hs after the enrolment lists had been made
out, one-third of the tenants had moved. No doubt the experience was
typical. How can the one who hardly knows what a home means be expected
to have any pride or interest in his home in the larger sense: the city?
And to what in such men is one to appeal in the interests of civic
betterment? That is why every effort that goes to help tie the citizen
to one spot long enough to give him the proprietary sense in it which is
the first step toward civic interest and pride, is of such account. It
is one way in which the public schools as neighborhood houses in the
best sense could be of great help, and a chief factor in the success of
the social settlement. And that is why model tenements, which pay and
foster the home, give back more than a money interest to the community.

They must pay, for else, as I said, they will not stay. These pay four
per cent, and are expected to pay five, the company's limit. So it is
not strange that the concern has prospered. It has since raised more
than one million of dollars, and has built another block, with room for
338 families, on First Avenue and on Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth
streets, within hail of Battle Row, of anciently warlike memory. Still
another block is going up at Avenue A and Seventy-eighth Street, and in
West Sixty-second Street, where the colored population crowds, the
company is erecting two buildings for negro tenants, where they will
live as well as their white fellows do in _their_ model tenements,--a
long-delayed act of justice, for as far back as any one can remember the
colored man has been paying more and getting less for his money in New
York than whites of the same grade, who are poorer tenants every way.
The Company's "city homes" come as near being that as any can. There is
light and air in abundance, steam heat in winter in the latest ones,
fireproof stairs, and deadened partitions to help on the privacy that is
at once the most needed and hardest to get in a tenement. The houses do
not look like barracks. Any one who has ever seen a row of factory
tenements that were just houses, not homes, will understand how much
that means. I can think of some such rows now, with their ugly brick
fronts, straight up and down without a break and without a vine or a
window-box of greens or flowers, and the mere thought of them gives me
the blues for the rest of the day. There is nothing of that about these
tenements, unless it be the