ths,
45 per cent. rent their houses, and 30 per cent. are boarders. With regard
to inhabitancy, the average number of persons living in one house in
Massachusetts is rather more than six, while the average number of the
Massachusetts family is four and three quarter persons. Hence, lodgers
being excepted, almost every operative family in this State lives under
its own roof, while one fourth of all such roofs are owned by the heads of
families dwelling therein.

I leave, for a moment, the agreeable task of describing one of these homes
of native American labor, and pass on to the question of education, whose
universality among native Americans is perhaps most vividly illustrated
by the following facts. Of 1,200 persons born in Massachusetts, whether of
native or foreign parents, only one is unable to read or write, while four
Germans and Scotch, six English, twenty French Canadians, twenty-eight
Irish, and thirty-four Italians, out of every 100 emigrants of these
nationalities respectively are illiterate. The total number of public,
elementary, and high schools in the United States is 225,800, or about one
school for every 200 of the entire population, and one for, say, every
fifty of the 10,000,000 pupils who attended school during the census year
of 1880. Finally, referring once more to Massachusetts, there are nearly
2,000 free libraries in this single State, or one to every 800
inhabitants, and these, together, own 3,500,000 volumes, and circulate
8,000,000 of volumes annually.

With regard to sobriety, it is well known that local option succeeds in
closing the liquor saloons in very many operative American towns, and with
the happiest results. The county of Barnstaple in Massachusetts, for
example, with a population of 32,000 souls, and having no licensed liquor
saloons, yields a crop of only three convictions per annum for
drunkenness. The county of Suffolk, on the other hand, with a population
of nearly 400,000, and a license for every 175 of its inhabitants,
acknowledges one drunkard for every 50 of its population. The labor in one
case is nearly all native; in the other, largely foreign.

It is almost, if not quite, impossible to obtain the statistics of
pauperism in America. The "indoor" poor, as paupers in almshouses are
called, can be found and counted with comparative ease, but how can the
outdoor paupers be found? It is no use inquiring for them from door to
door, and the poor-master's disbursements are s