and were then driven from these
Objections; and by the time Mr. Chauncey left them,
ie was satisfied that he had planned the village of
105
5 * 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
Rosedale, at least five years ago. He had left its name
to Mrs. Chauncey, and this was her selection.
As for our other railroad, - the Cattaraugus and Katahdin,- it never occurred to anybody to suggest
anything to any of their people; and they have never
had a fast special train from that hour to this, nor ever
will.  The only thoroughly original thing they ever
did was to pay in currency in Naguadavick the interest they had promised to pay in gold in London.
IV.
IT was astonishing to see these two towns grow.
You see it was not the ordinary speculation of selling
house-lots to other people, while you do not go yourself
to live there. But both towns were based on that ingenious Vineland principle.  It is the principle on which
Uncle Sam sells his farm-lots at the West.  The price i
of the lots, once established, was established forever, so
far as the first holder went. Of course they became
more valuable every day. Of course every man who
bought one whispered to his next friend that there was
an admirable chance next him, if he only seized at once.
Everybody tried to seize at once, and Aboo Goosh and
Rosedale were soon alive with the hum of the hammer
and the buzz of the mortising-mnachine. By the time
we dedicated the Sandemanian church at Aboo Goosh,
and that was really as soon as we could get up a
respectable church edifice, there were five hundred
106 
HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVIOK.
nouses inhabited there. In two years more there were
two thousand.
Anybody will understand how the people with com fortable incomes lived there. That sort of people live
outside the towns they work in everywhere. London,
Boston, New York, all places of size, let the men who
receive salaries, and who begin to work at nine in the
morning, live in their suburbs,- and they all know
how to provide for that class of people.  The good
fortune of Naguadavick was, that in these Aboo Goosh
and Rosedale enterprises, we provided for the daylaborers also. The people who worked in the mills,
the mere diggers and builders, who had to stand in
rows to be hired on the blind side of the Phenix Bank,
opposite the Common, the women who sewed in the
cloak-shops, - all found it cheapest and best to live in
the country, and to do their work in town.
I had myself to leave Naguadavick when these
towns had been four years under way.  I left it for no
fault on either side, but in consequence of an unfortunate misunderstanding and emeute at a public meeting, called for the purpose of teaching the children to
hold their knives better at table. But up till that time
I was intimate in both these new towns. And I may
close this account of them with the notes of my last
visit in Rosedale.
I called there on an old parishioner of mine, named
Mary Quinn. She hailed originally from Carrick on
Suir, but had married Michael Quinn, who was from a
107 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
village just outside of Tipperary, some years before I
knew her. She had six or eight children here, and
two in heaven. I hunted her up in Rosedale,found her a mile from the station, on the horse-railroad.
They had a regular system of horse-railroad tracks
there, that virtually passed every man's house.  There
was a nice garden round the house, of half an acre,no fence, which seemed odd; but there was hardly a
fence in Rosedale. They had some side hedges, but
made  up for stronger fences by  strict cattle laws.
The house itself was a clever story-and-a-half house,
such as costs in a country town five hundred dollars.
I found this had cost Quinn rather more than seven
hundred. The lot had cost him seventy-five. He
had paid for that clear, with money he had in bank.
He and his wife had paid a third part of the cost of
the house, and there was a mortgage on it of four
hundred and sixty dollars.  Their Savings Bank there
took such mortgages, if they knew the people. The
truth was, that the land was worth now ten times what
the original price was.
" Well, Mrs. Quinn," said I, "I am glad to see the
little girl so nicely."
The child, when I saw her last, in one of our back
streets, had been white and puny, worrying along with
the relics of scarlet fever. She was now rugged, sunburned, freckled, and looked as if she would like to
eat a tenpenny nail.
"Indade she is, your Riverince, and it is hard to
108 
HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
say why, for the medicines are all gone, and we have
not sent for the new doctor, since we came here."
This was a stroke of humor on Mrs. Quinn's part.
She knew well enough that her children were growing
up to a constitution like her own, because they were
growing up in the same way as she did.
"But the boys, your Riverince, they are the handsomest sight, if you could only see them. They're
all gone now for blackberries, - or for I don't know
what, for indeed the fields here are not like what we
had at Carrick on Suir, - but they are grown so big
and so brown that you would not know them."
"And how does there come enough to eat, if they
are so big and hungry?"
" There, again," said she, with the pride with which
the hunter praises his hounds, and the farmer his
grounds, and the bishop his lawn. She flung open
the door of the neat kitchen we were sitting in, and
pointed to the well-hoed potato-patch behind the house,
and to the rows of comely cabbages behind them, - as
;f she had compassed sea and land, lived at the Five
Points and in North Street, and now in Back-street:ourt-place in Naguadavick, not in vain, if she could
only have her own potatoes at the last. Of them she
-aid nothing;  but, with that speaking wave of the
hand which would have become Rachel herself: "And
he milk, your Riverince, which cost us ten cents a
quart in town, is only six cents here. Half the neigh)ors have cows, and it is handier for them to let my
109 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
boys milk for them, and pay them in milk, than to
hire for money. For they don't all have boys as fine
as mine," said Mary, who had her weak points, like
the rest of us.  " For butcher's meat we have more
than ever, and it costs us less. Two pigs my man
brought up last year on the place here, and though
they said the pork was not the attest, it made a big
place in the bill any way, for the butcher allowed us
all it was worth, or he said he did, and surely that
was a good deal more than nothing."
Then I cross-questioned Mary about their social life,
t:ied to make her own that she felt the want and the
excitements and amusements open to her in Backstreet-court-place; but there was no craving for their
flesh-pots.  Pretty clearly, her "man" was more of
a man here, and she was more of a woman.  Why?
Why, because they held Real Estate.  Real very emphatic, and with a very large R, - and Estate with 
a very large E. What is it Jupiter ordains? I am
writing at No. 9, in the 3d range, and must quote
from memory:
"The day
That makes a man a slave takes half his life away."
Well, he might have added, if it were he, and I believe it'was not, he might have added:
"When he can
Say,' This lot of land is mine,' he's twice a man."
There is no need to be sentimental about it, but that
is the living fact.  The glory of New England as she
was, was that every man was a freeholder.
110 
HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
"My man," said Mary, affecting not to boast, but
really running over with pride, "my man does not
have much time for the garden. He just cuts at the
trees a little, and looks at the boys' work, and taches
them a little about the pig; but after supper he has to
dress himself and go to the meeting of the co-operative store, where he is a manager, or he sings in the
bass in the International Club, or he takes his turn
on the sanitary committee of the Union." Poor
Mike, too, then, he had come to enjoy the sweets of
"eventfiul living," and his wife had come to the pride
of having her husband "sought-arter," second only
to the pride of being "sought-arter" herself, in the
not forgotten days of seventeen.
Boys and girls both might now be trusted out-doors;
and out-doors was a joy and delight to their mother as
to them.  There was no longer the horrid watch and
anxiety there had been in the wynds and courts of the
city.  Every summer the large market farmers who
surrounded them at Rosedale were glad enough to
hire the children on jobs to pick peas and beans and
the small fruits; and, in fact, we got our vegetables the
better in the city market, because we had sent, not an
ornamental, but a working population, to our suburbs.
It was their gain and it was ours too.
Mary's grandest moment was when she asked me
to tea. When I got up to go she said with a reality
far beyond any of the tones of artificial civility, that I
must stay to see the children and take a cup of tea.
111 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
In Back-street-court-place she would have welcomed
me had I looked into the crowded kitchen parlor bedroom at tea-time, but, had I come in before tea-time
she would no more have asked me to stay than she
would have asked me to hear her square the hypothenuse. But now I should not see the children, nor
Mike, she said, unless I stayed to tea. And she was
sure I should be late at home, which was true; and I
was glad I stayed, because I saw the children, which
was best of all.
In  they came, clattering  and  explaining,   the
youngest first, by some miraculous law, then two or
three of the biggest, then a miscellaneous assortment,
wound up with him, always the last, who had on this
occasion got into the brook, and brought in his shoes
in his hand. Clattering and enthusiastic were all the
party, each telling his part of the story on a some- 
what high key, and all explaining about the quantity c
and quality of the berries, which were indeed manifold. Mary sympathized, applauded, wondered, and
quieted, tried to'bring them to consciousness that
the old minister was there, promised that they
should have the blackberries for tea and for breakfast, bade Phelim and Owen go quick for the milk,
whispered to Mary Ann that she was to run to the
baker's and buy some tea-cakes, and bade the others
go quick to their rooms and wash themselves and brush
their hair that they might be ready.
Their' rooms! Why did not she say their thrones
112 
HOW TIIEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
or their palaces? Heavens! had not I seen all tlhose
children lying asleep together in one room, fifteen feet
by twelve, ill whlich all thle cooking(r of tlhat fimTlily h1.(I
been done that day, - all Mfrs. Aminid(ab Jollnsoll'.s
family washing done, -and in whlicli thle wlhite mus  lin dress that Selina Johnson wore to a b)irtllday bill
thle next nirlit was ironed whlile tlhose children sl(.)t,
so that l'lielimi  and Oweien migllt carly it home ill tlIe
morning?  Suchl, dear reader, is thle stow.age in ev-ery
Back-street-coltrt-l)lace witllin lilf a mile  of whlere
you read these lines!  Their rooms, indeed!
And come into thle sittiiig-rooin yourself,' your
Riverince,'  continued MIary.   "I would hlave.aisklel
you in before, but it seemis more sociable hlere, aiil(
more like old times."  Nor l]ad slle reason to al)()lo gize for  her well-blackcd Banner, lier neat kiteclien
table, and brilliant tin ware, nor for the p)retty gardlen
view before whlich I lhad been sitting.  BIut I  went
into thlle sitting-room, knowig, I must be outt of the
way now whlile shle "got tea."
Reader, I have taken tea with tlhat.ame womani's
sister M argaret in thle cablin bothl were b)orn in, oitsi(le
Carrick on Suir.  It was  a stone cabin withi a mui(l
floor; a partition of boar(l paIrtly sel)arated us froiu
the pi(, who lad(l thle firont of tlhe *1.)(r.wy, l l,t whI(
Was visible to tlle inqtlirilng eye.   I iai.(le mvy (lI -it
twiliglit, and found M{ary's nie(es and( nelliews seitecl
on low blocks, or on thl(ir heels, looking in thle fire of
peat. One of them ran for M1argaret, to whlom I lhad
R
113 
SYBARIS AND OTHIER HOMES.
coime to briig a message, three thousand miles fromn
Mary. Instantly, when sihe appeared, had a troop of
ravens been sent out to borrow tea and sugar, that I
mignilt feast; instantly had two oat-cakes been set lup
against the stones on thle lihearthi; soon! had the kettle
boiled and the tea been ready, and tihen we  had all
repl)aired inta Margaret's bedroom,- size, as I live,
six feet by five, -  my Reverence carrying with me
the only chair in the hlouse, while Jolhn the hlusbalnd
sat on the bed, while the teapot and oat-catke smoked
at the little table, and Margaret, having in fact nothing
to sit upon, stood and served.   That grandeur of one
chair, borrowed tea, and a barefoot life by a peat-fire
was what this Mary Quinn was born to.  Yes, and
for my notion, I tliilk it was better for her and her
brothers and sisters tihan the tenement life, upper sto
ry, three flighlts, in Back-street-court-place, where the
children feasted and slept in the corners left by Mrs.
JohnIson's and Selina's spotless drapery.   But to be
-liushered out by this same Mary, not into the five-footsix bedroom, to feast from a groaning taper-staind, but
into the comely sitting-room,-  with its six painted
chiairs, its sofa and ornamented  centre-table (shiade
of St. Patrick), its portraits of Dan O'Connell, TheobIald MAatliew, George Washington on his deathbed,
aid( fi-ained testimony of membership of the Siloam
D)ivision; to see the cheer and joy with whichll that
womani remllm(flbered that she was not living either in
a pig-sty or in a barrack, and the sweet saintliness
114 
1IOW TI-IEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
withl whicli SliCe thlanked G(d tlhat shle was not;   to
see this, and to know tlis, and to reimember tlhis, was to
iiiake Rosedale glow indeed withl the true roseate line.
I  should  not  have  selected the pictures or finiiture, but she had.  They were her taste, if not minle,
and thlere was the glory.   "Excuse me  for a  mnoment," said the matron, "Honora will be down stairs
presently,"  and  retired, intent on hospitable  cares.
I hlad enough to tlhink of to make it unnecessary for
Inme to read tlhe last Ilarper, or MIr. Ioadley's " Gengls
Klian and lhis Coadjutors."   I only lhad thle liarl)er in
my hand that I migh,It not seem  ineglected whlen  imyv
)retty little Ilonora came in.
And  that was really the same  clhild whom I lhad
seen faded and dead in thle a!i,      v.'iys of tlhe towni!
She remembered the thlings she said theln, and lila(l the
book Polly gave her tlhen for a Clhristmas present.
Thel(  same  child?  Wliat one tlhing in her was tlhe
same?  This nut-brown face  gaillst tat  limiy-wliite
skin, these  hlard romlld arms  agailist tlhose  skinny
fagots  of  muscle and  tendon,  tlhis modest, sinl)lelook, against tlhlat eager, inquiringr, dissatisfied, anxious
glare I  And  when  I talked with  her, -  (the cllil(I
knew me as well as shle knew her father,)-  wllhen I
talked with her, here were undertakings, and fiiends,
books,  walks,  collections of butterflies, a party  to
AMount Greenback, a picnIic at  Paradise, —all this,
against thle stupid town life of sucll a clil(l, who hias
gone to schlqol and come back if she is good, and gone
115 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
again and come back again; but to whom one day lhas
been as another, because hler mother cannot trust her
much in the streets, and there is for her no possibility
of society ill its forms of simp)le, li,ght-hearted pleasure!
Dear rea(ler, if you care to go into Back-street-courtplace in 13oston or in New York, you  may  finld as
many hundred Ilonoras as you choose, who never saw
thle sea onl the beachl, never picked shlell from sand,
never planted seed in ground, never wateled( bird's
nest on tree, never crunched moss with foot, never
sailed chlip on stream, never hunted butterfly over
grass, never rested under shady tree, never waded
across mountain brook, never picked berry fiom bough,
never ate pI)each or pear, never rode on horse or ass,
never sat inil wagon or sleigli, never enjoyed one of the
little pleasures whichl  are as the daily fbod of your
cl]il(lren, wlichl thley thlink of so little thlat they are
1)ea(ging you to-day for something more, because tlese
are tlhings of course to everybody.
So, you see, Ilonora was hlerself tlle heroine of a
romance to me.   There is tlle reason whly I read so
few iiovels, dear boy; it is because I see so mInally.
