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.

We want not only a better class of dwellings, but we require the people to be so educated as to appreciate them.  An Irish landlord took his tenantry out of their mud huts, and removed them into comfortable dwellings which he had built for their accommodation.  When he returned to his estate, he was greatly disappointed.  The houses were as untidy and uncomfortable as before.  The pig was still under the bed, and the hens over it.  The concrete floor was as dirty as the mud one had been.  The panes of the windows were broken, and the garden was full of weeds.  The landlord wrote to a friend in despair.  The friend replied, “You have begun at the wrong end.  You ought to have taught them the value of cleanliness, thriftiness, and comfort.”  To begin at the beginning, therefore, we must teach the people the necessity of cleanliness, its virtues and its wholesomeness; for which purpose it is requisite that they should be intelligent, capable of understanding ideas conveyed in words, able to discern, able to read, able to think.  In short, the people, as children, must first have been to school, and properly taught there; whereas we have allowed the majority of the working people to grow up untaught, nearly half of them unable to read and write; and then we expect them to display the virtues, prudence, judgment, and forethought of well-educated beings!

It is of the first importance to teach people cleanly habits.  This can be done without teaching them either reading or writing.  Cleanliness is more than wholesomeness.  It furnishes an atmosphere of self-respect, and influences the moral condition of the entire household.  It is the best exponent of the spirit of Thrift.  It is to the economy of the household, what hygiene is to the human body.  It should preside at every detail of domestic service.  It indicates comfort and well-being.  It is among the distinctive attributes of civilisation, and marks the progress of nations.