810 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
up. The Commissioners, Messrs. Letchworth, Craig, and 
Walrath, purchased the property of a moribund Shaker 
community. It contained 1875 acres, and the price was. 
£35,000; but a large part of it had been under cultivation,. 
and there were included buildings fit for occupation, and 
other improvements, valued at £15,000. It is approached 
by good roads, and not far from a railway. When the 
necessary alterations were made, the managers were able to- 
open at once with accommodation for 200 patients. There 
are now 840, and as a proof of how greatly the need has 
been appreciated, there are on the books 900 applications. 
for admission, which cannot be granted on account of the 
want of money to extend the buildings. The cottages, 
which are widely separated, are built to hold from 12 to 30 
patients. It is generally agreed, that over that number 
the home-feeling ceases. The women and children are pro- 
vided for in distinct cottages at the other side of the estate 
from the men’s dwellings, and across a creek. There is a 
small hospital for any one suffering from acute illness, and 
innumerable buildings and sheds for carrying on indoor 
trades. The colonists build outhouses, make bricks, carry 
on printing, harness-making, and numberless other mechani- 
cal occupations, while the great area planted with fruit 
trees or laid down in crops, or for feeding the small! army of 
cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs, provides healthful occupation 
for scores more. Dr. Peterson and Dr. Spratling have great 
ideas as to the wise economy of energy. In engaging 
teachers of any trade, for instance, they urge that it is less 
expensive to engage one first-class man and let him spend 
his time in instructing the patients to become qualified work- 
men, and therefore self-supporting colonists, rather than 
take the immediately cheaper course of engaging second-rate 
tradesmen (several of them), and to have to go on employ- 
ing them permanently doing work for the colonists, while 
these untaught stand by incapable of doing it for them- 
selves. On the same grounds the managers strive to make 
as many of the colonists as possible expert in the higher 
trades, on the ground that the man with a skilled trade at. 
his fingers’ ends is a more valuable product economically, 
produces more for the colony and for his country than ie 
mere labourer, useful as his work may be. 
I have taken these three establishments as typical, joa 
time would fail me to tell of the large number of institutions 
on the colony plan scattered over the Continent and the 
United States. In England two great movements are 
under way. The first under the auspices of the London 
County Council, which, going further than any other body 