And hlere comes in the great shy Frederic,- my Riverinee's godson, - -whlo  has endued lhimself rapidly
in Ills Sunday jacket because of my  sta,ying to tea,
ald wllo is sly and ill at ease botlh because I ~ii there
and( lecalise le llas on the jacket.   But I ad(lliliister
a story of the good fortuine of D)ick IMcKelvy, who
hlias goile to Mexico withi tile army, and I sihow Fred
116
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a burnin,g-glass of a pattern he hlas never seen, and lie
becomes coinmunii(cative.  Can it be possible!  IThis
godson, whlo was erst a little wild(l, you must know,whio really, if you will not mention it, got into thle
lock-up olne day because hlie threw marbles at an auctioneer, and, whichll was ten thousand times worse, at
the common law, slapped the policeman who trie(d to
stop hlim,-  this godson, for whomn I then and tlhelre
hlad to go b)ail that hlie shlould keep the peace of tlhe
State, else lie woul(dl have been sent to the hlouse of correction, -  this wild godson of mine is the most sedate,
if the most enterprising of human  beings.  lie lias
formed alliance, offensive and defensive, witlh lod Bates
(Hlod is short for lorace).'"Yotl know II()( B'ates;?"
AIy Reverence lad not tlat lileaslire.  "Welll, l1o(
is a first-rate fellow, and his father owns a saw-mill
- uii) at Number Nine and two townships in the Seventh,
and( Hod is going up withl the men next winter to take
care of one of the camps, and lie has asked llis father
to let me go up a(nd take care of the other; and if he
likes and I like, I am  to llave a cllance at thle mill
wlhen it begins rimning in April, -tlle fellow that is
there now is going  to Illinois," &c., &c., &c.  IFred
is on a larger stage now, and thle accumulated steam
whlich erst fired inmables, as firom a Perkins gun, on
iny excellent firiend Cuniinglliain witll his lhammer, is
niow to drive the mill whichl is to cut the lplank, wllielh
is to lay the floor of the court-llouse, in whichl  you,
my dear Frisbie, are to lay down the law which is to
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save fiom ruiii these States in all coining time!  This
is the house that Fred built I
A slight commotion, and it is announced that MAike's
train passes the window.  Ten minutes more (for thle
lhorse-cars are not Metropolitan, let us be tlhankful)
and Mike's step is heard at the side door.   Two iiiin
utes for a second wasll, for brushing, the hair evenv withl
MAecthodistical precision, and for a Sunday coat, and
Mlike emerges into the sitting-room.   His ride out
of town has been his visit to his club-room; lie has
picked up all the gossip of Naguadavick and of Rosedale.  He tells me more news than I have heard in a
week, and does the honors with infinite volubility.
Thirty seconds more and Mary's tea-bell rings.  That
Mary Quinn should need a tea-bell! that the little
lhawks are not sittitlig on their perches waitiig to descend on tlle visible meal I  And we go in to sit, not
oIl the bed of lher bedroom, but in the neat kitchen,
at her p)retty table, where everything, dear Aili1iiitryon, is served a great deal hlotter from the stove thlan
you will ever hlave it in your palace, for all your patenif
contrived double dishes and covers, and for all youi
very noisy dunmb-waiters.
OnI thlat lhospitable meal let the curtain fall.  It was
the eaters, not tile eaten, that had the fasciiiation foI
me.  As it lippened(l, it was only the day before that
I had walke(l tlrougllh A Street in South Boston.  It
was vacation, and the wretched Irishl children wel,
sitting onl tiheir haunches as Baker describes the Abys
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sinians, looking across the street at niotliitii wvitl tileit
I)oor lacklustre eyes.  Whlat should they (.o?  Mr.
Nashl lead given tlhemn bathls.  But thlley cotild not sw%im
all day! The city hlad given scliools, but tlhey could[
not go to schlool all tlhe year I Poor wretches, - afteroo1001  had  come, and supper-time lhad  not comje, -
whlat room was there in thlose heated tenements, -
}what play for thlem out-doors?  And tlese nliseral)le,
pseudo-Abyssinian children were of the same blood as
Plielim and lionora and Owven.   Nay,  maybe they
were their cousins. Maybe; - and whlat is certain,
dear reader, is that they were your b)rothlers and sisters, and were mine!
So I drank' l\Mary's tea firom hler wonderfil new
service of "clhaney."  I eat, in tlhe rilght order, of
bread, toast, gingerbread, pie, and tea-cake;  I prItised
the chlildren's berries and had a quart put up for Polly
and the children; I kissed the little ones good I)y, I
shook lhands withl the eldest, cried "All ri,glt!" to hlieliimias hlie stopped the horse-car, entered it, crossed to
tlle steam station, and in tlhirty-seven milutes and
nineteen seconds, from house to hlouse, I was at lhome
in Polly's arms.
They did not sell season tickets on the Great Nortlierni; thley sold package tickets, and fo)r his six ]lUiIldred( and  twenty-four Ipassages yeaily MIike lla(l to
pay sixty-two dollars and tforty cents.  Ihis interest
money on his house was forty-six dollars and fifty cents.
These two amounts made one hundred and eigit dol
I I.')
10 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
lars and ninety cents a year against the thlree dollars a
week wlhiclh Mike used to p)ay ifor two nasty and (dl('.tdly
rooms over the openi drain iii Back-street-court-l)lace.
Ie l]ad, tlhrowin in beside, the steady impl)rovement
in his property, his chlildren's hlealtlh, the value of tlheir
work, as it appeared in the garden and thle results of
tlhe gardenI, and, above all, the feeligt that no niani was
his niaster, tlhat lie was independent, was subduing the
worl(l, and in shlort was one of thle governing classes.
Mike was not the only workman in Nagtuadlavick who
saw the advantage of that line of life.
"This is certainly better," I said to myself, as I
rode into townii, " than  hlaving to crowd  Mike  an,l
Mariy and their friends as we did five years ago.   All
our nlinistry at large, and all our home missions, and
all our provident associations, and all our relief orgalliNations, and all our soup kitchlens, were but a poor
-apology for sllci a success as tlis.  We  are getting
back liere on  tlhe true American principle,'wherelCIe
every roo(d of grouiid supports its man,' woman, and
ciild, -   -llay, is it not tlhe principle of  the  prol)let:
I Every manii shlall sit under  his own  vine and figtree'?"
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"We must have land enough too," I said.  "In a
circle of fifteen miles' radius around  Naguadavi(k
tllere are about four hundred and fifty thousand acres.
So many acre hlomesteads, supposing an acre were the
akrel.age.  Tlhat gives homes for two million persons,
aI(d  Naguadavick will not need two million inlhabi
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HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK.
rants, 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
121 
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 mnarvel. 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
EnI  
HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
salvation of our large cities to be found. I believe
thecse principles are of general application, and that
the success of Vinleland 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 virtues 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
123
FI' 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
race of beings from the privates in the English regiments under the command  of General Gage whom
they met in battle. The institutions which they made,
when they established, in 1780, the Constitution of
Massachusetts, - and when they established afterwards the other constitutions which on that were
patterned, - were all based on a supposed state of
society, where almost every man owned his home,
had a stake in the country, as the English say, and
had that steadfast desire to improve the town in which
he lived, in all of its institutions, which to such real
estate belongs.  Real estate, indeed!  It is the only
estate which gives man firm foothold.  It represents
the only wealth which does not easily take wings and
fly away!
So long as the American systems are tested in States
where most men still have freehold, as in the State of
Vermont, for instance, they work as regularly and as
precisely as they ever did.  Let me copy literally the
opinion of one whose opinion in such a matter is
worth much more than mine.   I take it from a note
on my table addressed to me, which I copy literally,
only omitting the name of the town in Illinois where
it is written. It is from a boy now seventeen years old,
who in Massachusetts knew the inside of at least one
jail, and was always in hot water.                      -
"July 27, 1869.
"Mr. Hale Dear Sir i Write these few lines to let
you know that i amrn Well and hope you and your
124 
HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
family are the same i have been west onwards two
years i have been living on a farm since i came out
hlere i have clothed myself and laid up my money i
have been geting $ 250 a year i have thought of buying a farm and takeing my mother out here if i thought
she would come i like this state very well the reason
is that a poor man can get a home in a little while if
hlie uses his means proper more so than in the east i
wichl you would give me some information where my
mother is and tell her to write to me as soon as posible
as i am anxious about her if you think i am worth noticeing i wich you would write to me as soon as you get
this letter and give me some advice on this matter and
tell me what you think i had ought to do."
Now that letter is a little deficient in commas, but
the spelling speaks sufficiently well for the two or
three winters' schools to which this boy was sent in a
mountain town in Massachusetts. And I would give
more for the letter as anl exposition of the real worth
of Illinois than I would for fifty "hifalutin " articles
in the Chicago or the Springfield newspapers. That
Irish boy of seventeen has found the root of this matter. He can get a home in Illinois, though he is poor,
and he can send for the half-cracked mother, who
spent the best of her life, after her husband deserted
them both, in taking care of him.
Land, - or Freehold, - in short, is really a prime
necessity.   It is necessary that almost every  man
125
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
should have a fair chance at Land,- held in his own
right,- if you mean to govern America by its original institutions.
Now if a man means to be a farmer  there is no
trouble about his getting this land. Between Lord
Ashburton's line on the northeast and Cape Florida on
the south, and Nootka Sound and the rest of the Pacific
Ocean on the west, there is plenty of land- and
the best of land, if a man wants literally to subdue
the earth -to raise the food from it for his own
household, and to sell to the more civilized lands
'the surplus he has left. According to the free-traders
this is what we all ought to be doing. We ought to
stap this singing of songs, wearing of clothes, printing
of books, carving of statues, digging in mines, and
ought to devote ourselves to the "providential duty" of
America in raising breadstuffs and cotton for the rest of
the world.  But even Adam Smith made books, instead
of working at a loom in Glasgow, as by his own theory
he should have done. And the good sense of the people of America prefers God's order to the order of the
Economists.  It prefers to develop each human gift as
it appears, and so to vary human industry; that, on
our own soil, there shall be fair chance for each class
of human power. If Jonathan Edwards happens to
be born here, we give him a chance as a metaphysi cian, though by the theory he should be raising In dian  corn.   If Allston is born here, we give him a
chance as a painter, though he should be raising indi
4*
126
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
go. We once let Eli Whitney try his hand as an inventor, though he should have been laying stone-wall
in Connecticut, by the theory.   By our latitude in
that one case we created the cotton crop of America.
We let Fulton build steamboats, and Norris and Ross
and Winans build locomotives, and De Witt Clinton
build canals, and Nathan Hale build railroads, though
by the theory all of them should be hoeing, or at the
best grinding. And so, after two or three centuries of
varied industry, we have a civilization of the highest
grade,- wholly different from the low agricultural
civilization of Southern Russia, of Poland, and of Ireland. We have millions of people, gathering in and
near large towns for purposes of commerce and manufacture; -and vet we have and we love institutions
which are based essentially on the idea that the very
great majority of the people of the State shall be freeholders, and shall be controlled, in their motives and in
their action, by those considerations which to the possession of Land infallibly belong.
Nobody but Mrs. Partington expects to sweep back
these thronging millions from the towns to the prairies
by nice little half-column articles in the daily papers,
on the joys of Agricultural Life.   If the men who
write these Idyls like the prairies, why do not they go
to them themselves?   That  is the fierce question
which young men from the country and young girls
from the country ask,-  men  and  girls who  have
forced their way to the large towns and their excite
127
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
ments and occupations, precisely because their own
tastes or aptitudes lay in the direction of commerce or
of handiwork or of fine art, and precisely because
they did not choose to continue in the duties which
the life of a farmer compelled. We cannot undo the
eternal laws of our civilization.   We  cannot  keep
our bread and eat it too. We cannot have large
cities, with the stimulus they give in civilization, and
at the same time send all our young people to fence in
prairies, and raise breadstuffs. The plaintive appeals
addressed by those who have got their seats for the
spectacle to those who are crowding on the outsidethat they will all be pleased to go away- are scarcely
heard. When they are heard it is by those who are
quite incredulous, though they are told that there is
not even standing room within.
I. FREEHOLD is taken for granted in the theory of
American institutions.
II.  COMPACr  CITIES  are necessary for modern
civilization.
HIow are these two necessities to be reconciled?
Where the cities are not large the tendency and
habit of American institutions asserts itself, and the
workmen in the shops of cities are at the same time
freeholders in the immediate neighborhood of their
work. In the city of Worcester, in Massachusetts,
there are about thirty-five thousand persons at the
present time, of whom I suppose nine tenths are en
128
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
gaged in manufacture. As in all manufacturing
towns, the proportion of persons not living in families
is large. There were in May, 1868, 9,137 men over
eighteen years of age. I suppose five thousand of
these may have been heads of families.  To live in,
these families had 3,849 houses, the average number
of inhabitants to a house being as low as eight and
nine tenths,- singularly low for a manufacturing
town. The number of resident persons, firms, and
corporations which pay taxes on real estate was as high
as 2,924. It would probably be safe to say that in that
manufacturing town one half the voters are freeholders, own their own houses and reside in them,
having obtained freehold in the neighborhood of their
work. A circle of four miles diameter, of which each
point would be within two miles of the city hall,
would give twenty-four thousand lots of a quarteracre each, allowing a quarter of the space for roads
and parks. On the usual computation of seven persons to a family, a city whose workshops occupied a
square mile might give a freehold of a quarter-acre
to one hundred and thirty thousand people, all within
a mile and a half of the workshop square; and yet no
person should live in a house with more than seven
inhabitants.
The advantage which newly formed towns like
Worcester have in such regards is very great. In old
towns like Boston it is very difficult for the laboring
man to get freehold near his work; he becomes a ten             6*                              I
129
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
ant, and the tenement-house system comes in, withi all
its disadvantages.
But at this point the invention of railroads relieves,
or may relieve, the crowd upon the towns.
Any village within fifteen miles of a commercial or
manufacturing town is within half an hour of it by
express train. Now half an hour between home and
work meets the requisition of a laboring man.
A circle of fifteen miles' radius includes rather
more than.....
Give a quarter of this, or...
to roads and parks, and you have left
fbr workshops and homes.
Give eight thousand acres to shops and warehouses,
-that is, a block three miles by four miles in the
middle of the circle, - and you have left three hundred and seventeen thousand acres.   This, if you
chose to divide it so, would be a freehold acre-lot for
so many families; for a population, that is to say, of
two millions and a quarter, none of whom should live
in the "business part of the town," none of them in a
house of more than seven inhabitants, and each of
them with a galden of an acre.
This is the tlheorctical combination of the advantages of freehold, and the advantages of compact cities.
But, as every reader knows, the practice does not
approach this theory.
1. In cases of seaboard cities a large deduction
130
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io8.395 11
. 325.185 acres
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
must be made for that part of the circle which is
covered by water.
