About three thousand persons are employed in the works; and seven hundred and fifty-six houses have been erected for their accommodation.  The rents run from two and fourpence to seven and sixpence a week, according to the accommodation.  Some of the houses are used as boarding-houses.  The rents include rates and water supply, and gas is sold at a low price.  The cottages are built of stone, lined with brickwork.  They contain a parlour or long room, a kitchen or scullery, a pantry and cellar, and three bedrooms.  Each house has a separate yard, with the usual offices.  The workpeople are well able to pay the rents.  Single workmen earn from twenty-four to thirty-five shillings a week.  A family, consisting of a father and six children, earn four pounds four shillings a week, or equal to a united income of over two hundred and twenty pounds a year.

The comfortable houses provided for the workpeople have awakened in them that home feeling which has led them to decorate their dwellings neatly and tastefully,—­a sure sign of social happiness.  Every visitor among the poor knows how such things combine to prevent vice and disease, to elevate the moral tone of working people, and to develope their intellectual powers.  A man in a dirty house, says Mr. Rhind, the medical attendant at Saltaire, is like a beggar in miserable clothing.  He soon ceases to have self-respect, and when that is gone there is but little hope.

Great attention is paid in Saltaire to education, even of the higher sort.  There are day schools, night schools, mutual improvement classes, lectures, and discussions.  Music—­one of the most humanizing of pleasures—­is one of the most favourite studies.  “In almost every house in the town some form of musical instrument is found; and indeed, the choral and glee societies, together with the bands, have become household names.”  There is one full brass band for men, and another drum-and-fife band for boys; and concerts, vocal and instrumental, are regularly given by the workpeople in the dining-hall.  The bands have instructors provided by the firm.

Besides taking part in the musical performances, a large number of the skilled workmen devote their leisure hours to various scientific amusements,—­such as natural history, taxidermy, the making of philosophical instruments, such as air-pumps, models of working machinery, steam-engines, and articles of domestic comfort,—­while some have even manufactured organs and other musical instruments.

There is no drinking-house in Saltaire, so that the vices and diseases associated with drunkenness are excluded from the locality.  The diseases peculiar to poverty are also unknown in Saltaire.  Everything is attended to—­drainage, cleansing, and ventilation.  There are baths of all kinds—­plunge baths, warm baths, Turkish baths, and douche baths; and the wash-house, to enable the women to wash their clothes away from their cottages, is a great accommodation,—­inasmuch as indoor washing is most pernicious, and a fruitful source of disease, especially to the young.