128 HOME-LIFE. 



one another to find out their natural fellows in 

 London or Liverpool, Manchester or Glasgow, 

 New York or San Francisco. "Where do all the 

 other people live whom I should like to know ? " 

 asks a despondent man of letters into whose soul 

 the iron of suburban life has entered deeply. " In 

 the other suburbs. Where are all the men whose 

 tastes and habits are similar to my own ? In the 

 other suburbs." The fact is, we do not discover 

 each other readily in these vast and unwieldy 

 heterogeneous concourses of fortuitous social 

 atoms. 



The natural consequence of such social isolation 

 in the big towns is that the innumerable warm 

 human hearts of a great chiss, or rather of many 

 great classes, among us have been wholly and some- 

 what un wholesomely turned inward on the home 

 alone. Home, which ought rightly to fdl the 

 larger part of life, but a part only, has been made 

 improperly to do duty for the whole gamut of our 

 feelings as far as possible. The wealthier classes 

 indeed have always been able to secure abundant 

 social intercourse. liiey have their clubs and 

 their assembly-rooms, their dinners and their 

 dances, their lawn-tennis and their garden-parties, 

 their endless occasions and opportunities for meet- 

 ing and mixing with one another. But to large 

 classes of the \o\\\\ populations such occasions 

 and opportunities come seldom or never. Home 



