in the United States, if not in the world, by any single company, is that of Pullman, on Lake Calumet, a few miles south of Chicago, an enterprise as yet scarcely five years old.  It is by no means a novel undertaking, except in the magnitude, thoroughness, and unity of the scheme.  Twenty years ago the managers of the Lonsdale Mills, in Rhode Island, were erecting cottages on a uniform plan and maintaining schools and religious services for their operatives.  More recent but more extensive is the village of the Ponemah Cotton Mill, near Taftville, Conn.  These are illustrations merely of similar investments upon a smaller scale elsewhere.  But the European examples are older, such as Robert Owen’s experiment at New Lanark in Scotland, Saltaire in Yorkshire, Dollfuss’ Mulhausen Quarter in Alsace, and M. Godin’s community in the French village of Guise, which are among the more familiar instances of investments originally made on business principles, with a view to the improved conditions of workmen.  New Lanark failed as a commercial community through the visionary character of its founder; the Godin works at Guise have passed into the co-operative phase within the past five years, but Saltaire and Mulhausen still retain their proprietary business features.

The class of ventures of which these instances are but the more conspicuous examples has peculiar characteristics.  They differ from the Peabody and Waterlow buildings of London, described in Bradstreet’s last August, from Starr’s Philadelphia dwellings, and from the operations of the “Improved Dwellings Association” of New York in these particulars:  the latter are financially a pure question of direct investment; are mainly concerned with life among the poor of cities, and, whatever philanthropy may be in their motive, are capable of adaptation to any class of citizens.  The former, while investments also, are composite, the business of manufacturing being associated with that of rent collecting and sharing its profits and losses; their field of operations is almost invariably rural, and tenancy is restricted to the employes of the proprietor.  On the other hand, they differ from all co-operative and socialistic communities in that they are an adaptation to existing circumstances, propose to demonstrate no new theories of economics, are free from all religious bonds, do not depend on any unity of opinion, and do not touch the question of the proper distribution of wealth.

It is, of course, no new thing for owners of large factories, particularly in country districts, to furnish tenements for their operatives, and oftentimes it is quite indispensable that they should, because there would otherwise be no accommodation for their workmen.  What is recent and exceptional is the spread of the belief that it pays to make the accommodations furnished healthful, convenient, and attractive.  The sources of profit from this careful provision are these:  the proprietors have control of the territory, and