rated in suburban districts, the
various occupations which attend them, such as grocers, shoemakers,
tailors, and others, would follow, and be established near them. Many
nationalities among our working class have an especial fondness for
gardens and bits of land about their houses. This would be an additional
attraction to such settlements; and with easy and cheap communications
we might soon have tens of thousands of our laborers and mechanics
settled in pleasant and healthy little suburban villages, each, perhaps
having his own small house and garden, and the children growing up under
far better influences, moral and physical, than they could possibly
enjoy in tenement-houses. There are many districts within half an hour
of New York, where such plots could be laid out with lots at $500 each,
which would pay a handsome profit to the owner, or where a cottage could
be let with advantage for the present rent of a tenement attic.

Improved communications have already removed hundreds and thousands of
the middle class from the city to all the surrounding neighborhood, to
the immense benefit both of themselves and their families. Equal
conveniences suited to the wants of the laboring class will soon cause
multitudes of these to live in the suburban districts. The obstacle,
however, as in all efforts at improvement for the working people, is in
their own ignorance and timidity, and their love of the crowd and bustle
of a city.

More remote even, than relief by improved communications, is a possible
check to high rents by a better government. A cheap and honest
government of the masses in New York would at once lower taxation and
bring down rents. The enormous prices demanded for one or two small
rooms in a tenement-house are a measure (in part) of the cost of our
city government.

Another alleviation to our over crowding has often been proposed, but
never vigorously acted upon, as we are persuaded it might be, and that
is the making the link between the demand for labor in our country
districts and the supply in New York, closer. The success of the charity
which we are about describing in the transfer of destitute and homeless
children to homes in the West, and of the Commissioners of Emigration in
their "Labor Exchange," indicate what might be accomplished by a grand
organized movement for transferring our unemployed labor to the fields
of the West. It is true, this would not carry away our poorest class,
yet it would r