Since,
therefore, so much depends on the character and conduct of the parties
themselves, it is right that they should feel their responsibility in
this matter, and that they should know and attend to the various points
connected with the improvement of their own Homes."
While this important truth should be kept steadily in view, every
possible exertion ought, at the same time, to be made to provide a
greater abundance of comfortable, decent, and comely dwellings for the
working classes; for it is to be lamented that, in many districts, they
are, as it were, forced by the necessities of their condition to
gravitate into localities, and to inhabit dwellings where decency is
rendered almost impossible, where life becomes a slow dying, and where
the influences operating on the entire human energies, physical and
moral, are of the most deleterious character.
Homes are the manufactories of men, and as the Homes are, so will the
men be. Mind will be degraded by the physical influences around
it,--decency will be destroyed by constant contact with impurity and
defilement,--and coarseness of manners, habits, and tastes, will become
inevitable. You cannot rear a kindly nature, sensitive against evil,
careful of proprieties, and desirous of moral and intellectual
improvement, amidst the darkness, dampness, disorder, and discomfort
which unhappily characterize so large a portion of the dwellings of the
poor in our large towns; and until we can, by some means or other,
improve their domestic accommodation, their low moral and social
condition must be regarded as inevitable.
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