leries. The ground-floor rooms should be apportioned to a dining and coffee-room, a library and lecture-room, and a kitchen. The central portion, to the height of the first floor, should be covered in with glass pavement, and applied to hot and cold baths, and wash-houses. The cellars beneath, to the stowage of provisions and fuel. The upper story should be the nursery for children, and the school-rooms. The intermediate ranges of apartments would be sittingrooms and bed-rooms. On the north side of the building, external to the kitchen, should be a building containing a steamengine and well, and small gas-works, with a lofty chimney running above it close to the external wall. The waste heat from the gas-works would serve to heat economically the engine boiler, and to prepare heated air to warm the building generally in the galleries and halls, and particularly in the private rooms, being in the hollows of the floors at all times, and admitted into, or excluded from the apartments, at the pleasure of the inhabitants. Each bed-room and sit-quent on inconvenient and miserable lodgingting-room would be provided with a closet, dust-shoot, and sink; and some of them would be arranged to throw three or four or more apartments in groups at pleasure. The use of the engine would be, to grind and chop for the kitchen, to clean boots and shoes with circular brushes on a shaft, to clean knives and forks by the same process, to pump up hot and cold water into all the apartments, to furnish steam for the dryingclosets and cooking, and cleansing earthenware and utensils, and keep going a rising and falling lift to the upper stories, to save the labor of mounting stairs. Westward and southward of the building should be laid out a garden and pleasure-ground, kept cultivated by the manure and refuse, chemically treated, to neutralize the gases. The garden would furnish plants to place in the interior of the building, to consume any vitiated air that might escape the ventilating processes. Open fire-places might be placed in the apartments on the ground floor, and mattresses or water beds. It is not gener ally understood that the object of a soft bed is chiefly to fit the body, to prevent undue strain on any portion of the bones or muscles. Feather beds do not well attain this object, because the feathers not being pliant or moveable, are consequently compressed. The water bed obviates this, and produces equal pressure. Could the body be laid in a plaster cast exactly fitting it, there would be no sensation of hardness. Plaster casts and prints, multiplied by mechanical art, should abound. The large halls, and dining and lecture-rooms, might be furnished with statues and paintings, if they could be afforded. But all should wear a severe simplicity, though the eye should never rest on an ugly or ungraceful object. It may be objected that this mode of living would not suit the tastes of English people, who consider "every man's house his castle," and prefer model cottages to model lodging-houses. This idea, we believe, has chiefly arisen from the distaste conse gas stoves in the others. These arrangements would suit the solitary as well as the gregariously disposed. The gas and hot water arrangements would serve for all the processes of private cookery, and the public kitchen would supply food for single men or families, to whom household drudgery were a nuisance. The furniture should be chiefly metallic, to prevent risk of fire, and of forms simple, yet graceful. The beds should be spring houses. But there is no reason why this system should not combine all the advantages of the clubs with all the privacy of domestic life, free from its drudgery. It is certain that, upon this system, the maximum of comfort, with the minimum of labor, may be realized; and it is only by the congregation of individuals that high civilization can be attained. Let us consider the advantages. First, the most thorough and absolute independence of all personal attendance. In such a dwelling a man might conveniently obtain all that he would require for personal use, as simply as he could buy goods in a shop. There could be no dirt, with hard slate surfaces for floors and walls. His hot and cold water, and gas, all arranged to his hand, and with the means of getting rid of waste water; with couch and furniture so simple as almost to be self-arranging; and with ready access to food at any time he might require it; he would need no personal attendance, save in case of illness. might go in and out at his own pleasure, without trouble to himself or others. Advantageous as all this would be to individual men, infinitely greater would be the advantages to families. A large assemblage of people could maintain their own physician on the establishment; could engage their own lecturers and school teachers; could have a public nursery; could tend the sick; could have their own gymnastic grounds: in short, all the appliances which are now the ex He the se badly arranged dwellings, mostly hinge, and a change is fast arriving in the character of domestic service. The position of both men and women domestic servants, is that of painful privation. Taken as a mass, good feeling is the highest of their en clusive privileges of the wealthy. In such an establishment the natural aptitudes of children would be developed profitably to the community; and painful misfits, rendering so many intelligent persons a nuisance to their friends and the community, would be avoided. Social intercourse would be at-joyments; good lodging is uncommontainable without its present disadvantages, and the members of such a community would grow up attached to each other. We have contemplated such an establishment as this for the use of working men and their families—a species of communism for the purpose of economizing expenditure, just as gas companies, and water companies, and canal and railway companies, are enabled to accomplish, economically, things which are beyond the reach