food for some huge conflagration, and so should be forbidden by law, not only perpetuate bad taste, and so should be frowned upon by public sentiment,

but stand in the way of the establishment of genuine, independent homes, and should receive the hearty reprobation of every well-wisher of his kind. The buildings, public and private, of a city or village, are not only exponents of the taste of the generation erecting them, but they educate the taste of the generation succeeding. They explain to the traveller the history of the past as much as the hoary monuments of an older civilization do, and they shape the growing sentiment as truly as the grand churches and cathedrals and monuments of antiquity. How much our own Northampton, Springfield, Portsmouth, New Bedford, quiet and sober Salem, say for the past, of the present! Somehow there is a home-spirit which looks out from these and many a lesser New England village you look for in vain in the crowded streets of the city and its suburbs. In them men built houses for their own living in, and the house reflects the home. They were a generation in that respect wiser than this, whose civilization, striding rapidly forward in purely material interests, overlooks the things of sentiment and affection, and leaves them to be plagued by the speculator, who has no higher idea than that of building houses that will pay, not homes that shall bless.

I would place in the front rank of philanthropy, I would more honor than a hero, the man who should

set himself to building homes for the people, — buildings neat, snug, separate, and in good taste, which a man would be content to live in for years, and would come to love. But better than this will it be when every man shall build his own home, or shall find that to buy which shall be his home. Is this the impossible thing many make it? Perhaps so, if we are to foster the foolish notion that we must equal or eclipse our neighbor; perhaps so, if we have to wait to grow rich before we can have homes. But I think the essentials of a home are nearer every man's reach than he supposes. A house to be a true home must be strictly adapted to the owner's position in society, his calling and means. The houses of the laborer, the mechanic, the merchant, the professional man, must differ as their callings do. I could not be at home in a laborer's house, or he in mine. The house must be adapted to the man. If you build or buy otherwise, you jeopard the home. Now, I believe that every industrious laborer or mechanic may have a home of his own, if he will drop all ambition, and, to use the homely proverb, "cut his coat according to his cloth." It is not large houses, costly houses, the houses with all modern conveniences, which make the homes, but the houses adapted to the circumstances

and wants of the individual. I do not say it would be perfectly easy for a man with only his hands to depend upon - especially a young man to secure a home of his own; but, without waiting for a class of men whom it is to be hoped God in his own good time will raise up, who shall assist the young and deserving in securing homes, or, more hopelessly still, waiting until legislation shall recognize and provide for this general want, is there not a great deal spent by the laborer and the mechanic and the clerk uselessly, which if laid by every year would make the owning a home not the impossible thing it is held? And might not the young merchant, instead of giving in to the idea that he cannot withdraw enough from his capital to buy him a home, or that the money spent on a home is lying idle, learn that the best, the surest, even the best-paying investment he could make, would be in a home, which, though he suffer himself to be too busy to enjoy, would be a place of happiness for his wife and children? In the flush of your success you may call your money idle which is not busy in the market, but how many a man in the panics of these past years has had cause to bless God that he had a home of his own, no hired house, but a home of his own, to go to for rest and refreshing, a dear asylum from uncertainty and care? and though the ruthless blast has not always spared the hearth-stone, and the

keenest pang has been when for the last time the foot crossed the threshold, who that has a heart but has thanked God that he had at least once had a home? Subtract the knowledge and experience of a home that he can call his own from a man's life, and you have subtracted one of the most exquisite pleasures vouchsafed the human heart, a pleasure cheaply purchased at the cost of any personal sacrifice.

No man needs to own his house more than the hard working-man of moderate means. No one more needs this and every influence of home. One reason as

signed for the want of thrift, the low pleasures of the working-man, is the character of the place he lives in, and the fact that the bar, or saloon, or billiard-room will give him cleanliness and comfort his home lacks. It will very soon break down the ambition of an otherwise very worthy man, if he find his home wanting in the cheaper means or appearance of comfort which the places of resort afford, means or appearances which a large class of tenements do not afford. His own home, — small, but speaking within and without of his care and love, that is the great safeguard of the man and the family of moderate means. To it, when the day is done, he goes with joy, upon it and its comfort he willingly lays out a portion of his wages. It smiles, in return, as another man's house never can; it rebukes, in his wandering, as only his own home

could. It is an anchor by which he holds amid the tossing temptations of life, a place of refuge and of love, whose charms, whose solid, pure delights, prevail against all that pleasure offers or appetite suggests.

Another reason which should operate strongly in favor of every man's owning his house is, that so only can any thing like permanence of residence be secured. This want of permanence is one of the crying sins of the age. It prevents that local attachment which is one of the strongest and purest sentiments of the human breast. No wandering horde of the desert is more restless, unsettled than we. We strike our tents, and flit at any moment, the great ambition of some seeming to be to see how many houses they can reside in. All this is fatal to the home. It breaks up any thing like continuity of life; it prevents fixedness of habit, and so fixedness of purpose. You are always getting ready to live in a new place, never living. Your past is a shifting scene, and your future only prospective change. It makes life a hunt after houses, and its chief end the altering of carpets and putting up of bedsteads, and has introduced the omnipresent furniture-wagon, that melancholy fact in modern civiliation, so suggestive of outraged household affections, -that unnatural institution of a people who have ceased to regard permanency of abode among the cardinal virtues. The heart cannot be brought again to