2. The railroad companies in general are compassing sea and land to get another barrel of flour or
another passenger from a thousand miles away, unconscious that they can make their richer market at their
doors. One passenger from New York is shot into Bostoll with the highest speed science can give, for a thousand who are left to linger along in the doldrums of
local trains. But the time of the distant traveller is
not a whit more important than that of the neighbor.
3. The landholder thinks his duty done when he
cuts his land into small lots and offers it for sale. The
truth is that land of itself is the most worthless of
commodities. To induce the laborer from the city to
buy the land many intermediate steps must be taken.
Of many of these steps we have valuable suggestion
in the experience of VINELAND.
It is perfectly true that in the neighborhood of all
large cities may be seen tracts with the lines of paper
roads dimly shadowed on them, with one or two cottages orne'es tumbling to ruin, which are held up as
the illustrations of the failure of efforts to induce laboring men to live in the country. In truth, they are
only illustrations of the folly which supposes that, in
a country of intelligent men, any man can sell by the
foot at high prices what he bought by the acre at low,
without doing anything himself to improve the condition of the property.
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
1. People will not establish themselves in any village of small holdings, unless it is large enough, or promises to be large enough, to give them society, and, with
society, the amusements, the instruction, and mutual
advantages of other kinds which society affords. The
town must be large enough for two or three churches
at least, for good schools, for public entertainments of
different grades, and for the vivacity which belongs to
city life, or the laboring men will stay in the city.
This requires an enterprise involving at least one
thousand families.   Six hundred acres of land, at
the very least, are needed to offer to each settler
the attractions which are indispensable.  One or two
thousand would be better.
- In the establishment of VINELAND, Mr. Landis, the
founder, was not looking to draw men out from cities.
I suppose he would be quite as willing that men used
to city life should not come. HIe was trying to build
up a community of small farmers. But even he saw
the necessity of compact village life. The centre of
Vineland is a village of six hundred acres, crossed
by eight streets, running one way, and in the middle
of all, by the broad avenue of which the railroad is
the middle;- and across the other way by nine
streets, with Landis Avenue. The village lots were
originally fifty feet wide. Mr. Landis gave land for
the erection of churches; and, as he could, encouraged horticultural, scientific, and other societies, which
aimed at entertainment and mutual improvement.
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
Outside of this village, Mr. Landis laid off farm lots,
from five to twenty acres and upwards, which now
cover a tract of more than forty thousand acres.
I am confident that the success of Vineland is due,
first, to the very magnitude of the scale on which it
is planned. Most of us would be willing to live in a
community of ten thousand people. But it is only
exceptional persons who really prefer the solitude of a
hamlet of twenty or thirty.
2. The new-fledged freeholder, who has bought
himself a half-acre lot in some Mount Vernon or
Mount Bellingham speculation near a large city, is
apt to find that all the hardships of land-owning come
upon him long before the advantages can develop.
The day of the auction sale he was quite a hero. He
had a free ticket to ride to the spot. He had champagne, crackers, and cheese without charge. He was,
that day, the companion and friend of all the directors. The new roads were in perfect order. The
trains came and went exactly as the exigencies of the
sale required. But, before he has owned his land a
month, he has learned that the fence to it will cost
him more than the land cost him. The road has
washed badly in a shower, and he cannot find anybody
whose business it is to repair it. No grocer is yet
established in the neighborhood. And the railroad no
longer runs a train in and out when it is wanted. iHe
does not know any of the other new land-owners. He
finds that the directors of the land company no longer
133
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
know him; and that they are naturally quite indifferent to his difficulties. The only new acquaintance he
makes is the tax collector, who begins assessing his
real estate at the auction price. And when he talks
with a mason about building, he is told they must begin by digging a.well on each of these little lots,
for which he begins to think they have all paid very
high.
In Vineland Mr. Landis met most of these difficulties in advance, by methods which, as I believe, must
be imitated by any one who wishes for success. He
went and lived in his own town, and made the establishment of the town his business. There was at least
somebody on hand who wanted to have the establishment succeed. By a master stroke of policy, fortunately easily imitated under the law of Massachusetts,
he took away all necessity for fencing, by keeping all
cattle closely confined. On the other hand, he bound
each purchaser to make certain improvements within
twelve months; so that there cannot be in Vineland
many of the odious empty corner lots, waiting to become
valuable, which disgrace most new towns. Among
the improvements required of each purchaser was the
seeding with grass of the sides of the highway, the
planting of shade-trees along the streets and avenues,
and a fixed line was given, before which the fronts of
the houses must not be carried. By these arrangements alone many of the drawbacks which sicken a
new freeholder of his bargain are effectually removed.
134
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
If you go to Vineland, you find near the station a
decent-looking hotel, which, when I saw it, made no
pretence, but seemed comfortable enough,- which is,
clearly enough, in the interest of the proprietor. You
enter your name on the book, and, before long, a
man accosts you, who asks if you wish to see the place.
If you say you do, he says it is his business to show it to
you, and that if you like to take his guidance, he will be
ready with a carriage when you say,- without charge
to you.  Meanwhile you can look at the plans, where
you will find the prices of unimproved property marked.
He will own that he shall try to make you see the
place to advantage, that he has a commission on each
sale he makes; but you are of course at-liberty to go
with or without his guidance. Probably you take his
guidance. He drives you up and down well-built avenues and roads, shows you village lots, farm lots, the
general plan of the settlement, and answers your
questions as well. as he can.
You finally think you should like such or such a
place which you have seen, and say you will go home
and ask your wife.  "As you please," says the agent,
"but if you buy at first hand you must take your
chances.   If another purchaser appears to-morrow,
why, we shall sell to him." If you agree to purchase
to-day, favorable terms are given as to times of payment, which extend over four years; but invariably
the conditions which have been alluded to are exacted.
No person buys, unless he expects to become himself
135
ril. 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
a settler. It is evident, from all conversation with
the people of the place, that they have taught themselves to regard any land speculator who comes between the original holder and the inhabitant of the land
as an unendurable nuisance. But they do not regard
Mr. Landis so, I think. Their purchases have made
him rich, and they know it.  But he has identified
himself with the success of the place. He has kept
up the highways at his own charge. The business
of the town is raising fruit. Mr. Landis appoints an
agent who carries all fruit for the settlers to Philadelplhia or New York, sells it, and remits the full proceeds to the producer, without any charge on them.
This is, of course, in theory, false political economy.
But see at how low a charge it encourages the beginnings of the industry. on which the town is to rest.
Uinder a similar policy he has borne the principal part
of the expense of draining three hundred acres of
swamp, from which muck can be drawn for manure,
and has given to each settler the privilege of drawing
for his own use as much as he needed. During the
winter of 1866 - 67 fifty thousand wagon-loads of this
muck were removed thus by the settlers from the
lands of the proprietor for manure for their own farms
and gardens. I was told that the settlers went with
confidence to Mr. Landis as a friend who would pull
industrious men out of difficulties. I see that he is
an officer in almost every one of the innumerable societies.
136
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
In the year 1866 the Agricultural Society paid an aggregate
amount in premiums of two hundred and twelve dollars, while
the Floral Society distributed in premiums twenty-three dollars.
In the same year (1866) Mr-. Landis distributed the following
list of premiums: -
One hundred dollars to be divided in two sums, for the best
essay upon the history of the place; to be determined under the
supervision of the Historical Society.
One hundred dollars, to be divided in two sums, for the best
essay in Prose, and the best in Poetry.
One hundred dollars to the Agricultural and Horticultural
Society, to be distributed as premiums for the best specimens in
Produce.
One hundred dollars to the Agricultural and Horticultural
Society, to be distributed as premiums for the best specimen of
Fruit.
One hundred dollars, to be divided into two prize gold medals
with proper inscriptions, to the two male and female scholars
who shall each be pronounced the most proficient scholar, independent of any other consideration.
One hundred dollars to the two male and female scholars over
fourteen years of age, and not over eighteen years of age, who
shall each be pronounced the most proficient scholar, independent of any other consideration.
One hundred dollars to thle Band of Music, for which they
are to give six public concerts,- three in the open air in summer, and three in winter.
One hundred dollars, in two gold medals, with proper inscriptions, to the persons most graceful in and proficient in gymnastics.
Fifty dollars, in a gold medal, to the lady who cultivated the
best flower-garden with her own hands.
In addition to the premiums offered by the Agri
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
cultural Society in 1867, Mr. Landis offered the following: -
Twenty dollars and certificate for the best acre of broom-corn.
Twenty dollars and certificate for the best acre of field car
rots.
Twenty dollars and certificate for the best acre of field tur
nips.
Twenty dollars for the best kept farm.
Twenty dollars for the best kept orchard, not less than two
acres.
Fifty dollars to the lady who cultivates the best flower-garden with her own hands.
One hundred dollars, to be divided between the two male
and female scholars, not over eighteen years of age, who shall
be pronounced the most proficient scholars.
One hundred dollars, to be divided between the three persons who are the best players on the violin, cornet or bugle, and
flute; to be played at the Fair, and decided by the committee.
Fifty dollars to the lady most proficient in gymnastics.
Fifty dollars to the gentleman most proficient in heavy gymnastics.
I may say, in brief, as a summary of this part of my
observations on Vineland, that it is the only new place
I ever visited where I have found the greater part
of the women satisfied. Pioneer life - the establishing of new communities- comes very hard upon the
women. The men have the excitement; the women
generally have hard work at home without excitement.
The men find their society as they do their daily work.
The women generally are left alone to theirs. But
in Vineland, even when it was but four years old, I
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tIOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND
found intense activity everywhere, and I spoke to
no woman who was not well satisfied with the social
experiment which was undertaken there.
3. It will not unfrequently happen that the purchaser fails to make the improvement to which he is
pledged, and that the land therefore recurs to Mr.
Landis. In this case, when he offers the land again
for sale, he changes the price from what it was, as the
circumstances may justify.  But in general the price
of unimproved land remains unchanged, Mr. Landis
relying for his profits on the continual improvements
of the settlement, which of course quicken sales, as the
population enlarges. What reason he has for such
reliance may be judged from the following record of
progress.
In 1861 one shanty was built on the new village
lot.
In 1862 twenty-five houses were built, a store, and
a school-house.
In 1863 one hundred and fifteen houses were built,
and at the end of the year three hundred and sixtynine purchases of land had been made.
At the end of 1864 six hundred and seventy farms
had been sold; and on the 1st of January, 1865,
nearly two thousand persons attended Mr. Landis's
annual reception. As a token of regard they presented to him "Appleton's Cyclopedia."
In 1865 about two hundred buildings were erected,
and at the end Mr. Landis had sold about fourteen
I.Q, 9
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
hundred properties. Nearly one thousand contracts
to build were made in this year.
At the end of 1867 nearly two thousand farms had
been sold.
The following table, recently published, shows what
various institutions had come into being in this period.
Many of these are doubtless larger on paper than anywhere else, still they represent something.
I. MANUFACTURING INTERESTS.
i. American Building Block Factory.
2. Twelve Stone Quarries.
3. Three Brick Yards.
4. Six Steam Mills, Planing Mills, and three Lumber Yards.
5. Door, Blind, and Sash Factories.
6. Carriage Factories.
7. Saw and Plane Handle Manufactory.
8. Wood-turning and Scroll-sawing Manufactory.
9. Shoe Factory.
10. Pottery and Stone-Ware Manufactory.
11. Straw-sewing Business.
12. Crates and Fruit-Boxes Business.
13. Bookbinding and Paper-Box and Fancy Varieties Busi
ness.
14. Clothing Business.
15. Hoop-Skirt Manufacturing.
16. Button Business.
II. AGRICULTURAL AND KINDRED SOCIETIES.
1. Vineland Agricultural and Horticultural Association.
2. Ladies' Floral Society.
[Strawberry Festivals and annual Fair and Exhibition under
the auspices of the above.]
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
3. Pomological Association.
4. Fruit Growers' Association.
5. Cooperative Association.
6. Landis Avenue Improvement Association.
7. East Vineland Agricultural and Pomological Society.
8. South Vineland Fruit-Growers' Club.
9. Lincoln Mutual Benefit Farmers' Club.
10. North Vineland Agricultural and Horticultural Society.
11. Forest Grove Agricultural Society.
III.'CIIANGE AND BUSINESS FACILITIES.
1. Private Bank.
2. Safe Deposit Company.
3. Mercantile Association.
4. Vineland Loan and Improvement Association.
5. Three Post-Offices, one of which does a far larger business
ban any other in West Jersey.
-
Fr~
IV. TEMPERANCE AND PHYSICAL REFORM.
~ Intoxicating Liquors Voted out of Vineland, July 10, 1863
~ Township law to that effect.
1. Independent Order of Good Templars.
a. Alpha Temple.
b. Liberty, Excelsior, Rising Sun, and Koh-i-noor Lodges.
2. Health Association.
3. Phil-Athletic Club.
4. Base Club.
V. EDUCATIONAL PRIVILEGES.
1. Sixteen District Schools. at convenient distances from al
.arts of the Tract.
2. Four Private Schools.
3. Classical Institute.      is
141 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HIOMES.
4. Young Ladies' and Gentlemen's Academy.
5. Methodist Conference Seminary, now building, 142 feet
long, 56 feet wide at the ends, and 44 feet in the centre.
Height from ground to top of cornice, 50 feet. Lofty French
roof; spacious cupola, porticos, piazzas, balconies, &c.   Style,
- Large Italian, (whatever that may be.)
6. SOCIETIES OF ART AND LEARNING.
a. Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society.
b. Pioneers' Association.
c. Literary Association.
d. The People's Lyceum.
e. Hamilton Mutual Benefit Society.
f  Vineland Library Association.
g. Harmonic Society, Glee Clubs, and Cornet and other
bands, &c.
h. Dramatic Association.
i. Social Science Association.
j. Lectures, exhibitions, festivals, and other varied intellectual
entertainments, periodical and extraordinary.
VI. BENEVOLENT SOCIETIES, &C.
1. A. F. of A. M.: - Masonic Hall.
2. I. O. of 0. F.
3. Philanthropic Loan Association.
VII. PUBLIC HALLS, PARKS, SQUARES, &C.
1. Plum Street Hall.
2. Mechanics' Hall.
3. Union Hall.
4. The Park, covering forty-eight acres.
5. Thirteen Public Squares.
6. Siloam Cemetery, covering fourteen acres, beautifully laid
out.
7. Public Adornments.
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
VIII. RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES.
1. Episcopalian. - Trinity Church (Gothic), on Elmer Street.
2. Presbyterian.- Church (Light Italian), on Landis Avenue.
3. Methodist.- Church (Romanesque), on Landis Avenue.
4. Baptist. - Reed's Hall. Large Church (Byzantine Romanesque), now being erected on Landis Avenue.
5. Free-Will Baptists.
6. Sabbatarian.
7. Baptist Congregational. - Church (Italesque), in South
Vineland.