of individuals. Whether out of this condition of things, long practiced and widely diffused, may ultimately grow associations for the purposes of Production amongst working men, is a fit problem for contemplation. It is the probable course of man's progress; but assuredly no fallacy can be greater than that of assuming that men who have been forced into selfish thoughts and habits by bad training and privation, can be fitted for communist association. The class of men in the mass, fitted for such purposes, have yet to be born and bred. Individuals may be found from whom pattern associations of an imperfect kind may be congregated; but it is only by a fine race of nature's gentlemen that the perfect result can be obtained. Meanwhile "coming events cast their shadows before;" o'er all the earth nations are dreaming the dream of man's coming equality, and the wonder-working process of social reforms. It will not be in our time, but we may sow the good seed which shall bear blossoms in the future. Misapprehension will probably retard it; for people will dream that it is proposed for them to live in public caravansaries, the truth being that it is desired to obtain for them, more perfectly than ever, the most complete privacy at their own option that privacy which is ever sought in great cities, by those who understand the course of human action. We have contemplated such an establishment as erected for working men; and the outlay of capital will not frighten those who know how comparatively cheaper large houses are built than small ones. But it is a matter for the serious contemplation of the middle and wealthier classes, if they would retain their comforts around them. Upon domestic service, their comforts, in pleasant lodging a rare exception; social intercourse is practically denied. They are, in short, mostly treated as a species of white slaves; and, as a natural consequence, they will many of them lie and pilfer like black slaves. Their higher feelings are rarely cultivated; they are regarded as a necessary evil, and "envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness," are begotten in them toward those whom they regard as cruel taskmasters. It is said that there are upward of a million of women servants in England; and so commonly is their condition that of unjust treatment, that where individuals behave kindly to them, they are apt to think them fools or designing persons. It is impossible that this mass of injured human beings should long remain contented in their condition. They have human feelings, and they will have human ties. Domestic Servants' Associations will infallibly rise up to resist this great injustice; and infallibly they will commit other injustices in redressing their own wrongs. In England we have the example of employers' injustice; in the United States we have injustice on the part of the "helps." But to the position of the United States we are fast approaching. Service is distasteful, because, practically, it is accompanied by loss of freedom. The word service is in itself a gracious word, as it is a gracious thing to serve our fellows; but in our domestic servants' apprehension it has lost its original meaning, and has become distasteful servitude, or service rendered for hire. So surely as the years roll on, higher wages and lessening performance will mark domestic service, till the time comes round that the obligation is considered equal to serve and be served; that mutual attachment from superiors to inferiors in the social scale, arising from the possession of different qualifications, will be a far stronger bond than that of mere cash payment. Ere this comes to pass, there will be heavy domestic feuds between the ill-instructed of both classes, and by which the better instructed will suffer. Meanwhile, the only remedy for the middle classes, loving their ease, will be to increase their mechanical appliances and labor-saving processes, to make themselves self-dependent as fast as their domestic servants become independent. Both parties will gain by this change; and the new generation will grow up to improved dwellings as their natural state of existence, far in advance of that of their fathers and mothers. Precisely as the Brougham carriage, with one horse and one man, has replaced the cumbrous old vehicle, with its two men and two horses, and made the rider more independent, so will the improved dwelling, with its diminished personal wants, take the place of the old inconvenient house. But where are we to find sites for these improved dwellings and gardens for working men? will be asked by a host of objectors. Where do you find sites for your workhouses? will be our reply. Are they not all going out of town, under the new system? If you want garden land, go to the borders of the new working men's parks in Manchester, or of the new Victoria-park, in London. Go to the railways, east, west, north, and south, and find sites along their borders. On this question we have yet much to say. We have now run through the four minor questions relating to Physical Man and his progress-Food, Fuel, Clothing, and Lodging; clearly indicating the steps by which we think it probable that he will eradicate physical evil in conformity with the laws of nature, who has provided a constant succession of new circumstances in accordance with the growth of his knowledge and power, from the form of the ferocious wild animal up to the likeness of an angel. And herein a great work will have been achieved, though we shall be met at this point by numerous objectors, who hold so strongly to the progress of man's mind, that they forget his body is a basis-a temple, wherein his mind must dwell. Following up these objectors to the extreme, we should arrive at asceticism; we should pull down our baths and wash-houses, for they are but a portion of the labor bestowed upon our bodies. Fairly meeting these objectors, we should subject them to a test. We would say to each one -What is