built city homes
for 1450 families, and has only made a beginning. All the money that is
needed for going on with its work is in sight. Nor are the rich the only
investors. Of the 400 stockholders 250 have small lots, ten shares and
less each, a healthy sign that the company is holding the confidence of
the community. It has fairly earned it. No one could have done a greater
and better thing for the metropolis than to demonstrate that it is
possible to build homes for the toilers as a business and net a business
interest upon the investment.

The statement is emphasized by the company's experience with the
suburban end of its work. It bought sites for two or three hundred
little cottages out on Long Island, but within the greater city, and
only half an hour by trolley or elevated from the City Hall. A hundred
houses were built, neat and cosey homes of brick and timber, each in its
own garden; and a plan was devised under which the purchaser had twenty
years to pay for the property. A life insurance policy protected the
seller and secured the house to the widow should the breadwinner die.
The plan has worked well in Belgium under the eyes of the government,
but it failed to attract buyers here. Of those whom it did attract at
the outset, not a few have given up and gone away. When I went out to
have a look at the place the year after Homewood had been settled,
seventy-two houses had found owners under the company's plans. After
four years fifty-six only are so held, ten have been bought outright,
and three sold under contract. Practically the company has had to give
up its well-thought-out plan and rent as many of the houses as it could.
Nine were vacant this last spring.

So what we all thought the "way out" of the slum seems barred for the
time being. For there is no other explanation of the failure than that
the people will not go "among the stumps." Lack of facilities for
getting there played a part, possibly, but a minor one, and now there is
no such grievance. The simple fact is that the home-feeling that makes a
man rear a home upon the soil as the chief ambition of his life was not
there. The tenement and the flat have weakened that peg among the class
of workers for whom Homewood was planned. I hate to say that they have
broken the peg, for I do not believe it. But it has been hurt without
doubt. They longed for the crowds. The grass and the trees and the birds
and the salt breath of the sea did not speak to t