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acceptance and use. Though he make no profit directly on the sale of these, he is indirectly but substantially benefited by whatsoever shall increase the annual production of his township, and thus the ability of his customers to purchase and consume his goods.
The merchant whose customers and neighbors are enabled to turn off three, five, seven or nine hundred dollars' worth of produce per annum from farms which formerly yielded but one or two hundred dollars' worth, beyond the direct consumption of their occupants, is in the true and safe road to competence and wealth if he knows how to manage his business.
Every wild wood or waste morass rendered arable and fruitful, every field made to grow fifty bushels of grain per acre, where but fifteen or twenty were formally realized, is a new tributary to the stream of his trade, and so clearly conducive to his prosperity.
Tenement houses.
The wretched, tumble-down rookeries now largely inhabited by the poor of our city are horribly wasteful in every way—wasteful of space, of property, of health, of life. Sweep away all these kennels on a block—say about Elizabeth or Stanton street, and build up in their stead a substantial structure, six to eight stories high, with basement and sub-cellar, the whole divided into rooms and suites of rooms for families and single persons, with baths, wash-houses, refectories, &c., in the basement, and public and private parlors, library, reading-room, &c., on the second floors. Let the first floor for stores or shops, and a part of the second for offices if required; put the whole building in charge of some responsible person disqualified for rugged labor, to be let at reasonable rates, payable monthly in advance—the highest story not more than fifty cents per bed-room. Such an edifice (economizing the space now required for cooking, washing, yard-room, &c.) might afford accommodations to families at $100 to $200, according to size and ___location; while two seamstresses might have an attic in common for one dollar each per month. As each family could hire a parlor or bed-room (retained for this purpose) whenever it had company, no one need hire regularly any more room than it absolutely needed, while a large square in the center of the block should be embellished with trees and shrubbery, gravel-walks, grass-plat and fountain. One such edifice, filled with tenants and paying ten per cent. to its owners, with a liberal margin for repairs, would very soon be imitated and improved upon, until our whole laboring population would be far better lodged than they now are, at half the expense, while room would be made on our Island for thrice the population it can stow away under the present architectural anarchy. Pestilence would be all but rendered impossible by this building reform.These paragraphs, selected from more than a hundred of similar tendency, will show better than ever so much statement by another