your own personal limit of comfort and convenience; what kind of house do you inhabit; what food do you eat; what kind of clothing do you wear; what do you possess of refinement or embellishment in works of art? Cease, then, your objections to physical ease and comfort, till every human being is at least as well provided as yourself with the things that God has given od ends. If you deny this, you will lie open to the reproach of seeking to keep others poor in order to appropriate to yourself. If you preach poverty, at least practice your preaching. We ourselves believe poverty to be an evil;-wealth, as the name imports, in its high sense of weal, to be a good. From poverty-in other words, from ignorance-spring countless evils; from wealth, rightly applied, innumerable goods. One of our most earnest modern writers, the author of "Modern Painters," has written in his work some sentences capable of misapprehension on this point. We approach him with a reverential feeling, for his power and love of truth, and we would fain hope that we have misunderstood him. But we cannot let it pass unnoticed, for others may read it wrongly also, if we have so done; and it were pity that such a mind should fail to take hold of the mass, or be held as an ascetic teacher of bygone times,-a stern taskmaster of the present seeking to renew the temple-building of the past ages with the sweat of modern brows; leaving the laborer in his unwholesome hovel, while the priest inhabits a palace; teaching him to worship God in temples made with hands, while he himself has but a wretched hut to cover him. As in Egypt, the pyramid for the priest, the cavern for the worshiper. We stop to extract: "And yet people speak, in this working age, and land, and food, and raiment, were alone usewhen they speak from their hearts, as if houses, ful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration, were all profitless; so that men insolently call them selves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said the raiment than the body; who look to the earth to think, that the meat is more than the life, and as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew, and the water they draw, are tains like the shadow of God, and than the great better than the pine-forests that cover the mounrivers that move like his eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that though God 'hath made everything beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their hearts, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." "This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for existence in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the Let us know Him by whom we live, and that he is not to be known by marring his fair works, and blotting out the evidence of his influences upon his creatures, not amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovations, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences which he gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for glory and for beauty, he did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death generation after generation, that we, foul and sensual as we are, might give the carved work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the hammer; he has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; he brings not up his quails by the east wind, only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; he has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven. suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the deliverance, the faith; but now, when they have learned to live under providence of laws, and with decency and justice of regard for each other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem arising out of the rest, evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also-a fear grea'er than of sword and sedition--that dependence on God may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water sure; that gratitude to Him may cease, because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world, that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation; that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words, and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colors its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which, so long as they are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust. And though I believe we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all matter however trivial, in all directions however distant. And at this time, when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea; when their great sagene is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and strength of England together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms, and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufacture; when there is not a monument through- "But the common consent of men proves and out the cities of Europe, that speaks of old years accepts the proposition, that whatever part of any and mighty people, but is being swept away to pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and adbuild cafés and gaming-houses; when the honor mits of material uses, is ignoble, and whatsoever of God is thought to consist in the poverty of his part is addressed to the mind only is noble; and temple and the column is shortened, and the that geology does better in re-clothing dry bones, pinnacle shattered, the color denied to the case- and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins ment, and the marble to the altar-while exche- of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in quers are exhausted in luxury of boudoirs, and opening to us the houses of heaven, than in teachpride of reception-rooms; when we ravage with- ing navigation; botany better in displaying strucout a pause all the loveliness of a creation which ture than in expressing juices; surgery better in God in giving pronounced good, and destroy with- investigating