o limited in amount that
his bills for pauper relief become mixed up with other items, so that they
cannot be separately stated. The total number of paupers resident in
American almshouses is 67,000, or about one in every 70,000 of the whole
population. In England, we have still one pauper in every fifty thousand
of the population. Such being the more important aspects of native
American labor, as displayed by the statistician, it is time for the
social observer to give his account of a typical American artisan's home.

We are at Ansonia, in the Naugatuck valley, one of the chief towns of
"Clockland," where, within a radius of twenty miles, watches and clocks
are made by millions and sold for a few shillings apiece. Our friend Mr.
S. is an Ansonia mechanic who occupies a house with a basement of cut
stone and a tasteful superstructure of wood, having a wide veranda,
kitchen, parlor, and bed-room on the ground floor and three bedrooms
above. The house is painted white, adorned with green jalousies, and
surrounded by a well-tilled quarter acre lot. Its windows are aglow with
geraniums, and from its veranda we glance upward to the wooded slopes of
the Green Mountain range, and downward to the River Naugatuck, whose blue
mill-ponds look like tiny Highland lakes surrounded by great factories.
Within, a pleasant sitting-room is furnished with all the comforts and
some of the luxuries of life, the tables are strewn with books, and the
walls decorated with pretty photographs. Mr. S.'s wife and daughter are
educated and agreeable women, who entertain us, during an hour's call,
with intelligent conversation, which, turning for the most part on the
events of the War of Independence, is characterized by ample historical
knowledge, a logical habit of mind, and a remarkable readiness to welcome
new ideas. No refreshments are offered us, for no one eats between meals,
and, in private houses, as in the public refreshment rooms, where native
labor usually takes its meals, nothing stronger than water is ever drunk.
Such are the homes of men whom I would distinguish as "American" artisans,
and such, also, are those of many foreign workmen who have been long under
native influence.

It is not in the valleys of Massachusetts, however, that the greatest
manufacturing cities of the Union are to be found, the towns already
referred to containing usually only a few thousand inhabitants, and being
still, for the most part, rural in their surroun