8. Union.- Church (Italesque), in South Vineland.
9. Adventist.
10. Unitarian.- Church (Plain Gothic,) on Sixth and Elmer
Streets.
11. Friends of Progress. - Plum Street Hall.
12. Catholic.- Church soon to be erected.
13. Young People's Union Christian Association.
IX. MISCELLANEOUS.
1. Journalistic.
a. Two weekly newspapers: "Vineland Weekly" and "Vineland Independent."
b. One bi-weekly: "Vineland Democrat."
c. Two monthly: "Vineland Rural" and "Farmers' Friend."
2. Political.
a. Union League.
b. Grand Army of the Republic.
c. Two Campaign Clubs.
The steadiness of the price of unimproved lots is an
inducement to every resident to persuade his friends and
relatives to come and assist in the enterprise. Almost
all settlers, in this way, begin to feel a Pecuniary inter
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
est in the success of the whole. If a settler and his
wife are pleased, - if they see the rapid advance of the
value of land, given by some improvement, they become
themselves the best advertising agents; they write to
relatives ox friends to show to them the advantages of an
investment here; and thus add to the growth of the
establishment.   They cannot invest in unimproved
lands themselves, without making the required improvements.   But  they can invite their friends to
come and make them, and it is evident, from the rapid
growth of the place, that this is what they have done.
That Mr. Landis is himself kindly regarded by the
people who have come together in the town which he
has founded seems evident from the'direction which a
thousand straws take, blown by the wind of its popular opinion.
4. Early in the settlement of Vineland the people
of the town, led undoubtedly by Mr. Landis, determined, with great unanimity, that they would not
have the sale of intoxicating liquor, or what they call
"saloons," and we call " bar-rooms."  They sent out
of town the first dealer who sold beer to the boys and
wood-choppers, and called a meeting which passed
resolutions, and formed an organization to prevent the
sale of intoxicating liquors. This was July 10, 1863.
They then, by a very curious arrangement, petitioned the Legislature of New Jersey, to pass a special
law precluding the sale of any intoxicating liquor, beer,
or wine, within the limit of Landis township. The
144
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Ar,; or 
HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
Legislature did this by a vote of sixty-three to four,
on the ground, probably, that the people asked for it,
as the State of New Jersey has no such general policy.
Each offence against this law is punishable by a fiine
of fifty dollars or by imprisonment or both.
Of course this peculiarity keeps from Vineland all
settlers who wish to have the privilege of buying and
drinlking liquors in public. There is no restriction on
a man's buying liquors elsewhere and bringing them
to his house to use. But he must not sell them in
Vineland. Mr. Landis, and the great majority of the
people there, are very willing to give up any settlers
whom  they thus lose.   There is, indeed, in  most
new enterprises of land-settlement, no lack of openings for them. The result of the policy is shown succinctly in the following report from the Town Constable and Overseer of the Poor, published in the spring
of 1869.
As Constable anl Overseer of the Poor there are some things
in my department which show so conclusively the favorable
working of the system upon which Vineland is founded, that
I will give the information to the public, so that the facts may
be known and the example of this system followed.
The two principles in Vineland which we recognize as upper.nost are: First, That land shall not be sold to speculators;
second, By the decision of the people that there shall be no
'rog-shops, liquor saloons, licensed taverns, or lager-beer shops.
WVhat is the practical working of these principles? I will
:tate a few facts which are probably unexampled in the United
States, at least.  Though we have a population of ten thousand
145
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i 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
people, for the period of six months no settler or citizen of
Vineland has required relief at my hands as Overseer of the
Poor. Within seventy days there has been only one case,
among what we call the floating population, at the expense of
four dollars.
During the entire year there has been only one indictment,
and that a trifling case of assault and battery among our colored
population.
So few are the fires in Vineland that we have no need of a
fire department. There has only been one house burnt down in
a year, and two slight fires, which were soon put out.
We practically have no debt, and our taxes are only one per
cent on the valuation.
The Police expenses of Vineland amount to seventy-five dollars per year, the sum paid to me, and our poor expenses are a
mere trifle.
I ascribe this remarkable state of things, so nearly approaching the Golden Age, to the industry of our people and the absence
of King Alcohol.
Let me give you, in contrast to this, the state of things in the
town from which I came, in New England. The population of 
the town was 9,500, a little less than Vineland. It maintained
forty liquor-shops. These kept busy a police judge, city marshal,
assistant marshal, four night watchmen, six policemen. Fires
were almost continual. That small place maintained a paid fire
department of four companies, of forty men each, at an expense
of three thousand dollars per annum. I belonged to this depart ment for six years, and the fires averaged about one every two
weeks, and mostly incendiary. The support of the poor cost
two thousand five hundred dollars per annum. The debt of the
township was one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The
condition of things in this New England town is as favorable
in that country as many other places where liquor is sold.
T. T. CORTIS,
Constable and Overseer of Poor of Landis Township
146 
HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
5. The aim of Mr. Landis, from the beginning, has
been to build up a community of which the central
business should be small farming. He has no such
aimns as had the founders of the villages, described in
this volume, who wished to make homes for the laborers of Naguadavick.   His advertisements, his reports,
and his plans all refer to the advantages of the place
for light farming, or market gardening or the raising
of friuit. To this object he has applied himself, - and
in his effort he has succeeded.   Of course a great
many people are dissatisfied, and go away. In the
Vineland papers are long advertisements of improved
property offered for sale.   But this will happen in all
new places. The restless people go to them; the
restless people leave them. People who succeed in
them leave them for a larger field. People who fail
leave them to try other circumstances.  Indeed, I think
I could show that of a given number of persons in a
community, even as settled as is Boston, the chances
are, taking the average of years, that one twelfth will
have removed from that city before one year is over.
Vineland is no Eden or Fairyland.  It requires work,
perhaps as much as any place in the world. But by
a few simple arrangements it is made easy for people
withl small capital to establish themselves there.  It
follows that large numbers  do establish themselves,
and that, of those numbers, a large proportion remains.   The  following letter from  a "comparative
cripple "-a carpenter-farmer -  will show what has
...
, * ~ *
147
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SYBARIS AND OTHEU HOMIES.
been done in a single instance, which seems to be in
no way exceptional.
VINELAND, Landis Avenue, near Main Road, May 6, 1868.
MR. EDITOR,- I have thought that a truthful record of my
farming and "getting along" experience generally in Vineland
would be of some importance, especially as bearing on the prospects of success which have hitherto opened, and still continue
open here, to an industrious person of small capital. To that
effect I hereby treat you to the following" fireside talk," which
can be any day fully verified by the closest investigation.
I have resided in Vineland for four years. I came here with
my family, consisting of my wife, one son, who lost an arm at
Gettysburg, and two grown-up daughters, from Canaan, Maine.
MIy occupation there was the mnanufacturing of bedsteads and
general teaming, with some little farming. This brought me in,
during six years, an average of one hundred dollars clear annually; but I must say that my ambition was but very poorly
satisfied with such small "pay" for very heavy work.
As it happened my daughter came across a "Vineland Rural."
We  all perused it attentively, and, after careful deliberation,
unanimously decided that we would give a fair trial to Vineland,
more on account of our health than anything else, as we had for
some time come to the conclusion that a milder latitude than
that of Maine would be decidedly beneficial to us all. And I
would here say that I was then a comparative cripple, and have
been for a long time constantly suffering from a most annoying
chronic disease, which all people, professional and otherwise,
naturally pronounced irremediable.
Well, I came and saw Vineland, travelled some over the tract,
investigated, thought, pondered, and finally made up my mind
to settle. After paying my debts in Maine, and moving my
family here, I found that we had left, in all, two horses and one
fifty,dollar bill. But we had made up our minds not to feel dis:-': 
148
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L= 
HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
couraged, come what will. I wenfit at once to work with my horses,
stump-pulling, at four dollars per day. After a while, and by pretty
strict economy, I bought the machine, improved it somewhat,
and pulled all the stumps put in my way, "on my own hook."
As we had in the mean time (as well as for some time after) no
house to go into, I hired two rooms at two dollars per week;
bought a small cook-stove and a few other necessary utensils;
"kept house in a small way," and got along pretty comfortably on
the whole. In a short time, comparatively, I was enabled to
pay one fourth cash down, namely, one hundred and twenty five dollars for twenty-five acres of wild land, five acres on Landis
Avenue, oni which I reside, and twenty on Chestnut Avenue.
Then I bought me another machine, continued to stump for my
neighbors and to clear my own land, bought another pair of
horses, and also a pair of mules.  From then till now, I "kept
at it " pretty closely. We all of us lived well enough, got supremely satisfied with the capacities of the soil, raised excellent
truck and fruit, and this day I have all my land cleared, thirteen acres thoroughly stumped, three acres set to grape-vines,
three acres in blackberries, two acres in blackcap raspberries,
half an acre in Philadelphlia raspberries, beside four hundred
and twenty-five apple-trees, three hundred and seventy-six peartrees, twenty peach-trees, with some currant and gooseberry
bushes, all in fine growing condition. From what I have tested
in the cultivation of sweet and Irish potatoes I have determined
to set four acres in each. I also raise every year lots of garden vegetables,- onions, beets, carrots, parsnips, cabbages, &c.,
-and with this garden produce we are highly satisfied.
My dwelling-house, which I intend to enlarge and trim up
generally as we go along, is of wood, sixteen feet by twenty-six
main building, with an L tlhirteen feet by twenty-three, all one
story and a half. The stables are thirty-six by twenty-eight.
And, by the by, this leads me to state that I intend going into raising grass and hay at no distant day, having already been duly
149
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
deliberating on that subject, as a thing which, by proper attention, will pay and pay well in Vineland. The nearest calculation I can make, as to what I have done in Vineland, and what
Vineland has done to me, is simply this: I know full well, from
comparison and the offers which have at times been made to
me, that my land and buildings in their present state, show a
market value of at least Ten Thousand Dollars ($ l 0,000), and
that my machines, teams and farming implements are worth at
least Two Thousand Dollars ($ 2,000), making up the total of
Twelve Thousand Dollars ($ 12,000), which I call my Vineland
Industrial Luck. In fact, we would not by any means sell out
at a much higher figure.
I have never found any place like Vineland for an industrial
man to get along in. Besides, it has proven itself, to my expe rience and knowledge, to be a very healthy place, particularly
in my lung diseases. I am myself, for all my hard work, in a
much better condition than I had been for long years before
moving here. I need not praise our pure, sweet, soft water.
The working season, as compared with that of Maine, is just
this: you can work out from May to October, or November, at
farthest, in that "upper region"; here you can, on a fair aver age, improve your land from February to Christmas, and some times even to New-Year's Day.
My son and daughters have helped me considerably in work;
but they were all well paid. In fact, except a little during my
first summer here, I have had no work whatever done for me
which has not been strictly paid for.
My family has not had one single fit of homesickness since
we arrived. They are so highly satisfied with Vineland that
none of them would leave on any account.  Besides, all my chil  dren have been well married in Vineland.
There are no two ways about it. A man that has a mind to
work, and has some ambition in him, will surely get rich, even if
partially crippled, and quite as poor as I was when commencing
150 
HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
operations here. But if a man will put his little all in a house
to begin with, and will not keep up his industry and ambition, why,
then he deserves not to get rich anywhere, and he has only himself to blame.
Respectfully yours,
CHAS. B. WASHBURNE.
I have said that I know of nothing exceptional in
this case. I do not, however, fail to remark, that the
name of the writer is that of a family, many of the
members of whom, when they have emigrated from
Maine, have done so to some purpose, for themselves
and for their country.
Here is a most condensed statement, from which
I have attempted carefully to prune the enthusiastic
declarations which old Vineland settlers always make,
of how muchl they like the place. It is the history of
a town, which has been made out of nothing in eight
years, without remarkable physical advantages. This
town now contains twelve thousand people, living in
great comfort, none of whom had large means when
they went there. It is a town which evidently is
established, and has remarkable prospects in the
future. To speak of a single point only, which settlers will appreciate, - here are two hundred miles of
well-built roads, in this little tract of say forty thousand
acres.
It seems to owe its growth and beauty and pros
151
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
perity to a few general principles which might be
carried out anywhere. In the statement of a Committee at the Paris Exposition of 1867, which gave
Mr. Landis a medal as the founder of Vineland, these
principles were stated as four.
I. That the land should be laid out with reference
to practical convenience.
II. That it should be laid out with reference to
beauty.
III. That societies for mutual improvement and
entertainment must be formed, and temperance enforced, in order to promote the physical prosperity
and mental improvement and happiness of the people.
For this, also, small farmning and compact population
are considered necessary.
IV. The lands and town lots are sold to actual colonists only.
. From these principles spring the details thus described in the same paper by Mr. Landis:
MATERIAL ELEMENTS.
1. The general plan of laying out the land, by which peculiar
facilities were afforded to industrious people to obtain land for
homesteads. To accomplish this it was laid out in five, ten,
and twenty acre lots and upwards, at a small price, payable in
one, two, three, and four years.
2. The requirements that the houses in the town plot be set
back from the roadside at least twenty feet, and on the farm lots
at least seventy-five feet, in order to afford room for flowers and
shrubbery.
3. Requiring all colonists to plant shade-trees upon the roadside, and to grass the roadsides.
152
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HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND.
4. Requiring colonists to build and settle upon their lands
within one year, and selling no land to other than actual colonists.
5. The introduction of fruit-growing and the general improvement of agriculture and horticulture.
6. The introduction of American manufactures.
7. The making of roads and other improvements at my individual expense.
MORAL ELEMENTS.
1. The introduction of good and convenient schools.
2. Theformation of agricultural and horticultural societies.
3. The formation of church societies, for the encouragement
of morality and religion.
4. The formation of literary societies and libraries.
5. The introduction of a new temperance reform, which, in
its practical operation, appears to do away with all the evils of
intemperance.
To this statement, which includes the secret of the
prosperity of this place, I add the following words
from Mr. Landis himself.
"The reason why many settlements fail is because
the projectors expect to make an easy speculation of
them without much labor and time, and because they
have no definite system which will insure the increase
of the value of lands upon the hands of the purchasers, as well as the general prosperity of the
settlers.
" No prosperous settlement can be made without
the personal application by the proprietor of much
care and labor over a period of many years. He must
7*
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMIES.
expect to make the enterprise an exclusive and legitimate business."
I believe the last statement to embody a most
essential suggestion.
Vineland, in short, is a wilderness settlement in the
heart of civilization. You have not to carry your
family, your furniture, and your stores a week's joirney towards the West. You have not to wait a week
for your letters from the home you have left behind.