organization, than in setting limbs ; out a thought all those labors which men have only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, given their lives, and their sons' sons' lives to every step we make in the more exalted range complete, and have left for a legacy to all their of science adds something also to its practical apkind, a legacy of more than their hearts' blood, plicabilities; that all the great phenomena of nafor it is of their souls' travail; there is need, bit-ture, the knowledge of which is desired by the ter need, to bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that to live is nothing, unless to live be to "All science, and all art, may be divided into that which is subservient to life, and which is the object of it. As subservient to life, or practical, their results are, in the common sense of the word, useful. As the object of life or theoretic, they are, in the common sense, useless; and yet the step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist; and the step between practical and theoretic art, is that between the bricklayer and the architect, between the plumber and the artist; and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to greater, so that the socalled useless part of each profession, does by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind, assume the superior and more noble place, even though books be sometimes written, and that by writers of no ordinary mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for the years of toil which have traced the greater part of the combinations of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a cheap way of refining sugar, and date the eminence of the philosopher, whose life has been spent in the investigation of the laws of light, from the time of his inventing an improvement in spectacles. angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to farther vision the being and the glory of Him in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences and so much of material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desires as the imperfection of their nature may admit; that the strong torrents which, in their own gladness, fill the hills with hollow thunder, and the vales with winding light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed and barge to bear; that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its upheaval and the volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and quickening spring, and that for our incitement-I say not our reward-for knowledge is its own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and stars their times." This is speech as from the lips of a prophet, -grandly expressed and purposeful in its meaning. Yet, of a surety, has Ruskin lived in the halls of the high and powerful only to have gathered up this meaning at this age of the world. Of kindred feeling was Coleridge, thinking of the proud ones of the earth, when he penned the lines "Oh, lady! nursed in pomp and pleasure, Where learned you that heroic measure?” It is the | bodies of men, women, and children: while men ask for bread, and get stones to break in answer; while France, and Germany, and Italy, make revolutions, incited mainly thereto by the scarcity of food, let us not be accused of too much work; while eastward, and westward, barbarism still obtains, and men are as the "beasts that perish," let us not be turned aside from the work that is to work out their civilization. Pine forests, John Ruskin, are better than wood to burn, yet "The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods That know not fear, fatigue, or cold. I teach Iowa Saxon art." It is not so, John Ruskin; the workers of this world, this our English world, are not mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. The contracted utilitarian abuse of doctrine that followed on the announcement of the philosopher, passed away after but a short. lapse of time, and was no more. instinct of God that prompts the modern worker in his course, as surely as it prompts the preacher. The brave and heroic worker, faithful to his appointed task, even he whom All these uses the pine serves while man men call "Navvy," the stern old Saxon stock, is in his infancy. When he shall grow up who, like his ancestry of the race of the into full and ripened manhood, with the proVikingr, works out the mystic ways of Prov-gress of art the pine may remain in its native idence, that the bread of physical life shall forest unharmed, "to cover the mountains be placed in the mouths of himself and his like the shadows of God." brethren; he perchance knows not, or heeds not, the command, "that man shall not live by bread alone;" suffice it for him that man cannot live without bread. Years ago a party of engineers were walking through the grounds of Woburn Abbey. All were suddenly struck with the magnificent form of a large pine-tree, and stood still "Parson!" cried out a fen farmer to a man saying nothing, lost in admiration of its beauof God in black garments, "why don't 'e putty as a tree. One of the number at length, souls into the congregation?"-the laboring peasantry. "Souls!" replied the preacher, turning an eye of indignation on the hard man-"Souls, without bodies! Find you the bodies with fitting wages, and I will undertake to raise the souls. I cannot create souls in starving bodies!" No! no! not in our day must the reproach be raised that we work too much, while Dorsetshire laborers starve, and hungry dogs in Skibbereen devour the unburied strong in his art or artistry, his second nature burst out into speech, "What a splendid water-wheel shaft that tree would make!" Years have rolled away, and water-wheel shafts are now all made of iron. The pine-tree may grow and flourish forever, undisturbed by the engineer. Nature has taught him the uses of inorganic matter. Not even from the lips of Ruskin can we patiently listen to the vituperation of railways-the modern Acts of the Apostles of |