from tyranny and oppression, with the hope and prospect of bettering their fortunes by joining the ranks of our toiling

classes. Among them are doubtless some, it would be

strange if there were not, who bring with them and sound the loudest those "ominous class-cries of other lands," which so grate upon the ear of cultivated leisure and hereditary wealth; but, after making all due allowances for these, it will be found, upon investigation, that although property may, be in some instances largely concentrated, it is also greatly diffused; its gradation, from these who have most to those who have least, is as regular now as it was a generation ago.

The whole number of legal voters in the State in 1870 * was 262,120; of these, 150,488, or 58 per cent., paid more than a poll-tax; in the city of Boston, the rate was somewhat less, amounting to 40 per cent.; of the remaining 111,632, who were assessed simply for a poll-tax, there are no means of ascertaining how many of them had their little accumulations snugly put away at interest, where the vigilance of the assessor would fail to find them; but the savings-banks returned the number of their depositors the same year at 560,000, with deposits amounting to $163,000,000.

Thirty-five years of constant and intimate acquaintance with the very humblest and poorest of our people, and twentyone years of active experience at a calling which affords continual knowledge of transactions in real property, have impressed me fully with the conviction that among the very

* Report of the Secretary of State, made February 11, 1870.

humblest of the laboring classes, the acquisition of homesteads is steadily increasing; not abodes assuming any degree of style, but houses plain, simple, and unpretending, oftentimes tasty, and far better than their owners had ever enjoyed before. To-day, the class of property most in request, and yielding the best and quickest returns to the builder, is the small, single house which can be sold at from $2,000 to $4,000, and the supply is not equal to the demand. Not long since I had occasion to lay off from a large estate one little lot, measuring only 141 feet front by 46 feet in depth, and containing only 667 square feet; yet upon this lot was located a dwelling and a stable, furnishing a comfortable shelter for the proprietor, his wife, two grown sons, a horse, cow, and pig; the value of the property was perhaps $500, and its owner was one of the happiest and most demonstrative of men, and proud of his homestead; frequently, when passing by, I have seen him deliberately pacing off its narrow front, and conning its boundaries, as if by some possibility encroachments might have occurred, as he naively phrased it, “unbeknown'st to him."

Go into the humblest quarters of our cities and towns, and you may find whole streets of these modest dwellings of the independent poor, not many of them so small or so fully occupied as the case I have cited, but still so diminutive and narrow that many a sympathizing philanthropist who studies mankind downward rather than upward, wonders how the family could be accommodated in so cramped a space. My youthful head was sheltered by such an humble dwelling, and

nowhere have I found a more earnest spirit of inquiry into those matters that most deeply interest the citizen and taxpayer, or a more conservative regard for the rights of person and property.

In no surer way can we serve to protect the community from convulsions and political disorder, than by encouraging the acquisition of homesteads by the poor and laboring classes. It is a field that promises better results to the labors of the philanthropist, than stirring them up to feel that their poverty is a personal grievance, which can only be redressed by subverting the rights of property and obliging those who have, to share their goods with those who have not.

The old town meetings are disappearing year after year; and why? Because the people are sufficiently informed of the principles of self-government to know that a town organization is entirely inadequate to administer the affairs of a large community, or to properly and justly obtain the will of its citizens upon those interests which concern them most deeply; those men who will rally in the strongest numbers to vote the appropriation for a new engine-house, district school-house, or firemen's parade, yield the feeblest support to, and manifest the least interest in, those great sanitary measures, such as the maintenance of a water supply, or the establishment of an adequate system of sewerage,—without which a dense population cannot long be preserved from disease or pestilence.

Ignorance and vice do keep pace with the increase of poverty, but they are the cause and precursor, not the result

of it; could they be removed, continuous poverty would become unknown.

We are passing through social and political changes, which at any other epoch of our national existence would have been considered crises. The shock of civil war convulsed all grades of labor, and undoubtedly produced many of the changes which have increased our communities beyond all prediction or precedent. There still hangs over us the burden of debt which it entailed, representing simply the cost of the destruction of life and property, and which by a fiction is called to represent money and value; this producing inflation. and expansion, has brought increase of prices and artificial wants to all the laboring classes, who, failing to supply their wants, both fancied and real, with the products of their toil, become restive and uneasy.

Strikes and lock-outs, crimination and recrimination, aggression and retaliation, follow in rapid succession, until both employer and employé become crippled, — the one by the loss of wages which he can ill afford, the other by interruption of business and the increased sensitiveness of the capitalist, by whose aid alone he is enabled to carry on his enterprise and employ his operatives. The fact that the manufacturer is as much dependent upon the capitalist as the humblest laborer, is lost almost entirely from sight.

The commonly accepted statement of the relations of labor and capital, as they are associated in business, has been nowhere so concisely stated as in a remark of Lord Derby, which is all the more remarkable as coming from a nobleman

of a proud family, and not generally credited with sympathy for the laboring classes. Said he, "Every man has the undoubted right to struggle for his own success, at whatever cost of inconvenience or failure to others; but the expediency or propriety of the matter is a question to be determined in each instance." According to this theory, success would undoubtedly follow the possession of the greatest resources or powers of endurance. Adopt this principle as the rule of action, and the propriety or expediency would be little discussed; the struggle of man against man, and interest against interest, would be bitter and exhausting; the very principle upon which our social system is founded would be disregarded and violated; man, thrown back upon his natural rights, would subvert the general good, that his individual benefit might accrue. This proposition is the basis of Feudalism, worthy of its aristocratic author, and can only be construed to justify the strong in a struggle against the weak, which, whenever it occurs, leaves the strong, stronger and more arrogant, and the weak, weaker and more embittered than before.

This question is aggravated by the injudicious efforts of the zealous and well-meaning persons, who, with a misconception of the most delicate relations which the different classes of society bear to each other, continually represent poverty as the greatest of human misfortunes, and an unmixed evil.

If it be true, then should the possession of wealth be the height of earthly happiness and the goal of man's ambition.