I have never forgotten the moment when I first
stepped on the platform of the station there. I was
in a new settlement, four years only from the wilderness. The people were that day grubbing up the
brush where a new church was to stand, in a spot
which but just before had been forest. From the car
there landed with me two families of the settlers. A
woman with one carried a canary-bird.  A man of the
other waited at the baggage-car for a mould of Philadelphia ice-cream. They were new settlers,- acting
like new settlers. But, if they chose, they had canary-birds and ice-cream as well. The incident suggested to me the contrast between Vineland and a
log-cabin in township No. 9, in the seventh range.
154
hit 
s
HOW  THEY LIVE IN
HOW THEY DIE
"THERE is not one word in the paper," said Laura,
as she threw it over to her husband, both of them sitting on the piazza, above the sea at Manchester.  "I
do not see why they choose to print so much trash
from day to day." So she took up Littell's Living
Age, and began reading some of Crabb Robinson's
boy,mots.
For fifteen minutes there was silence.
Bernard laid down the paper in his turn.  "I hardly
see why you say there is nothing in the paper," said
he, looking a little pale and worried. "It is true
there is no battle, and there has been no accident on
the Erie Railroad for three days; but this account of
the death of these poor little children, whose fathers
and mothers loved them as much as you and I love
Ben, is to me as terrible as a battle, and cuts as near
home as a railroad smash."
"Children,-  my dear child," said Laura, pale in
her turn now.  "I saw nothing about children.  What
is it? Whose children were they?"
Bernard read: -
0
BOSTON, AND
THERE.
F,  
STBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
"From Our Own Correspondent.
"The mortality of the infants in Bethlehem, which has made
every Christian mother curse the name of Herod, is more than
equalled in the terrible suffering which I do not venture to describe. The ayuntaeniento appears powerless in the havoc; the
physicians give me no encouragement that the plague is stayed.
With my companions, I have in the last week attended at the
fiuneral rites of seventy-five of these little innocents; and unless
we receive some relief, which we do not anticipate, I shall be
obliged often to send to you the same melancholy information."
"Melancholy information!" said Laura, bitterly.
"Is the man a stone?- is the agony of a baby and is
the wretchedness of the mother only a paragraph in
his string of news?  Where is this, - in Mexico or in
Spain?  Why did not I see it?  Give me the paper!"
And she took it.
"Why, Bernard," she said, after a moment, reproachfully, "you are not making fun of me! You
could not make that up to quiz me!"
" No, darling," said Bernard, sadly, looking over
her shoulder; "I only added the words for the want
of which it missed your eye. There is the story,
enough sadder than I made it, and the story will be
there next week, and next week, if you take pains to
look for it. Only now you know where to look, and
you did not know before. The trimming which ladies
wear on their summer dresses in Wiesbaden is so important that these people can give a quarter-column
to describe that; but the death of seventy-five infants
in their own town is only worth half a line of min
156
t.  
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
ion. I will make it a little clearer for yoa. And
then with his pencil he drew a line around the words,
CHOLERA INFANTUM, 75 in the table which
I copy below: -
CITY MORTALITY.- The deaths in Boston during the week
ending at noon to-day numbered 196,- 102 males, 94 females.
Americans, 149; Irish, 36; English, 3; Scotch, 1; Provinces,
4; Germans, 2. Consumption had 20 victims; cholera infantum, 75; dysentery and marasmus, 11 each; brain diseases, 9;
cancer, 5; diarrhoea and lung disease, 4 each; accident, apoplexy, convulsions, intemperance, peritonitis, and rheumatism, 3
each; diphtheria, debility, infantile and puerperal diseases, typhoid and scarlet fever, old age, premature birth, 2 each; anamia, inflammation of bowels, croup, dropsy, fistula, exposure,
heart disease, measles, necrosis, paralysis, scald, and syphilis, 1
each. American parentage, 73; foreign parentage, 123. -July
31, 1869.
"That means, dearest, that there were seventy-five
households fighting death over the cradles of their
babies last week, and that seventy-five fathers and
seventy-five mothers were defeated, and that life is
hardly worth living to them now, because their little
ones are not. If it were half round the world, and
if it were an ayuntamiento that was puzzled, it would
make a paragraph; but seeing it is only in Suffolk
Street and B Street, it is not of so much consequence."
"0, O" said Laura, through her tears, "do not be
bitter about it,- these people, as you call them, are
no more careless or negligent about them than I am.
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LIE 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
We are so happy here and the children are so well,"
and she looked anxiously at big, bouncing Ben in his
wagon, -" that we forget there are other people in
the world.   Who  are these children?  I read the
deaths in the papers every day, and there have not
been many names of children,- nobody's name that
I knew.
" No, dear," said Bernard again, "you did not
know them, and I did not, and they are not the kind
of people who send their deaths or their marriages to
the newspaper. They are the children of the people,
who stand up to their knees in water, that the stones
may be laid firm that support the causeway on which
is laid the gravel that your and my carriage rolls
smoothly over. They are the people who, withnaked
skins in a temperature of a hundred and ten degrees,
wheel the coal to the retorts that there may be gas'
enough at Selwyn's to-night, if you and I fancy we
should like to go and see Laura Keene in Midsummer.
I do not know," he added after a pause, " how I should
have this cigar in my mouth at this moment if there
were not a good many of such people somewhere.  But,
for all that, their names do not get put into the newspapers when they die, unless, by bad luck, somebody
kills them."
"Do you mean to tell me," said Laura, rousing herself with something almost of agony in her manner,
"that it is sickly in Boston, and that I have not
known it all this time? That Emily is there with all
158
r. 
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
her children, in the midst of an epidemic, and that I
have not known a word about it?  That was not
kind!"
" No, dearest," said Bernard again, more sadly than
before, -" no, dearest.  Emily's children are as safe
as yours, probably safer, so far as human wisdom goes.
There is no epidemic in Chestnut Street, or Mount
Vernon Street, or Beacon Street, or in Worcester
Street, or Chester Square, or on Telegraph Hill, or
on the Highlands.  There is no epidemic anywhere.
Only where people live sixteen families in one house,
with their swill-barrels in their entries and their water
draining on the floors, the chances for life are not as
good as they are at. Emily's house, where each child
has a bath before she goes to bed and a room of its
own to sleep in. All I mean is that these people live
so that it becomes a very easy matter for their children
to die."
Laura sat in silence a few minutes, pushing by
Crabb Robinson and the paper both. Then she said
to Bernard, "Why  is it, Bernard, that I, who have
lived all my life in Boston, know nothing about these
places that these poor children live and die in?"
"Why is it," said he, "that I know nothing about
them, -that I take all I tell you from the printed
report of some poor fellow who  is trying to thorn
up me and the other governors of this country to
do something about it? It is simply the old story;
as somebody said in London,'When the nice peopl)le
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
of Belgravia and the rest of the West End shall be
making their answers at the day of judgment, they
will have some reason to say, "When saw we.tlhee
sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee? "even after it has been explained to them that seeing
one of the least of his brethren is seeing the Lord.
For in Belgravia they do not see St. Giles, and as for
visiting the prisoners, they would find it hard to get a
permit; and as to feeding the hungry, they are afraid
to give them potatoes lest they should turn them into
beer.'
"I don't care for that," said Laura, "I do not mean
to be cynical or satirical about this thing.  I do not
live in Belgravia, and there is no place in Boston that
I dare not go to, if you go with me. I move we go
and see some of the people to-morrow. There is no
danger that it would hurt Ben, is there?"
"Not the slightest, child," said Bernard; "we will   r
go as soon as you like. Will you be ready at the 10.28?"
"Yes, or earlier. I will be ready for the early
train at 8.40. We will drive up to Beverly and take
it there."
So was it that Laura and Bernard made the following observations.
AFTER endless charges to Katy that Ben should be
kept out-doors till he took his nap; and that after his
nap there should be this and that and the other, they
drove to Beverly in time for the early train. It was
160 
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
not more than ten minutes late in Boston; and before
ten o'clock they were on their way to the City Hall.
Laura felt all tile excitement that she felt when she
first entered Paris. For, because she ha(l lived ill
Boston all her life, almost of course, she knew nothing
about it. In Paris she had been taken to see the
Hotel de Ville, and there was a good deal about it in
her journal; in Florence she had, of course, gone to
the Uffizzi; in London she had been taken to Guild
Hall to see Gog and Magog, but it had never occurred
to any one who managed the education of this really
well-trained young lady to take her either to the State
House in Boston, to see the machinery of the government of the State, nor to the City Hall, to see how
that of her native city was carried on. There were
pictures at the Uffizzi, and only some photographs at
the City Hall.
So there was all the interest of novelty to Laura, as
her husband led her up the palatial stairway, and
brought her into the City Registrar's handsome office.
There was a little of the fear that she was out of her
place; but this vanished at once when the Registrar
so courteously received her and her husband, though
they were both strangers to him. Bernard introduced
himself, and said, almost abruptly, being himself perhaps a little nervous, " I am sorry to see you had a
bad week last week." The Registrar understood him
on the moment, spoke of the seventy-five cholera-infantum deaths, and gave to his visitors such detail as
R
161
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
showed to them at once that he was no mere man of
figures, and that his tables had to him  the terrible
interest which Bernard had given to them when he
read to Laura. Thie Registrar stood there and sounded
the trumpet week by week, and that with no uncertain
sound.   If those children died when there was no
necessity, his at least was not the responsibility.
He had at once invited Laura into his airy and elegant office, and had given her a chair. In a moment
more he brought to her husband the large folio, in
which every detail reported to him of the deaths of the
last week was written down. Bernard having gained
his permission to use these tables, explained to Laura
what they were to do.
He had brought with him a little memorandum-book,
which he gave to her, that she might copy upon it each
of the names of the seventy-five little children who
had died from this single disease. She selected these
from all the other deaths. She did not enter the birthplaces of the children, nor the names of their fathers
and mothers, nor the other facts which she found in
the Registry. Her little table, which I will only copy
in part, assumed this aspect:  BOsTON.  CHOLERA INFANTUM.  July 24-July 31, 1869.
No. 1. MaryA. Murphy, 1 y. 7 mos., 22 Davenport Street, Ward 15
" 2. Sarah Eaton, 2 mos., 102 Portland Street,  "  4
3. Edith M. Dillman, 5 mos, 19 Trask Place,    "  13
" 4. Gertie F. Tucker, 6 mos., Eutaw Street,     "   1
" 5. John McLaughlin, 8 mos., 61 Prince Street,  "   3
6. Mary McCarty, 2 mos., 224 Havre Street,     "   1
and so on.
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C.., 
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
While she was copying, Bernard, on a little map of
the city he had with him, was making red crosses with
a pencil, midway in the streets where the deaths occurred. He had finished almost as soon as she had.
Then he returned the Registry to the office, with his
thanks, and they both went down again to the carriage, leaving for some future day an investigation of
the various curiosities of the City Hall.
"Drive to Suffolk Street," said Bernard, as he
entered the carriage; and then to his wife, " Well,
darling, it begins to look real now. How much more
one feels it, when he sees the names of the little
things! "
"Do we ever feel anything, Bernard, till we look at
it piecemeal, or in the detail? Did you notice, - no,
the figures were not on your side of the book, but,
Bernard, almost all of these children are less than a year
old. Now we always thought that the second year,
while they were teething, was the dangerous year for
children. But see there," and she took out her notebook, "in my first twenty-two names there is Will
Sullivan, three years old; one boy of one year, and
one girl of one year and seven months, and all the
others are less than a year." She found afterwards
that on her whole register there were but eight who
had passed twelve months.
"Now," said Bernard, "look at my little map."
And he showed her the map. " The worst street,"
said he, " is Island Street, down on the flats in Rox
163
u 
SYBARIS AND OTHIIER HOEILS.
burT, where the bad smells come from. If you had
ever been there you would wonder that any of them
were left alive. But of old Boston, which is all we
can do to-day, here are the places."
"Queer," said Laura; "they are in two rows, with
a white belt, half a mile wide between."
"Yes-; but that belt, you see, is the business part
of the town, where nobody lives, and Fort Hill, which
they are digging down, and it is the Common and
Beacon Hill. Here at the North End is Copp's Hill;
you see nobody has died there. On the original three
mountains of Boston, on its high lands, not one of our
seventy-five babies lived or died."
Laura studied the list then with some care. There
was not one child on her list from Beacon Street,
Chestnut Street, or Pinckney Street. And it was not
merely hillsides that were exempt. There were no
deaths in Union Park, Worcester Street, Springfield
Street, Chester Square; not one death in any of the
very nice streets where most of her friends lived and
she visited most. And the largest parts, as she had
said, were in two clumps together.
"What are these clumps?" said she.
"This on the north is what used to be called the
Millpond. It was filled up half a century ago. Of
the thirty-seven children whose homes I could find,
seven lived there.
" This on the south is the Church Street district,
joined to the region north of Dover Street. They
164 
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
are trying now to raise the Church Street district. In
this clump there are fifteen children.
"This death in Eliot Street must have been on upland; these in Russell Place and Phillips Place, and
these in Prince Street, Cooper Street, Holden Court,
Langdon Place, and Samoset Place, at the North End.
But of all the other thirty, I think the homes were
where God Almighty made the water flow. But it
is not that so much. It is that the poor wretches have
no air. What was it Sargent used to tell us, that the
science of health was the science of getting people into
pure air. You shall see as soon as we set foot on ithe
ground what chance there is for breathing, night or
day. They have fared well enough in Rutland Street,
Waltham Street, Tremont Street, on Commonwealth
Avenue, Newbury Street, and Marlborough Street,
though these streets are all on made land. These are
well-drained and well-aired streets. Air is what you
want. Now look here."
The carriage stopped at the corner of Dover and
Suffolk Streets, and  the coachman  asked, "What
number?" But Bernard dismissed him, telling Laura
that for what was left they had better go on foot. So
they came to a wooden house, with rooms each side
of the door, two stories high with attics; not so large,
as he bade her observe, as the house they had left in
Manchester.
"I How in the world are you going to get in?" said
Laura, timidly.
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
"0, I shall walk in," said Bernard, and hlie did,
the door being wide open. He tapped at the first
door, and immediately a stout Irishwoman appeared,
to whom Bernard addressed himself. The moment
there was any evidence of conversation, she was joined
by another and another.
Bernard whipped out a little note-book and pencil.
"Can you tell me, ma'am, how many families there
are on this floor?"
"There's four, sir, live in here, and this woman
lives in the room opposite."
"And how many children are there?"
" I've got one girl, and Mrs. McDaniel here, she
has two boys, and Mrs. McEna she has one girl and
two boys, and Mrs. Liener here, she has one boy,"
and Mrs. Liener blushed and was pleased and confirmed
the statement.  Bernard asked if they had all been
vaccinated, and was assured they had, with the additional assurance that the McDaniel boys were men
grown. Meanwhile Laura availed herself of the freedom of a free country to look into the rooms right
and left of her which the interlocutors had left open
that they might enjoy the colloquy.
