Sybaris and other homes

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Dedication

I DEDICATE this book to the

At the meeting which formed that Society the provision for better

homes in cities was publicly declared to be the first work of Christian

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 1 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 readerwill 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 Wjorcester, 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

VI 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 imagine 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 good 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

PEEFACE. vii

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.

The 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 buc 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 Thurii, 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 from the ancient cities and from their methods of government, were it only the great lesson of the value of training in administration.

Vm PREFACE.

There is a very odd habit of speech about republican government, which, hke 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 administration. 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-

PREFACE. IX

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. " How 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

X 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

PREFACE. , :d

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 horse-cars, bad tenement-houses, 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 traiaed 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, English, 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 civihzed world which has not some hints of value which it could give to every other city.

Colonel Ingham 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 he

Xa 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 accoinplished, 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 Juhus Caesar were

PREFACE. xiii

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 tiingle 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

XIV 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 I They could not understand, says Athenseus, 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 time 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 !

Contents

Fagb

Mt Visit to Stbaris 1

How THET LIVED AT NaGUADAVIOK . . . . ,' " 88

II

As soon as Greenleaf had bought the Chenery farm, and got a bond for a deed of the Gregory property, if he wanted it, he pubhshed the details of his plan.

Of course all the croakers were sure it would fail. It had been tried ten thousand times, they said, and had failed. " Canton, East Boston, Mount Bellingham, Hyde Park," said the croakers, who knew nothing at all about the success or failure of either of these enterprises, " when did not this plan fail ? People won't go where you want to send them."

" Tell me," said Greenleaf, cheerfully, — he was the only man worth anything who never got mad by any accident, — and this, as above, because he was so spirited and spiritual at once, — "tell me, when this ship has not sailed, if she was built before she was launfched ? I have heard of old Dutchmen, who built the forecastle of a ship, and launched it, and it went to the bottom, — and of cousins of theirs who built the stern first, and launched that, — and were surprised that it did not sail ten knots an hour. So, I have heard of people who laid out cities on paper fur their own advantage, — and forgot the advantage of their settlers. And I have heard of railroads who opened stations where no people lived, — and then sold no tickets. I have heard of new towns opened at way stations, — and people did not choose to churn along in snuffy old accommodation trains. But I have never heard of a place where a man was sure of four fast trains every morning and four more every night, that did not fill up in no time."

Down at the Union, one night, Ogden got talking about the new place, and somebody told him the Parisians would not sleep out of Paris. "No," said he, " nor vi'ill the people of this place sleep outside of Naguadavick, if sleeping outside means that they are to have no fun out there. If there are to be no parties, no theatre, no concert, no Union, no chance to croak together, nobody is going to live there. That is another reason why you must begin on a large scale. You must have people enough to make it worth Greenleaf's while to run four fast trains for you, morning and evening. If you have them, you will have people enough to persuade Blitz to juggle for you, Mrs. Wood to sing to you, Wendell Phillips and Henry Beecher to lecture for you, and the French company to act for you. The people who will go to this place to live are exactly the sort of people who will put all that thing through. You will have a better public hall there than we have got here." And so, indeed, it proved.

I was at that time the minister of the Sandemanian church at Naguadavick. I believed in'Greenleaf, and indeed I rather believed in this thing. So I went round one day and asked him if they did not mean to reserve lots for churches, and if they would not let me secure one. " Look at the plan, Mr. Ingham," said Greenleaf. " You will see some red crosses there on half-acre lots, which will be convenient for churches."

I looked, compared, and called his attention to one which seemed to me the best. I said I did not know if we could or would do anything about it, but would they not give us a deed of that lot, on condition we would use it for a house of worship.

" We will give you a deed," said Greenleaf, " on exactly the same terms as we would give the government one for a post-ofEce. Those terms you will find in brief on the plan. That lot is worth one hundred and twenty dollars, and for that sum the Sandemanian Consistory can have it. Look here, Mr. Ingham," said he, " religion, as I understand it, is the most essential reality in earth or in heaven. The institutions of religion then, as churches or Sunday schools, will in no wise put themselves on the plane of inferior organizations, as if they must beg for a living or for right to be. They will assert their right. We shall treat all institutions of religion with precisely equal respect. And I believe that the Sandemanians will find it desirable to buy a lot here now, while they can, to build by and by, when they want to."

I told him he was quite right ; that the Sandemanian cnurch, at least, was in no position to ask alms like a beggar. And so the next Sunday morning I spoke of the thing from the pulpit. I said it seemed to me we ought to secure a lot there, before the most available situations were taken up by others. I said that any money I found in the charity boxes that evening after the two services, would be applied to this purpose. And, as it happened, I found one hundred and nineteen dollars and nineteen cents there. Polly had eighty-one cents lying by, which she added, and we bought the lot the next morning. A very curious thing followed. The Spy and the Courant mentioned this fact, and, before a fortnight was over, the Unitarians, and the Universalists, and the Methodists, and Free Will Baptists, and Orthodox Congregationalists, and Baptists, and Episcopalians, and even Roman Catholics, had each bought lots. " They did not mean," they said, "to have those proselyting Sandemanians stepping in before them." So there seemed to be no danger but Aboo-Goosh, as they called the new town, would have enough religious privileges.

III

Elkanah Ogden talked so much about the "Suburb of Ease " at the Union, and in all social circles, he explained away so many difficulties, and pooh-poohed down so many objections, that he came to be considered as a sort of godfather to the plan ; and all sorts of people consulted him about it. After the lithographic plans were printed by the Great Eastern, and the demand for their house-lots became very spirited, people began to wake up who had been very drowsy before, or had said it was all nonsense, and that nothing could ever come of it. And all sorts 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 Adam. But he supposed he had seen him before ; so he said, " Good morning, Mr. Jones. Take a chair."

