SYBARIS AND OTHER HOMES.
BYEDWARD E. HALE.
BOSTON: FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1869.Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1869, by FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO., CAMBRIDGE.
DEDICATION.
I DEDICATE this book to the SUFFOLK UNION FOR CHRISTIAN WORK.
At the meeting which formed that Society the provision for better homes in cities was publicly declared to be the first work of Christian reform. At every meeting since some person has enforced the same necessity.
EDWARD E. HALE.
SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BOSTON, September 18, 1869.PREFACE.
THE reader will see that the papers in this book have a single object, whether cast in the form of fiction, or whether statistical narratives of fact. If I should classify them as the papers were classified in an earlier volume of this little series, the account of Naguadavick is the account of what ought to be; the account of Vineland is the account of what is; and the account of Boston is the account of what ought not to be. In the narrative of Sybaris the reader will find something of "if," something of "yes," something of "perhaps"; some possibility, much fact, and some exaggeration.
I have, perhaps, a right to explain the earnestness with which I try to enforce the necessity of better homes for laboring men by stating a single circumstance in my own history. For nearly twenty-five years I have been constantly engaged in the Christian ministry. About half that time was spent in Worcester, Massachusetts; about half of it in Boston. When I went to Worcester it was a town of about eight thousand people; when I left it, it had three times that number. Boston is a crowded town page: vi-vii[View Page vi-vii] of a quarter-million inhabitants. It is impossible for me not to notice, in every hour of my life, the contrast between the homes of the working people in these two places. I might almost say that there is no other difference of importance between the social opportunities of the two places. They are not far apart; both are active places of business, employing in about equal proportions people of enterprise and energy, in the varied work of manufacture, commerce, and transportation. But in one of these places almost every man can own his house, and half the men do. In the other hardly any man can own his house, and half the people are crowded into quarters where no man should be compelled to live.
To watch over and improve the charities of any town is the special duty of the Christian ministry in it,—to feed its hungry and clothe its naked, to open the eyes of its blind and the ears of its deaf, to make its lame walk, to cleanse its lepers, and to preach good tidings to its poor. Will the reader imagine to himself the position of the man engaged in that duty, when he finds his sick in such tenements as they must live in in our present system,—his blind, for instance, born so, perhaps, in rooms with no window, and all his poor in such homes that the only truly good tidings are tidings which send them away from him? Where a considerable part of the people live in such homes our best devised charities, either for moral culture or physical relief, work at terrible odds. Your City Missions, your Ministry at Large, your Industrial Aid Society, or your Overseers of the Poor are all working against the steady dead weight which, as we all know, presses down and holds down the man who is in an unhealthy or unhappy home.
The contrast in my own life between life in a small manufacturing and commercial town and life in a large one makes me feel the bitterness of these odds the more. I am sure that the suffering thus involved is unnecessary, as I am sure the labor which tries to relieve its symptoms must be in large measure thrown away. With an intense personal interest, therefore, have I attempted to show in this book how these evils may be remedied.
I do not know but Colonel Ingham's suggestions as to his imagined Sybaris may be thought too roseate and ideal for our Western longitudes. They have been already published in the Atlantic Monthly, and, in his absence in Siberia, I have been once and again favored with criticisms upon them. It is but fair to him to say, that, so far as the paper refers to ancient Sybaris or Thurii, it is a very careful study of the best authorities regarding that interesting state,—a study which I wish, might be pushed further by somebody. And I incorporate the paper in this volume because it seems to me that we have a great deal to learn from the ancient cities and from their methods of government, were it only the great lesson of the value of training in administration.
page: viii-ix[View Page viii-ix]There is a very odd habit of speech about republican government, which, like most careless habits of speech, hurts our practice. When the theory of a republic is discussed, everybody says that it worked admirably in cities of compact territory, but that it failed when it had to be extended over wider regions. This is really a commonplace in the old-fashioned sturdy books on political institutions. But when you come to talk politics with practical people to-day, the chances are nine in ten that they say, "Ah, republican institutions are admirable for the country at large; they work perfectly for a scattered population; but when you come to compact cities you want something very different. Must have one head there, one head there," &c., &c., &c. Now certainly this is very odd, that just as we have all learned to repeat one of these lessons from old Greek and Roman history, illustrated in the history of Greek and Roman colonies, we should all have to turn round and say exactly the other thing. Is it not probable that there is some misunderstanding?