Up stairs then proceeded Bernard, Laura following.
The first door gave no answer to his tap, the second
was wide open, and Laura saw a woman lying on the
bed, not asleep, however. Laura took the census
here, -there was this woman, who had two boys,
Mirs. O'Brien, who had one girl, and Jerry Regan,
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HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
who had no children, who occupied the four rooms on
this floor.  Up stairs in the attics were only the McDonalds (other McDonalds from the first floor), and
the Farnums, each with one boy. Here were nine
families, but none of them were named K****.
So Bernard asked the second Mrs. McDonald if
there were not a little child named K***** who died
here last week.
" 0, that, sir, was in the basement," said Mrs.
McDonald.   And  it proved that they had let the
basement go by, not suspecting that there was any.
Thus far the twelve rooms, of which they had inspected eight, were almost exactly alike, but that four
were attics. Rooms nearly square and about ten feet
by twelve.  Some of them  had two bedsteads in,
always with high cumbrous head and foot boards,
while in one, as Laura observed, which had a cookingstove, there was no bedstead. Some of them were
tolerably neat, - one, ill which the woman was lying
down, hopelessly dirty.  Of the children spoken of,
they had only seen one.  He was the junior McDonald, in the attic, who, under the auspices of Mrs. McDonald and Mrs. Farnum, was walking his first steps,
and crowed and laughed at the visitors very prettily.
All the other children had sought wider quarters.
From this inspection they went down the narrow
stairways, into what was called the basement. It was
almost wholly below the street, and in no way differed from what is usually called a cellar. Here they
167 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
found Mr. Kellarin and Mrs. West, but still no Mrs.
K*****.  The floor of the entry was wet from the
overrunning of the water-faucet which supplied the
house, and all the region was damp, as a cellar is apt
to be which is much below the tide level. Bernard
asked Mr. Kellarin, who seemed to be rather cross,
if Mrs. K***** did not live here. "No, -no such
woman here!"
"But did not a little child die here last week?"
"0 yes,- that was in the back room; no one is
there now. She has moved next door."
"Thank God for that," said Laura to her husband,
as they crossed the wretched alley. " Nothing can
be worse than where she was."
True enough.  That floor was wet from the slop of
the water. The air was wet, because the sun never
kissed it. The rooms were so chilly and so dark!
And the smell!
Across the alley was a little brown house about as
big as the coachman's house at Manchester.  It was
every way nicer than that they had left, though so
small. Here poor Mrs. K***** came to meet them
at the first door. Laura felt that it was she, she
looked so sad and so sick. Just a black rag of some
kind she had put around her, and when Laura spoke
to her kindly and asked about her little boy, and the
poor woman told her it was her only child, and that
he was sick such a little while, the two women were
sisters. The four families in this house were all
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HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
young. K*****, Leonard, Driscoll, Agin, with their
wives, -  they all had but two boys and one girl,
only seven people to live in four rooms, which if you
had put them together would have made one of
twenty feet square.
In the house opposite, which they had visited first,
were thirty-one persons in fourteen so-called rooms.
What had been the yard of this house had been taken
up by another tenement building.
I must not attempt to tell in such detail of each of
the visits which Laura made this busy morning. Bernard told her, as they drove back to the train at ten
o'clock, that she had knocked off more calls in her
three hours than he ever did in his most successful
work of his most successful New-Year's Day of his
bachelor life in New  York.  "You  have added to
your visiting list," said he, "as nearly as I can make
it up at this mnoment, thirteen Mrs. Flahertys and
twelve gentlemen of that name,- eleven Mrs. Sullivans,- six Mrs. Feenans, and their husbands,three Mrs. MeLanes and two Mrs. MeTanes, - besides miscellaneous names not to be mentioned."
"Well," replied Laura, stoutly, "I wish all my
other friends were as cordial to me as these good women have been, - I wish they would be half as well
employed when I called on them,- and I wish, on the
whole, that they made as much of their advantages
as these people do of what we cannot call their advantages."
8
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SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
It is certainly true, that in many instances the instinctive vigor of a woman, and that Divine Principle
which has given to a wife the establishment and the
comfort of a home, - which among this class of persons is a principle still respected and accepted,sustain the women who are forced to live in these
crowded cells with their husbands and children, so
that they often retain decency, order, and even neatness, where one would say it is impossible. Sweetness of air, freshness, or cheerfulness, it is, of course,
wholly beyond their power to give.
Laura and Bernard had been snubbed scarcely anywhere. Once, when Laura was the spokeswoman,
and asked, timidly, "Does not Mrs. Weiss live here?"
she got a very sharp "No."  When poor Laura varied
her question, the answer was, " No, she died here ";
and Laura, who had only taken note of children's
death on her memorandum-book, found that mother
and child had died together. The landlady, to whom
she was talking, knew nothing of her tenants, - or
pretended to know nothing, - and made haste to
usher her guests out of the wretched grocer-shop,
where, if they had asked for bad whiskey, they would
have had good chance for more cordial welcome.
They called at one house which always reminds me,
as I go to my train, of the front of a menagerie cage,
where the little monkeys may be seen among a few of
larger growth, performing behind It is four stories
high, and has no entry or hall in it, every room open
170
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HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
ing by its one door on the four front piazzas which
rise above each other. Each room has, in the rear,
two closets only lighted from the doors, one of which
may be eight feet square; the other is narrower. The
front room, which opens on the piazza, is fifteen by
thirteen perhaps.   This is a suite for a family.  And
any day you pass you may see the children of forty
such families disporting themselves on the piazzas.
The reason why there are no windows in the back
wall is that there is another similar building, which
has been squeezed in there in a space so narrow that it
is not nine feet from the windows and doors to the
wall opposite, -and, of that nine feet, four or five
must be given to the piazza.  Stop on your way down
Lincoln Street, Mr. Alderman, and look at that building;  do not be satisfied with the Lincoln  Street
front, but try the other front, and guess what are the
chances for life there.  As the building is arranged, it
will "accommodate," I believe, sixty families,- nearly as many human beings as would be permitted by
the United States statute on an emigrant vessel of the
same size.   Yet on the emigrant vessel there are
windsails to pump out the air,- there is the certainty
of fresh air on deck, and the best of it. And there,
at the worst, the imprisonment is but for a few weeks.
But, in this anchored hell, the child who is born must
live five years before he has wit enough and strength
enough to run away.
Here are Bernard's notes on the houses where he
171
.iI 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
and his wife first called. I have only described the
first tenement of the first two.
13 EMERALD STREET. Two tenement-houses adjoining each
other. There are thirteen families in one and ten in the other.
The water-pipes are put up in the most shameful manner. They
must of necessity freeze up at the very first frost.  Only one
faucet for each tenement-house, - i. e. twenty-thlree families
have two faucets to draw from. There is no way of getting to
the faucet without wading in dirty water, the drains being all
out of order.  Two of the most filthy privies entirely open for
these twenty-three families,- so much out of repair as to be
dangerous to enter. -The boards are broken away, so that you
can see into the vaults.  The only reason why the people in the
houses are not all dead is because they keep their own places
much cleaner than anybody could naturally expect. Miserable
places, out of repair, the plastering off the walls and ceilings,
no chance to whitewash, for there is no place to whitewash in
many of the rooms.
TENEMENT-HOUSE 73 MIDDLESEX STREET.  Sixteen families live in this house. The staircase is so narrow and dark that it
is a wonder how the children, with whom  it abounds, are not
daily injured.  In the event of a fire it might be that not one of
the families up stairs could be saved.   There is very fair accommodation here for water. No water-closets, however, and
but one privy in four compartments for the whole sixteen fanfilies. The passages below are in a filthy condition, owing to
unsuitable arrangements for the refuse.
Their whole inspection was on the southern side of
the white stripe across Bernard's map. And they had
not time that day to go to Island Street. Once or
twice they came upon nice, cheerful houses, where
Laura said the people had good friends, she was sure,
172
t
r,  
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
and she would not offer her sympathy.   But there
were many of these poor Irishwomen who were glad
of her visit, and with whom she will keep up her
visiting acquaintance long.
"I know," said Laura, as they rode home, " that you
hate to be constantly making laws, and controlling people by laws, and I know how your father says that the
best government is that which governs least; but I
should think something might be done to give such
people as these a better chance."
"My dear," said Bernard, "our system in Massachusetts about laws is that of Ensign Stebbins. We
take great pains about making the laws, and we take
equal pains to let them alone when we have made
them." And Bernard took from his pocket a little
blue pamphlet which contained the tenement law of
1868.
" How many of these houses had a fire-escape?
Did you notice? " said he.
" What is a fire-escape?" replied Laura.  "Did
any of them have one?"
"Not that I saw," said Bernard.  " But here is the
act:'Every such house shall have a fire-escape.'
That is Section 3. From Section 4 I learn that these
water-closets in Emerald and Middlesex Streets must
have been'approved by the Board of Health.' From
Section 6 that that basement in Emerald Street could
not have been occupied'without a permit from the
Board of Health'; nor at all unless it was' perfectly
173
I'..
e 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
drained.' From Section 8 I learn that all these houses
must' have suitable conveniences for garbage,' and so
on, and so on.
"How many times have you noticed the owners'
names to-day?"
"Not once," stared Laura.
"Nor I.  But listen:' Every tenement or lodging
house shall have legibly posted or painted on the wall
or door in the entry the name and address of the
owner,' - that is the law, dear Poi tia. And here is
the law about whitewash:' Every house thus occupied shall be whitewashed every April and October.'
My dear, the law might have been made for Svbaris.
But the only time I ever heard of a prosecution
under it, an ex-mayor defended the landlord, knew
how to rip up the indictment, and that was the end
of that. 0, there is law enough, dear child."
"Well, what can we do?'" persisted Laura.
"Do, child?  We can make public opinion.  The
first time Dr. Shurtleff asks you to go to ride, ask himn
to stop and call with you on some friends of yours in tihe
Crystal Palace. That is the best thing you can do."
But, for himself, Bernard sent me his observations,
and I determined to print them.
I CONFESS that I was surprised, when I first looked
over this list of seventy-five deaths by cholera infantum
in the last week of July, to see that, of the whole num
174
II. 
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
ber, twelve were in the three wards which are mnade
of the territory of Roxbury. It seemed curious, at
first sight, that the mortality in a so-called country
town, just now annexed to the compact city, should be
even larger in proportion to the population than that
of the more compact section. But a moment's examination of the localities removed my surprise. These
eleven deaths were all of them in houses on the low,
flat land, which would once have been called saltmarsh, which ought, perhaps, never to have been built
upon at all, without such elevation of the streets as
should give proper drainage to the houses. All of
them but two or three proved, on inquiry, to be in tenement-houses of the most crowded character.
My first visit among them was in Island Street; it
is not yet accepted by the city, which takes no responsibility for its drainage or its grading.  It will be known
by residents in Boston as the street which leads to the
so-called "Island," where were thie odious bone-burning
establishments.  Here twin children had died in a hut,
standing by itself, worth its annual rental perhaps, which
I think would be considered in any comfortable country
town in New England unfit for the residence of men,
but which here was regarded by its occupants as particularly desirable because they were alone. Two of
the other deaths were in Adamns Street and Chadwick
Street, which, though they run down upon the flats,
are occupied by a class of tenements much superior to
the others.  I visited  every tenement in Phoenix
175 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
Place, which is a fair enough illustration, in its melancholy uniformity, of the whole class. It is a narrow
court of eight houses, - four on each side. They are
lightly built of wood, all on the same plan. The two
end houses have each a shop in one side. All the
houses are parted in the middle by an entry with a
staircase; - on each side of this entry is a " suite" of
rooms, always two. In no case did I find any family
occupying more than these two rooms. Deducting the
shops, then, here were thirty tenements, - each of two
rooms, - and these were occupied by thirty families,
of which the smallest was a man and his wife,- the
largest a man and his wife with eight children. The
population was sixty adults and sixty-five children in
the sixty rooms, each of which was perhaps twelve
feet square. The summer atmosphere of these places
is odious, but I believe it is better than the winter
atmosphere. The houses have the great advantage of
standing separately from each other, so as to admit of
end windows, and ventilation between every series
of four tenements. But the lots are so small that all
privy arrangements and deposits of offal are horribly
near the open windows. The wretched way in which
a woman in such a house tells you that her baby died
yesterday, as if the child died of course, and she never
ought to have expected that it would live, is a sad
enough intimation that the tenants themselves know
tile risk they are running.
I have not cared to go into detail, however. My
176
tr 
HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON.
object is accomplished in calling attention to the single
fact that of these eleven deaths in Roxbury, by cholera infantum, not one took place on the proper upland.
In the mortality of the same week in the peninsula of
old Boston, out of thirty-eight such deaths, none took
place on either of the hills, and only eight on land
which had never been flowed over by the sea.
In the epidemic among children in the summer of
1864 one thousand children of less than five years of
age died in Boston in one hundred days. I suppose
that of the Boston people who read these pages not
one in ten knows that there was any such epidemic.
It did not rage among the children of people who read
Fields and Osgood's books; it raged in such places as I
have been describing.
If the deaths had been proportional among all classes of society, at least ten of these deaths would have
taken away infants from the parish of which I am a
minister, which embraces about one per cent of the
population of the city.
But that is a body of people in comfortable circumstances, living in comfortable homes. And, in fact, in
that epidemic not one of our children died. So untrue is that
"Pallida mors Tquo pulsat pede pauperumn tabernas regumque
turres." *
* "Pale death steps on with equal step; although
A hut or palace is the scene of woe."
177
I
8 *
L 
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.
IN addition to the statement I have made, as to the
houses in which the greater part of the laboring men
of Boston live with their fanmilies at the present moment, I am tempted to add some facts as to the details
of the arrangements which might be made for them.
They might all own their own houses,- as so many
of the laboring men do in our smaller cities, - and
yet, at the same timne, follow up their daily work in
the very heart of Boston. To illustrate this possibility,
I have published here the ideal sketch of the life of
the suburbs of Naguadavick.   To show some of the
detail in practice, I have published the historical sketch
of Vineland and its neighborhood. The object of this
volume is not fulfilled, unless it shows how similar arrangements may be carried out for the laboring men
of Boston.
I know very well that many persons suppose that
such arrangements are made thoroughly well now.
They know that there are a great many pretty villages
around Boston, from which crowded special trains run
in every morning, and to which they return at night.
And people who will read this book will be apt to
r.t
I 
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.
say that anybody who wants to live in Melrose or
Newton or Hyde Park now can do so; that there
needs no urging either of capitalist or of laborer;
that the residence of laboring men in the suburbs is a
thing which will settle itself, and may be left to settle
itself.
I am to reply, then, to this comfortable laissez faire
notion first of all. I have to say, that, as matter of fact,
it is not true that what we call, popularly, the laboring men and women of Boston live in any considerable numbers in the suburbs reached by railway.
