124 HOME-LIFE. 



and now ever-narrowing range of the family circle. 

 The fact is, our life is undergoing a rapid trans- 

 formation from the life of a mainly rural and 

 agricultural world, composed almost entirely of 

 villages and small towns, to the life of a mainly 

 urban and industrial world, composed for the 

 most part of great bustling manufacturing cities, 

 where thousand of families, unknown to one 

 another, live huddled together into a small space, 

 with few interests or feelings in common, and with 

 little social intercourse with one another. In 

 short, we have not yet adapted our habits and 

 manners to this new social state — we have found 

 no way of combining the arrangements of a great 

 city with the natural and easy social intercourse 

 of our small outlying towns and villages. Every- 

 body knows that the practical isolation of many 

 middle-class families in London, or Boston, or Chi- 

 cago is far greater than the practical isolation of a 

 solitary shepherd on a Devonshire sheep-walk, or 

 of a New Hampshire farmer on a snow-clad hill- 

 side. Most London families know nothing at all 

 of their next-door neighbors, and many of them 

 know hardl}' anybody outside their own household 

 among the whole four million inhabitants of that 

 vast nu)dern human ant-hill. The solitude of the 

 crowd is even more conspicuous and more sur- 

 prising than the solitude of the desert. 



How has this curious state of things come about, 



