ORGANIZED HOMESTEADS AND HOUSEHOLDS. 733 

 ORGANIZED HOMESTEADS AND HOUSEHOLDS. 1 



By WILLIAM F. CIIANNING, M. D. 



THE problem of homes for the people is not a simple one. The 

 question is not merely how to house single families at the least 

 cost. No solution of the problem can be worse than the solitary farm- 

 house in a thinly-settled country. The real question is, how to recon- 

 cile the autonomy of the individual and family with the economies 

 and productive forces of modern society. The solitary farm-house is 

 a pioneer in the wilderness, and good for that. But the first genera- 

 tion born in it, or as soon as civilization has spread far enough to take 

 it in, fly from it as if it were a pest-house. In the older States our 

 population is rushing into the towns, not because the earth has grown 

 barren, or because our town-life is natural or beautiful, but because 

 modern civilization attracts and marshals mankind to cooperative 

 work, and the universal instinct revolts against anti-social methods 

 and solutions. More farmers and farmers' wives, in proportion to 

 the population, are insane, than any other industrial or professional 

 class in America ; and this, notwithstanding all the healthful influ- 

 ences of Nature in the country, and the miasm, filth, and imprison- 

 ment, of the towns. 



The first step toward social order is to secure the independent 

 existence of the individual or family in a home which, like the tradi- 

 tional English house, shall be a castle inviolable and safe from all in- 

 trusion. One of the chief conditions of such independence is that 

 the home shall be owned by the individual or family, not rented. On 

 this account it introduces the wildest confusion into the present discus- 

 sion to compare the working-men's houses in Philadelphia, owned by 

 themselves, with hired tenements. We are brought, however, at once 

 to a legitimate though limited ground of preference for the Philadel- 

 phia plan of purchasing a homestead, over the common method of 

 living in rented houses, or in hired rooms in a tenement-house. 



But this is only half of the question. The wastefulness of build- 

 ing a separate house for each family, even with the cheapest appli- 

 ances, and of carrying on the household afterward, will be, always suffi- 

 cient to make the difference between comfort and pauperism for the 

 masses. In other words, which will bear repetition, the separate 

 house does not, cannot avail itself of the social economies and pro- 

 ductive forces which are the means of modern civilization. Two 

 great departments of human industry, Agricidture, already alluded to, 

 and the Household, remain in the handdoom state of development. 



What is needed in agriculture to charm the population back to 



1 A paper read before the American Social Science Association at Philadelphia, June 

 1, 1876. 