Many of them  live in Charlestown,  Roxbury, and
South Boston, where they can use the short lines of
street cars to go to their morning work. But this number, even, is inconsiderable, compared with the large
number of day-laborers needed for the day's work of
the city. of the classes of skilled workmen, of whom
we do not speak as day-laborers, a considerable proportion live in the suburbs accessible by steam,- the
places where they can obtain freehold.   Mechanics,
clerks in retail or wholesale stores, bankers' clerks,
and other persons whose incomes are a little above the
wages of the day-laborer, so called, avail themselves
freely of the relief which even in their present
management the steam railroads give, and bring up
their children thus, -where only, perhaps, children
should be brought up, -in the country. But the number even of these who are thus provided for is much
smaller than could be wished; and the arrangements
179
1fi 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
in many regards are cumbrous and inconvenient.
Granting, however, that they can take care of themselves, there is left the much larger class of women
who work in shops or stores, and the class, yet larger,
of men who work as porters, or stevedores, or as hodcarriers, or at other hard labor in building or in factories, - who live, as they suppose from necessity, in
such hired tenements as have been described. They
no more think of the possibility of their purchasing
their own homes than they think of translating the
Hebrew Bible. Of one hundred and thirty sewingwomen engaged at Jordan and Marsh's sewing-rooms,
September 7, 1869, ninety-three lived in Boston
proper, twenty-three in South Boston and East Boston, and only fourteen out of town. Of eighty-two
the same day at work at Hiovey & Co.'s, forty-five
lived in Boston proper, twenty-seven in South Boston and East Boston, and only ten out of town.
I have to say, next, that emigration, though it be only
emigration for ten miles, has, in fact, never thriven in
this world, unless it has been well led. Unless; at one
or another period of the emigration, the way has been
smoothed and prepared by men of intelligence, and by
the union of the several interests engaged, no emigration has ever gone forward prosperously. The people
of this country are utterly indifferent to what they
owe to the men who contrived the magnificent system
of the Land Laws of the United States, which of
themselves give exactly the encouragement to the
180
I
i  
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.
Western emigrant that I would secure for the emigrant whom I would lead from Lucas Street into Dorchester to-day.  And, for an instance on the other
side, the reason that the South, eager for emigration
to-day, cannot lure the laboring men it needs into its
waste fields by all its magnificent promises, is because
no set of men care enough for that wave of civilization
to put themselves humanely and deliberately at work,
on a large scale, for the organization of emigration
southward.
In the old communities of Greece this thing was
better understood. To lead a colony, and thus to establish a state, was considered by Miltiades, and Themistocles, and Alcibiades, and Lysias, and Isocrates,
not to name a hundred others,- as being an honor as
great as man could claim. I wish there were more
of such ambition among the young men of spirit, of
fortune, or of education, whom I meet every day,
wondering and even asking what America has for
them to do, now that the war is over. I remember
that Lord Bacon classed the founders of cities among
the first of men.
As the people of Naguadavick found,- in the ex
perience of their history contained in this volume, -
the enterprise of establishing a "6 suburb of ease" for
laboring men near a great city requires the co-operation of three sets of people, who are wholly unused
to act together.  It requires the co-operation of the 
owner of land, of the managers of the railway, and 
181 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
of the settlers who are to buy their homes. Neither
of these will move, if he have not confidence in the
other.
1. The owner of the land must be willing to devote from six hundred to a thousand acres within half
an hour's ride by steam of the city to the enterprise.
He must look for sure but not exorbitant profits, to
be secured within ten years.
2. The railroad managers must look to the growing up of traffic where at beginning there is absolutely
nothing; and, because that traffic is to be all their
own, they must at the outset provide for it much
more accommodation than its present returns will warrant. It is at this point, as I believe, that most such
plans break down. The companies are willing to sell
their tickets cheap enough, but they are not willing to
run their trains at the outset often enough or fast
enough. They want the village to exist before they
grant the trains. But nobody will go to the village
until they grant the trains.
3. No one laboring man will bell the cat in such
an enterprise. No one will go alone, - nor will ten
families go alone. The provisions must be generous
enough to induce at once general attention among
large numbers of people, or they will none of. them
move. The reasons for their hesitation are obvious.
I am glad to believe that at the present time there
are good reasons for expecting the frank and generous co-operation of all these classes in the neighbor
182
t 
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.
hood of Boston, upon the true principles which may
insure success. The questions connected with such
emigration have been discussed more than any others
at the meetings of the Suffolk Union for Christian
Work. They never came up for discussion there, but
some intelligent man, who had watched the present
difficulties, brought forward some important contribution towards their solution. The lines of railway running from Boston are so many, and pass through country so favorable for the purposes proposed, that every
thoughtful traveller sees the possibility of relieving
the city by colonies in its neighborhood.   Fortunately
these railways are in the management of men who,
in general, understand that their interests and the interests of the public are identical in these matters.
And the present condition of the worst tenementhouses in Boston is such as to compel the attention of
laboring men and their families to any well-considered
arrangements  for their relief.  Indeed, if the trdde
and manufacture of Boston are to enlarge in the next
twenty years in the same proportion as in the last
twenty, some systematic provision of healthy homes
for her laboring men and women is the very first necessity of all.
I have attempted in this volume to show that that
provision may be made by a system which shall involve the following details:  I. A village site of say a thousand acres.
II. This must be generously laid out by the pro
183
I.: 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
prietors, who must maintain on the spot active agents,
to care for the proper condition of the town till it can
go alone.
1. These agents must keep the roads in condition.
2. They must see that drainage is systematically
cared for.
3. In some localities it may be necessary that the
first owners sink the wells.
4. All negotiations with the railroads must, at the
outset, be made by the first owners.
III. The land should be divided, for our purpose near
Boston, into lots of about 10,000, 20,000, and 40,000
feet, to provide for settlers of various resources.  These
lots should be offered for sale on easy terms, with great
encouragement, however, for cash payments.   Mr.
Landis requires one fourth down, and the remainder
in three payments in three successive years. The
Illinois railroads require one tenth down, and the re nainder in nine payments in nine successive years.
Probably the first arrangement is the better for our
purpose here.
The price of lots having been fixed at the outset, so
as to give a handsome profit to the original landholder,
should never be changed by him.
All sales should be made on condition of consider  able improvements to be made within twelve months.
This is necessary to assure the first settlers of neigh  bors and society, and to prevent land speculation.
IV. The co-operation of the original holders with
184
l1. 
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.
the settlers in all enterprises of social improvement,
education, and amusement must be heartily and intelligently granted.
V. The railroad companies, looking to the steady
growth of such a village, must provide from the first,
and must assure, trains of cars which will place the
laboring man at his work in Boston at seven in summer and at eight in winter.
It has been proposed by Mr. Quincy, who has taken so
cordial an interest in such plans, that most of these companies, for the foundation of a new village in the view
here advocated, shall give a free ticket for five years to
each head of a family who will build a house in such
a town. Then rely on the travel of the members of
his family, and of other persons, for their profit. This
seems to me honorable, simple, and satisfactory. I
should ask nothing more in addition but careful study
of the hours of trains required by laboring men, and
some security for their permanence.
As to the methods by which such men are to get
the money with which to build their houses, I will
add a few words; but I do not believe the difficulty
in the business will be found there.
Mr. Quincy has published in the daily journals
details of the co-operative house-building systems of
Philadelphia and of England, which have worked so
satisfactorily that I need only refer readers who are
interested to them.*
* See, for one of such plans, Appendix A.
185 
SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
I am assured that at Hyde Park, near Boston, the
public offer is made by responsible parties, that they
will lend to any person who proposes to build there
three thousand dollars for that purpose, if he invest,
beside, three hundred dollars of his own, and pledge
the whole to them.  They are so confident of the increase of the value of real property in that town, that
they are ready to lend on mortgage of real estate,
with so small a margin, at the present time. This is
an illustration of the facilities offered in such places.
In the German savings-banks there is a system
which carries out with great simplicity the co-operative idea.   The managers of those banks discount
regularly to their depositors, on a regulation universally understood. It is this: any depositor who can
get two fellow-depositors to indorse for him can
obtain a discount from the savings-bank, which thus
becomes, not a bank of deposit for small sums only,
but a bank of discount for small sums. In the town
of Worcester, to which I have already alluded in these
pages, its prosperity is largely due to the readiness
with which the capitalists of the town have assisted
the young mechanics and laborers in establishing themselves. It is this readiness to give credit on fair terms
which has done so much to make that a place of FiREEIHOLD.
The  details of the German system are given by
Mr. Godkin in his valuable paper published in the
North American Review two years ago.
186
tk 
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.
I apprehend, therefore, that working men and working women will have no real difficulty in building
houses for themselves or in buying houses ready built,
so soon as the places are arranged where these houses
shall stand. The social condition might return of the
agricultural New-England town of two generations
ago, in which a rented house was an exception to the
general rule and habit of the community. The large
rents which laboring men are now accustomed to pay
have trained their families in habits of economy which
will make it very easy for them to obtain dwellings of
their own, as soon as these dwellings are offered to
them. For the cells which have been described on
page 171 the weekly rent is two dollars for one
room and the two dark closets adjoining. This is
about the lowest rent which any laboring man with a
family pays for a home in Boston. Most of them pay
more.  It is easy to see how fast an annual payment of
only one hundred and four dollars a year will eat up the
principal and the interest of such a home as such a
man may build for himself the moment land is offered
him  at a fair price.  And the passion for Freehold
is not extinguished among these people by a generatioil or more of tenant life.  It is pleasant to conceive
the ready response they would make to a programme
like this, put in their way in the columns of their
friends, the Boston Hlerald or Boston Pilot, handed
into their doors on a broadside, or posted at the street
corners.
187
11. 
BUY YOURSELF A HOME!
One Hundred neat Houses are for sale in the new
Village of
MONTGOMERY,
ONLY TWENTY MINUTES'. RDE FROM BOSTON! I
By a weekly payment of
ONLY THREE DOLLARS,
any man may own, in six years' time, a pretty
House and a Garden
3M gm                         EIly
Large deductions can be made to purchasers
who have cash in hand.
Free Railroad Ticket for Five Years!
4            0
i 
HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS.
An announcement like this would show very soon
that the laboring class of people are not without reserved funds to draw upon, if they have only a simple
and safe way to place them in real estate for their own
uses.
189
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.11 
APPENDIX.
I:
LI  
APPENDIX.
A.
TaE Constitution of a Co-operative Society for Building, which has worked well in Philadelphia, is explained in
the following letters from IMr. Quincy and Mr. Davis.
MODERATE HOUSES FOR MODERATE MEANS.
I would now call your attention to a communication
sent to me by Edward AI. Davis, of Philadelphia, describing the workings of an association of which he is president,
calculated to aid the frugal and industrious in securing
homes now payable out of fqture earnings:
It is called a Building Association, but should be called a
"Co-operative Deposit and Loan Company," as it does not have
homes built, but does receive and loan money.
There are 74 members and 1,000 shares. None of the officers
receive pay, except the secretary, and he only $ 2 a month.
The treasurer gives bonds for $ 1,000, but seldom has over $ 50
to $100 on hand, as the money is generally loaned the same
night it is paid in to the association. We meet in a schoolhouse and have no rent to pay. Fuel and a janitor costs us
about $15 a year. It is conducted for the benefit of the members, and not for the benefit of the officers, as is the case with
many loan associations.
The receipts of the association are:  1st. "Dues" of members, consisting of fifty cents a share, payable monthly.
9
il:
il 
APPENDIX.
2d. Fines of five cents a share each month as penalty for failure to pay punctually.
3d. Premiums on money loaned paid by members who borrow.
4th. Interest received monthly  at the rate of six per cent
per annum on money loaned. When from these sources the
shares are worth $100 each, a distribution is made in the proportion in which the stock is held, and the association comes to
an end.
Only members can borrow money. Each one can borrow
S 100 for each and every share, but not over $ 1,500 at one time.
The borrower must give to the association as security a first
mortgage on real estate for the amount borrowed, and if there
are buildings, they must be insured and the policy transferred
to the association. The borrower must also transfer the stock
on which he borrows; must pay the premium cash; pay his
dues and interest punctually, and all expenses of conveyancing.
Our association was started twenty4-two months since. As
fifty cents each month has been paid on each share, the amount
paid in is $1 1, but the shares are worth $ 14.10; the diffcrence
has been made out of premium, interest, and fines.  Judging
from the operations of other similar associations, by the time
$ 60 has been paid in by members as "monthly dues," the shlares
will be worth $ 100 each; that is, the association will hold claims
on the real estate of the members, and cash on hand, amounting to $ 100,000.
The loans are made by the president, stating that there are
say $ 500 in the treasury, but that he will sell' $ 1,500 if it is
wanted, payable out of the firist money in the treasury.  Some one
is willing to pay five per cent premium for it, another eight per
cent, others more, and so on until it reaches say twenty per cent.
The buyer has fifteen shares, and says he will take the $1,500.
He gives security for $1,500, and pays interest monthly on the
$ 1,500, but the premium of $ 300 is deducted and he gets only
$1,200 in money.  His monthly dues are $ 7.50 and his.inter
194
i,
4r 
APPENDIX.
est $ 7.50. HIe therefore pays $ 15 a month until the shares are
worth on-the books $ 100; then his mortgage is handed back,
marked paid, his policy retransferred, and his home is clear. This
occurs at the same time necessarily with every borrower, for it is
not regulated by what he pays for his money, or when he gets it,
but by the period when the shares amount to $100. When they
do all the borrowers are out of debt. If there is cash on hand
it belongs to those who have not borrowed, and will be just $ 100
a share for them.
The time that it takes for a society to "run out," as it is called,
depends mainly on the premiums paid. If they are low the period is over ten years. If they could average twenty per cent
the period would be much shorter. Money borrowed in the first
year of the association at twenty-five per cent premium does
not cost the borrower quite eight per cent per annum. Then
he has these great advantages; he can borrow an amount almost equal to the cost of his property; can return it in small
sums, and in addition participate in the profits made by the
association. It is the true mode of getting a home out of future
earnings. Being the prospective owier of the place occupied,
all the improvements inure to him. This system makes our
small houses more tastily and insures their being kept in better
order, because a home that is owned is more cared for than one
that is rented. I think that what are called building associations contribute much more towards securing homes to our mechafics and laboring people than our ground-rent system.
A person paying $15 a month by this system at the end of
about ten years has his house clear, but if he pays the $15 as
rent, at the end of the ten years the landlord has the rent and
the house too.
To carry out a plan like this it is necessary at first that
some philanthropic persons in whom the people have confidence should, like Mr. Davis, be willing gratuitously to
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devote a few hours every month to the management of such
an organization. As in the case of savings-banks, the success of one might lead to results in the highest degree beneficial both to the public and individuals.