I believe that a careful study of the history of the Greek and Roman cities shows that their success is largely due to their attention to the science of administration. The men who discharged specific functions were trained to those functions, and knew how to discharge them. In the Roman cities no man could be a candidate for the higher grades of service, unless he had served so many years in the lower. Any old Roman man, asked to vote in our city elections, would take it for granted that no man could be an alderman who had not been a common-council-man for a certain number of years, nor a mayor unless he had been an alderman for a certain number. In Athens they were even more careful, and all officers were as distinctly trained to their duties as with us civil engineers are or architects. What followed was, that when the right man got into place, there was a reasonable probability that he stayed in.
In our elective city governments, on the other hand, with a great deal of good feeling and a great deal of public spirit, we find uncertainty, hurry sometimes, and delay in others, frequent changes in system, shyness about responsibility, and, in consequence, a great deal of discomfort and grumbling. I once asked a very able and pure man, then Mayor of Boston, why the city did not undertake a certain policy, which seemed important. "How should I know?" said he with a sigh. "I was chosen to this place eight months ago, with no experience in city affairs. If I am chosen again in December, I may have heart to start on some such proposal as you name. But really, the first year of a man's service as Mayor must be given to learning where he stands." This is perfectly true.
Now, at the end of the first year who determines whether such a man shall or shall not go on? Almost always, five hundred men, united, can settle that thing page: x-xi[View Page x-xi] one way or another. If he have wounded the feelings of the policemen,—if he have made a change in the management of the fire companies,—if in any way he have crossed the track of any compact organization, he is put out and some other new man is put in, for his apprenticeship. I do not believe that this system of neophyte mayors is necessary. And I believe that whenever the public is roused to study it, it will be changed.
It does not make so much difference in Boston, however, because the Mayor has no great power, after all. He is not much more than a chairman of selectmen. The same difficulty, as it seems to me, comes in in the choice of the aldermen, who have, collectively, some power. I read a great deal of insulting language and bitter sneering about aldermen. I suppose there are bad aldermen, as I know there are bad ministers, bad painters, and bad bootmakers. But, in my experience, the aldermen with whom I have had to confer on the affairs of the city have been hard-working, upright, intelligent, public-spirited men, doing a great deal of work, for which they got no pay and no thanks; and doing it, under our lumbering system, very well. But they were all doing it by instinct, and not after training. They had happened upon the situation which made them a directory of twelve, governing, in nice details of administration, a city of a quarter-million people. They had never been trained in advance to do that duty. And, by the time they had learned it, in presence of the enemy, they were heartily sick of it, and were glad to resign.
It seems to me, that as long as we govern cities in that way, we shall have bad horse-cars, bad tenement-houses, bad streets, bad theatres, bad liquor-shops, and a great many other bad things, which, in a city where administration was a science, and no man chosen to office until he had been trained to it, Colonel Ingham did not find in Sybaris.
I observe that the newspapers are a good deal exercised when a committee of the city government, or when any city officers, go to study the systems of some other cities. For my part, I wish they went a great deal oftener than they do, and studied such systems a great deal more. I believe the city of Boston could make no wiser expenditure than it would make in sending to Europe, once in five years, an intelligent officer from each great department to study French, English, German, Italian, and Russian administration of streets; of hackney-coaches, omnibuses, and railroad stations; of prisons, of the detective and general police; of health; of markets, and of education. There is hardly a large city in the civilized world which has not some hints of value which it could give to every other city.
