nay, let him aid in the creation of fresh vigorous forms of social institutions-institutions based on equality and freedom, capable of spontaneous growth, of untrammelled development from within. If he do this, then, by certain laws of evolution, as sure in their action as the law of gravitation, he will aid the elevation of humanity through growth of moral sentiment; for, as Mr. Mill truly says, "The only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals.'

To the ordinary British mind there is no more sacred institution than that of home. We are proud of our domestic life, and ideally we worship the British home for its purity, privacy, and peace; its comfort, respectability, and independence; its venerable name and nature. John Bull is not a sentimental fellow, yet his eyes will fill with tender tears as he listens to the melody of "Home, sweet home! there is no place like home." Valued friends have said to me, "Take care how you approach with cruel criticism our noble conception of the home; my own life has its far-off memories of a happy childhood's home, that would alone suffice to guard me from all hasty and flippant treatment of this hallowed subject. I am brought to

and

it, nevertheless, in the course of my examination of our social condition, and although the ground I tread is holy, I can but advance, since I hold intellectually the firm conviction that rational argument will never injure truth, but, on the contrary, it will weaken error and strengthen truth.

The necessary elements of an ideal home are a father and mother of sound constitution and domestic habits, a large family of brothers and sisters affording companionship to one another, and wealth enough for comfortable or luxurious maintenance, abundant recreation, occasional travel, and the exercise of hospitality. Where these conditions exist, and, as age permits, the young inmates are launched into active life with suitable careers, these homes are sending forth the right material for repairing the waste of British life, and building up the nation. But alas for the home itself as the years roll on ! If daughters marry its brightness becomes overshadowed. The rooms are emptied one by one, until at last out of that merry group of brothers and sisters perhaps but one remains to minister in the desolation of loneliness to parents whose infirmities of age give them a peculiar claim upon the tenderness and love of all their adult children. Observe, the typical British home makes no systematic provision for the solace of old age. It leaves that to haphazard; and although the genuine John Bull would scorn ideally to neglect his aged parents, the actual fact is, that in the hurry and bustle of life, he gives them but a few fragments of his time, and a faint fraction of his tenderness; and they too often pine and languish for the daily presence of the beings on whom their life's best affections have been centred. Even this ideal British home, then, is unstable and imperfect. It fails in respect of a paramount duty of life, viz. the duty incumbent upon the generation that is in its prime, to console, support, and cherish to the utmost the generation that is tottering on the brink of the grave.

But, turning from the ideal to the real, let us consider for a moment what proportion of the actual British homes make any approach to this ideal which we have described. Mr. Bright, in his rectorial address at Glasgow,* stated that in that wealthy city no less than "forty-one of every hundred families live in a single room, and that beyond these forty-one, thirty-seven families out of every hundred live in two rooms." More than two-thirds, then, of the British families in our flourishing *Delivered in March, 1883.

OVERCROWDED HOMES.

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Glasgow are without such necessary elements for comfortable living as space and air. We may safely surmise that to them home is not the abode of purity and peace.

Dr. Anderson, in his report to the Police Commissioners of Dundee on the ravages of fever, states that there are in Dundee 8620 houses of only one room each, in which there is a population of 23,670 persons, and 16,187 houses of two rooms, into which are crowded 74,374 men, women, and children. Among the population living in one or two rooms, 183 persons per 10,000 were attacked by fever, and rather more than 16 per 10,000 died during the year 1882. The "Bitter Cry of Outcast London" was sent forth to proclaim the abject condition of the homes of the poor, and the cry was re-echoed from Liverpool, Edinburgh, and other large cities. Family life in the dwellings there described is impossible upon lines that answer to any worthy ideal of a home; and the facts compel us to recognize that in outward conditions and inward sentiment a change is taking place, which indicates the approach of, and the necessity for, a new social order.

In the year 1878 the Committee of the American Social Science Association meeting at Cincinnati prepared a paper descriptive of the rapid and startling changes brought about in the United States, since the commencement of this century, by the use of labour-saving machinery. What is said there in reference to home life I shall transcribe. "Not long ago the farm found constant employment for all the sons of the farm, and many of the children of the city. Now, the farm furnishes employment for but a very small number of its sons, and that for a very few weeks or months at most in the year, and for the rest work must be had in the cities and towns, or not at all. In the time of our mothers, they, with all their daughters, had an abundance of employment in their homes. Throughout our country every farmhouse possessed its looms and spinningwheels. From the sheep reared on the farm was the wool taken and carded by our mothers ready for spinning. . . . The women-folk, day after day, week after week, month in, month out, for fully or more than one half of the year, were all constantly employed in carding, in spinning, and in weaving the woollen and linen cloths that clothed the family, or were traded at the store for tea or coffee and sugar. The household music of that time was the hum of the spinning-wheel, the steady flow of the tones of the flax-wheel, the rattle of the shuttle. These operations were in constant progress in all the farm

houses, and a very large portion of the town houses; and the never-ending labour of our grandmothers must not be forgotten, who with nimble needle knit our stockings or mittens. The knitting-needle was in as constant play as their tongues, whose music ceased only under the power of sleep. All, from the youngest to the oldest, were abundantly employed, and all decently clothed. Now all this is changed. Now all this is changed. Throughout the length and breadth of our land the hand-card, the spinningwheel, and the hand-loom are to be found only as articles without use, kept as curiosities of a past age. The occupation of our grandmothers also is gone; no more does the knittingneedle keep time to the music of their tongues, for the knittingmachine in the hands of one little girl will do more work than fifty grandmothers. The consequence is, there is no more work at home for our farmers' daughters; they also must seek the towns and cities, where they find their sisters equally idle, and in thousands are found upon the streets, spinning yarn or weaving webs, the warp of which is not of wool, neither is the woof of linen. In conclusion, labour-saving machinery has broken up and destroyed our whole system of household and family manufactures as done by our mothers, when all took part in the labour and shared in the product to the comfort of all, and has compelled the daughters of our country and towns to factory operations for ten or twelve hours a day in the manufacture of cloth they may not wear, or to the city to ply their needles for eighteen or twenty hours a day in hunger and cold, or to the street in thousands spinning yarns and weaving webs that become their shrouds."

Now, a somewhat similar change to that here described must have occurred in the past history of our race; and the conception of home, that lies vaguely in the intellect, and embues the emotions of the British people, reflects a former social condition, but neither points to a future that is possible, nor to the present domestic state of the great mass of our overcrowded population. In these old times, doubtless, the life was a poor one, even at its best. Redundant numbers were continually swept off by famine, pestilence, war. But social conditions were more favourable to the union of survivors than

now.

No facilities for migrating existed, and sisters and brothers, for the most part, lived and died side by side, whilst the family sentiment was, on the whole, strong and enduring.

The parent-stock from which sprang Thomas Carlyle, was planted on a little farm where father, mother, brothers, sisters,