Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV THE EMPLOYER AND THE HOUSING QUESTION WHAT is the interest of the employer in the housing question? Looking backward to the early beginnings of centralized industry in the United States, we find that good houses were once esteemed as an indispensable part of the plant. Among the earlier established cotton manufacturing industries in New England, for example, there may be found traces of excellent corporation houses; some of them are of great architectural interest, and indicate that our real American traditions of the house and the home had not then been trampled under foot by competitive industry. But visiting these little towns of today, one is depressed at the sight of such slums and congested areas as now exist. Little by little they have crept in, ever growing meaner and more squalid, until they now beggar description. Manufacturers have entirely failed to note the presence in their midst of a microbe bent upon their destruction. They may, themselves, in many cases, have participated in the havoc caused by this tiny organism. They may themselves have reaped large profits from having bought land cheap and sold it dear. Someone has been doing that in every community. But the total effect has been to lower the living conditions of a large body of workers. It would be interesting to compare the percentage of wages spent for rent out of the wages received by a millworker in Rhode Island, in 1840, and the percentage spent in rent by the worker of today. But the living conditions represent a comparison that can be made by anyone who cares to make a little pilgrimage through the cotton manufacturing districts. It is true that the corporation has supplanted, almost entirely, the individual owner. The point of contact between actual owner and worker has been lost, and with...