Colonel Ingham has received many protests against the arbitrary and unprincipled action of the government of Sybaris in compelling marriage among its people. He had already made his own protest, as he page: xii-xiii[View Page xii-xiii] could, in his journal. Nor would he wish to be understood as desiring to enforce anywhere statutes so tyrannical. But, as I understand him, he is convinced, by what he has seen in Sybaris and in the rest of the world, that every artificial obstacle to marriage is so much multiplication of all other evil in the world, and whether that obstacle come in the form of fashion, of custom, of sentiment, of gossip, of political economy, or of law, it is to be deprecated and set aside.
I may add that I do not know why such views have not a larger place than they have in the current discussions of female suffrage. The married woman and the married man being one, she now has suffrage. How would it answer to withdraw suffrage from the unmarried men? This would put them on an equality with the unmarried women; and there would be a possibility, if they are troubled by the loss, of their regaining the privilege.
But I will not, in a preface, discuss the details of any of the experiments in city administration here suggested. My chief wish is accomplished, if I can call attention to the delicacy and difficulty of these questions, and to the necessity of studying them with scientific and conscientious precision. When our best men study the details of local administration with the care with which Themistocles, Aristides, and Pericles studied them in Athens,—with which Metellus, the Catos, Pompey the Great, and Julius Cæsar were willing to study them in Rome,—we shall find, as I believe, no difficulty in the republican government of cities.
The shorter essays in this book are devoted to the single subject of the homes of laborers at work in large cities, and, as I trust, require no further explanation.
————
As the last sheets of this book leave my hands, the watchful kindness of a friend enables me to add the last word regarding Sybaris.
Under the title "De Paris a Sybaris," (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1868,) M. Léon Palustre de Montifaut publishes his studies of art and literature in Rome and Southern Italy. And here is his record of what he saw of Sybaris. He speaks first of Cassano, the last Italian town which looks down upon the valley of ancient Sybaris.
"Cassano, with its beautiful gardens, its tranquil aspect, and its gray mountains, reminds one of the ancient Sichem. It has its freshness and its poetry, if it has not the same reminiscences.
"Still, I hastened my departure, for I was eager to cross before night those broad and marshy expanses over which the eye travelled without an obstacle,—a vast semicircle cut into the thickness of the Apennine, or fertile intervals left by the sea.
"And what was I going to see? Not so much as a ruin,—an uncertain region over which lay loose the page: xiv-xv (Table of Contents) [View Page xiv-xv (Table of Contents) ] voluptuous name of Sybaris. And I had made a long journey. I had undergone incredible fatigue to give myself this empty satisfaction. How the inhabitants of this easy city would have laughed at me! They could not understand, says Athenæus, why one should quit his country. For themselves they gloried in growing old where they first saw the light. Yet this people practised the broadest hospitality, and, contrary to the policy of most of the Greek states, they readily admitted the colonists of other nations to the rank of citizens. May not this liberal spirit and the astonishing fertility of the soil explain the prosperity of this prosperous town, which is so strangely kept in obscurity by all antiquity? Varro tells us that wheat produced a hundred-fold on the whole territory of Sybaris. At the present time the uplands produce the richest harvests."
And this, I am sorry to say, is the only contribution to the history or topography of Sybaris made since the date of Mr. Ingham's voyage. Mons. Montifaut, alas like all the others! hurried across the upland six miles back from the sea. It is as if a traveller from Providence, coming up to Readville, should cross to Watertown and Waltham, and then, going through the Notch of the White Mountains to Montreal, should publish his observations on Boston.
And these notes, alas, as late as 1867, are dated like Colonel Ingham's, on the 1st of April!
CONTENTS.
- MY VISIT TO SYBARIS. 1
- HOW THEY LIVED AT NAGUADAVICK. 88
- HOW THEY LIVE IN VINELAND. 122
- HOW THEY LIVE IN BOSTON, AND HOW THEY DIE THERE. 155
- HOMES FOR BOSTON LABORERS. 178
- APPENDIX. 193