But the old man said, " My name is not Jones. I live next the Jones farm. My name is Tenny, Elbridge Tenny. I live out in Knox."

Elkanah apologized.

Then the old man said that he had come to talk to him about his place. It was a beautiful farm, he said, sloping down each side of the north branch, which ran right through the place. Putting his father's place and his together, and throwing in the jointure property, there was nigh seven hundred acres in all. By this time Ogden understood that here was another man who would like to sell by the foot what had been bought by the acre.

" You see," said the old man, " if you want horse-cars, the grade is beautiful from each side down to the Great Northern Road, and the flat, where the stream bends, is just the place for a station."

" I dare say, Mr. Jones," said Ogden. " I beg your pardon, Mr. Eldridge, I dare say. But all this depends on what the ' Great Northern ' says. I have never found them very bright, or, which is much the same thing, very humane."

Mr. Tenny said his name was not Eldridge, and Ogden apologized again. Tenny had not been to the Great Northern people ; he had begun by drawing out his plan for streets, which perhaps Ogden would like to see. And then he had thought he would come and consult Mr. Ogden before he went any further.

"Well, sir," said Elkanah, "I am very much obliged to you. Now I tell you that your farm may be as beautiful as the Garden of Eden, and as well laid out as Alexander's city in Egypt, but unless the Great Northern does the right thing, which is to say the handsome thing, you can do nothing with the farm iri this way. More than that, Mr. Tenny [this time ho was quite correct] , more than that, they may be as handsome as — as — the Chevalier Crichton, and if you, up there, are the least bit short-sighted, or try to skin these workingmen whom you want to plant there, the whole thing fails again. As I have said forty times, the enterprise is one combined enterprise, which seeks everybody's good. It seeks the good of the honest day-laborer, who is now paying a dollar a week for his tenement here, it seeks the good of his children not yet born, it seeks the good of the Great Northern Railroad and all its stockholders, and it seeks your good. But if any one of the parties undertakes to overreach any of the others, the whole thing fails, and deserves to fail."

By this time Ogden was unduly excited, and Mr. Tenny was a httle alarmed. But he declared that he felt all this also, and only wanted to make a reasonable profit in the business, which he was willing everybody else concerned should share. Ogden cooled down, and told him that the merit of the enterprise was that it offered, not fabulous profit to anybody, but a perfectly steady and sure remuneration, — steady and sure, as he proposed to show. So they walked over together to the house of the president of the Great Northern. It was afternoon, and they knew he would not be at the office. They also knew that in that establishment responsibility was very badly divided, and that he would take it very ill if any such proposal as this were made to any of his subordinates before he had heard of it. In fact, if he could be persuaded, before the week were over, that he had devised the whole thing, that would be best of all.

It was very slow work, and, to a person as impetuous as Elkanah, very tedious. But he kept his temper like a saint, knowing how much depended on that. He let the president ramble off into endless histories of his own former successes in dealings with lumbermen, with politicians, and with owners of waterpower, — in all of which, he, being the painter of the picture, came off victorious, and these several hons

102 SYBAKIS AND OTHEK HOMES.

crouched at his feet. After many of these rambles into the forests of facts gilded by memory, he said, well pleased : —

" Then your object is to persuade us to open a new station at the Bates Crossing ? We might perhaps let the milk-trains stop there, — and the Montaigne special. H.OW would that answer ? That would give you two trains in winter, and "three in summer each way."

Elbridge Tenny looked round dubersome on Elkanah Ogden, and this time Elkanah blazed away.

" It would not answer at all, Mr. Chauncey. This is one of those enterprises, where you must do everything or nothing. The railroads of this part of the country have steadily cut ofp their best revenue, — the most reliable because not subject to competition, — by that policy of leaving their suburb travel to their accommodation trains. Unless we can have at least three morning expresses and three in the evening, we can do nothing."

It was a wonder Mr. Chauncey did not faint away, or show them the door as madmen. But Ogden had expected, even had intended, this surprise.

" The people who are to come and go on these trains, Mr. Chauncey," said he, " are not women going a shopping, to whom ten minutes more or less is of no account. They are not even bank clerks, or drygoods dealers, to whom all is gained if they are on the street here at nine in the morning. We want to provide for the day-laborer, who must get to his work at eight in*the winter and at seven in the summer. "We mean to have him, and his employer, as certain that he will be there, as if he had only to walk, in fifteen minutes from his home. You cannot give him that certainty, if he must wait till your Montaigne train has made its connections above, and come down to Bates's. Besides this, we want to promise him a seat sure, • — while he goes and while he comes. He must not be dependent on the chances of your up-travel. And when he takes his nap, — if he chooses to, riding out, — he is not to be waked at six or eight way stations. He is to be put through."

Mr. Chauncey smiled, — sublime, amused, and incredulous. But the smile faded when Ogden proceeded : " These fast trains are promised by the Great Eastern for the next twenty years, to people who take lots at Aboo Goosh, and that is the reason that they have already sold seven hundred lots. Offer notliing but way trains, stopping at all your near stations, and Mr. Tenny here need take no trouble about surveying his lands. He will not sell five acres ! "

The President became more thoughtful at this. "Have you thought what you should offer us?" said he ; " what bonus would be reasonable to induce us to try the experiment? We might put on one express for three months, and see how it would work."

" And you would not have passengers enough to pay for your oil," replied Elkanali. " No, Mr. Chauncey, it is a twenty years' business, or it is nothing, that we propose to you. There is nobofly 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."