JOSIAH QUINCY.
B.
LAW FOR REGULATION OF TENEMENT-HOUSES.
When the sketch of Life in Boston was published in the
Boston Advertiser, I was sorry to find that some of the readers
supposed the allusion to the Tenement Law was ironical; and
that I only suggested what law there should be.
Our Tenement Law is very well drawn up, based on the Law
of the State of New York, which was suggested by the experience of the Board of Health of the city of New York. In the
hope that it may be of use to persons interested in this subject
in other cities, I copy it in fuill here.
[CHIIAP. 281.]
AN ACT for the regulation of Tenement and Lodging Houses
in the City of Boston.
Be it enacted, etc., as follows: -
SECTION 1. From and after the first day of July, in the
year eighteen hundred and sixty-eight, no house, building,
or portion thereof, in the City of Boston, then used, occupied, leased, or rented for a tenement or lodging house,
shall continue to be so used, occupied, leased, or rented, unless the same, onil the requisition of the Board of Health,
shall conform in its construction and appurtenances to the
provisions of this act.
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SECT. 2. Every house, building, or portion thereof, in the
City of Boston, designed to be used, occupied, leased, or
rented, or which is used, occupied, leased, or rented for a
tenement or lodging house, shall have in every room which
is occupied as a sleeping-room, and which does not commu nicate directly with the external air, a ventilating or tran som window, having an opening or area of three square
feet, over the door leading into and connected with the ad joining rooih, if such adjoining room communicates with the
external air; and also a ventilating or transom window, of
the same opening or area, communicating with the entry
or hall of the house, or where this is, from the relative
situations of the rooms, impracticable, such last-mentioned
ventilating or transom window shall communicate with an
adjoining room that itself communicates with the entry or
hall. Every such house or building shall have in the roof,
at the top of the hall, an adequate and proper ventilator,
of a form approved by the Board of Health or the superintendent.
SECT. 3. Every such house shall be provided with a proper
fre-escape, or means of escape in case of fre, to be approved
by the stperintendent of the Board of Health.
SECT. 4. The roof of every such house shall be kept in
good repair and so as not to leak, and all rain-water shall
be so drained or conveyed therefrom as to prevent its dripping on the ground or causing dampness in the walls, yard,
or area. All stairs shall be provided with proper balusters
or railings, and shall be kept in good repair.
SECT. 5. Every such building shall be provided with
good and sufficient water-closets or privies, of a construction
approved by the Board of Health, and shall have proper
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doors, traps, soil-pans, and other suitable works and arrangements so far as may be necessary to insure the efficient
operation thereof.  Such water-closets or privies shall not
be less in number than one to every twenty occupants of
said house; but water-closets and privies may be used in
common by the occupants of any two or more houses: provided, the access is convenient and direct; and provided,
the number of occupants in the houses for which they are
provided shall not exceed the proportion above required for
every privy or water-closet. Every such house situated
upon a lot on A street in which there is a sewer, shall have
the water-closets or privies furnished with a proper connection with the sewer, which connection shall be in all its
parts adequate for the purpose, so as to permit entirely
and freely to pass whatever enters the same. Such connection with the sewer shall be of a form approved by the
Board of Health or superintendent, and all such water-closets
and vaults shall be provided with the proper traps, and connected with the house-sewer by a proper tight pipe, and
shall be provided with sufficient water and other proper
means of flushing the same; and every owner, lessee, and
occupant shall take due measures to prevent improper substances from entering such water-closets or privies or their
connections, and to secure the prompt removal of any improper substances that may enter them, so that no accu:nulation shall take place, and so as to prevent any exhalations therefrom, offensive, dangerous, or prejudicial to life or
health, and so as to prevent the same from being or becoming obstructed. No cesspool shall be allowed in or under or
connected with any such house, except when it is unavoidable,
and in such case it shall be constructed in such situation and
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in such manner as the Board of Health or superintendent may
direct. It shall in all cases be water-tight, and arched or se curely covered over, and no offensive smell or gases shall be
allowed to escape therefrom, or from any privy or privy vault.
In all cases where a sewer exists in the street upon which the
house or building stands, the yard or area shall be so con nected with the same that all water, from the roof or other wise, and all liquid filth shall pass freely into it. Where
no sewer exists in the street, the yard or area shall be so
graded that all water, from the roof or otherwise, and all
filth shall flow freely firom it and all parts -of it into tile
street gutter, by a passage beneath the sidewalk, which shall
be covered by a permanent cover, but so arranged as to
permit access to remove obstructions or impurities.
SECT. 6. From and after the first day of July, in the
year eighteen hundred and sixty-eighlt, it shall not be lawful, without a permit fromI the Board of Health or superintendent, to let or occupy or suffer to be occupied separately
as a dwelling, any vault, cellar, or underground room, built
or rebuilt after said date, or which shall not have been so
let or occupied before said date. And from and after the
first day of July, in the year eighteen hundred and sixtynine, it shall not be lawful, without such permit, to let or
continue to be let, or to occupy or suffer to be occupied,
separately as a dwelling, any vault, cellar, or underground
room whatsoever, unless the same be in every part thereof
at least seven feet in height, measured from the floor to
the ceiling thereof, nor unless the same be for at least
one foot of its height above the surface of the street or
ground adjoining or nearest to the same, nor unless there be
outside of and adjoining the said vault, cellar, or room, and
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APPENDIX.
extending along the entire frontage thereof, and upwards
from six inches below the level of the floor thereof up to
the surface of the said street or ground, an open space of at
least two feet and six inches wide in every part, nor unless
the same be well and effectually drained by means of a
drain, the uppermost part of which is one foot at least below the level of the floor of such vault, cellar, or room, nor
unless there is a clear space of not less than one foot below
the level of the floor, except where the same is cemented,
nor unless there be appurtenant to such vault, cellar, or
room the use of a water-closet or privy, kept and provided
as in this act required, nor unless the same have an external
window-opening of at least nine superficial feet clear of the
sash-frame, in which window-opening there shall be fitted a
frame filled in with glazed sashes, at least four and a half superficial feet of which shall be made so as to open for the
purpose of ventilation: provided, however, that in case of an
inner or back vault, cellar, or room, let or occupied along
with a front vault, cellar, or room as part of the same letting
or occupation, it shall be a sufficient compliance with the
provisions of this act, if the front room is provided with a
window as hereinbefore provided, and if the said back vault,
cellar, or room is connected with the front vault, cellar, or
room by a door, and also by a proper ventilating or transom window, and where practicable, also connected by a
proper ventilating or transom window, or by some hall or passage, or with the external air: provided, always, that in any
area adjoining a vault, cellar, or underground room, there
may be steps necessary for access to such vault, cellar, or
room, if the same be so placed as not to be over, across, or
opposite to said external window, and so as to allow between
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every part of such steps and the external wall of such vault,
cellar, or room, a clear space of six inches at least, and if
the rise of said steps is open; and, provided, further, that
over or across any such area there may be steps necessary
for access to any building above the vauilt, cellar, or room
to which such area adjoins, if the same be so placed as not
to be over, across, or opposite to any such external window.
SECT. 7. From and after the first day of July, in the year
eighteen hundred and sixty-eight, no vault, cellar, or underground room in any tenement or lodging house shall be occupied as a place of lodging or sleeping, except the same shall
be approved in writing, and a permit given therefor by the
Board of Health or superintendent.
SECT. 8. Every tenement or lodging house shall have the
proper and suitable conveniences or receptacles for receiving
garbage and other refuse matters. No tenement or lodging
house, or any portion thereof, shall be used as a place of storage for any combustible article, or any article dangerous to
life or detrimental to health; nor shall any horse, cow, calf,
swine, pig, sheep, or goat be kept in said house.
SECT. 9. Every tenement or lodging house, and every part
thereof, shall be kept clean and free from any accumulation
of dirt, filth, garbage, or other matter in or on the same, or in
the yard, court, passage, area, or alley connected with or belonging to the same. The owner or keeper of any lodginghou-tse, and the owner or lessee of any tenement-house or part
thereof      shall  thoroughly cleanse all the rooms, passages,
stairs, floors, windows, doors, walls, ceilings, privies, cesspools and drains thereof of the house or part of the house of
whic    h  he       is the owner or lessee, to the satisfaction of the
Board       of Health, so often as shall be required by oi in accord                10
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APPENDIX.
ance with any regulation or ordinance of said city, and shall
well and sudciently, to the satisfaction of said Board, whitewash the walls and ceilings thereof twice at least in every
year, in the months of April and October, unless the said
Board shall otherwise direct.   Every tenement or lodging
house shall have legibly posted or painted on the wall or door
in the entry, or some public accessible place, the name and address of the owner or owners, and of the agent or agents, or
any one having charge of the renting and collecting of the
rents for the same; and service of any papers required by
this act, or by any proceedings to enforce any of its provisions, or of the acts relating to the Board of Health, shall be
sufficient if made upon the person or persons so designated
as owner or owners, agent or agents.
SECT. 10. The keeper of any lodging-house and the owner,
agent of the owner, lessee, and occupant of any tenementhouse, and every other person having the care or management
thereof, shall at all times, when required by any ofcer of the
Board of Health, or by any officer upon whom any duty or authority is conferred by this act, give him free access to such
house and to every part thereof   The owner or keeper of
any lodging-house, and the owner, agent of the owner, and
the lessee of any tenement-house or part thereof shall,
whenever any person in such house is sick of fever, or of
any infectious, pestilential, or contagious disease, and such
sickness is known to such owner, keeper, agent, or lessee,
give immediate notice thereof to the Board of Health, or to
some officer of the same, and, thereupon, said Board shall
cause the same to be inspected, and may, if found necessary,
cause the same to be immediately cleansed or disinfected
at the expense of the owner, in such manner as they may
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APPENDLX.
deem necessary and effectual; and they may also cause the
blankets, bedding, and bedclothes used by any such sick
person, to be thoroughly cleansed, scoured, and fumigated,
and in extreme cases to be destroyed.
SECT. 11. Whenever it shall be certified to the Board of
Health by the superintendent that any building or part
thereof is unfit for human habitation, by reason of its being
so infected with disease as to be likely to cause sickness
among the occupants, or by reason of its want of repair has
become dangerous to life, said Board may issue an order,
and cause the same to be affixed conspicuously on the building or part thereof, and to be personally served upon the
owner, agent, or lessee, if the same can be found in this
State, requiring all persons therein to vacate such building,
for the reasons to be stated therein as aforesaid. Such
building or part thereof shall, within ten days thereafter, be
vacated or within such shorter time, not less than twentyfour hours, as in said notice may be specified; but said
Board, if it shall become satisfied that the danger from said
house or part thereof has ceased to exist, may revoke said
order, and it shall thenceforward become inoperative.
SECT. 12. No house hereafter erected shall be used as a
tenement-house or lodging-house, and no house heretofore
erected, and not now used for such purpose, shall be converted into, used or leased for a tenement or lodging house,
unless, in addition to the requirements hereinbefore contained, it conforms to the requirements contained in the following sections.
SECT. 13. It shall not be lawful hereafter to erect for or
convert to the purposes of a tenement or lodging house a
building on the front of any lot where there is another build
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APPENDIX.
ing on the rear of the same lot, unless there is a clear, open
space, exclusively belonging to the front building and extending upwards from the ground, of at least ten feet, between said buildings, if they are one story high, above the
level of the ground; if they are two stories high, the distance between them shall not be less than fifteen feet; if
they are three stories high, the distance between them shall be
twenty feet; and if they are more than three stories high, the
distance between them shall be twenty-five feet. At the rear
of every building hereafter erected for or converted to the
purposes of a tenement or lodging house on the back part
of any lot, there shall be a clear, open space of ten feet between it and any other building. But when thorough ventilation of such open spaces can be otherwise secured, said
distances may be lessened or modified, in special cases, by
a permit from the Board of Health or the superintendent.
SECT. 14. In every such house hereafter erected or converted every habitable room, except rooms in the attic,
shall be in every part not less than eight feet in height fromn
the floor to the ceiling; and every habitable room in the
attic of any such building shall be at least eight feet in
height from the  floor to the ceiling, throughout not less
than one half the area of such room.   Every such  room
shall have at least one window connecting with the external
air, or over the door a suitable ventilator, connecting it with
a room or hall which has a connection with the external
air. The total area of window ill every room communicating with the external air, shall be equal to at least one
tenth of the superficial area of every such room; and the
top of one, at least, of such windows shall not be less than
seven feet and six inches above the floor, and the upper
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APPENDIX.
half of each window shall be so made as to open for the
purposes of ventilation. Every habitable room of a less
area than one hundred superficial feet, if it does not com municate directly with the external air, and is without an
open fireplace, shall be provided with special means of
ventilation by a separate air-shaft extending to the roof, or
otherwise, as the Board of Health may prescribe.
SECT. 15. Every such house hereafter erected or converted,
shall have adequate chimneys running through every floor, with
an open fireplace or grate, or place for a stove, properly connected with one of said chimneys, for every family and set
of apartments. It shall have proper conveniences and receptacles or ashes and rubbish; it shall have water furnished
at one or more places in such house, or in the yard thereof,
so that the same may be adequate and reasonably convenient
for the use of the occupants thereof.  It shall have the floor
of the cellar properly cemented, so as to be water-tight.   The
halls on each floor shall open directly to the external air, with
suitable windows, and shall have no room or other obstruction
at the end, unless sufficient light or ventilation is otherwise
provided for said halls, in a manner approved by the Board
or the superintendent.
SECT. 16. Every owner or other person violating any
provision of this act, after the same shall take effect, shall
be guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine not exceeding one hundred dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding
sixty days.
SECT. 17. A tenemnent-house within the meaning of this
act, shall be taken to mean and include every house, building,
or portion thereof which is rented, leased, let, or hired out
to be occupied, or is occupied, as the house or residence of
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APPENDIX.
more than three families living independently of another, and
doing their cooking upon the premises, or by more than two
families upon a floor, so living and cooking, but having a
common right in the halls, stairways, yards, water-closets, or
privies, or some of them.
A  lodging-house shall be taken to mean andinclude any
house or building, or portion thereof, in which persons are
lodged for hire for a single night, or for less than a week at
one time.
A cellar shall be taken to mean and include every basement
or lower story of any building or house, of which one half
or more of the height from the floor to the ceiling is below
the level of the street adjoining.
SECT. 18. The Board of Health shall have authority to
make other regulations as to cellars and as to ventilation,
consistent with the foregoing, where it shall be satisfied
that such regulations will secure equally well the health of
the occupants. All complaints under this act shall be made
only by authority of the Board of Health, and the MIunicipal Court of the City of Boston shall have jurisdiction concurrent with the Superior Court of all offences against the
provisions of this act. [Approved June 4, 1868.
AUG 5 - 1916
THE END.
Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
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