Among the more prominent movements of the day for the improvement of the
condition of the working men are those which are growing into fashion
with large manufacturing incorporations. Their promise lies immediately
in the fact that they call for no new convictions of political economy,
and hence have nothing disturbing or revolutionary about them. Accepting
the usages and economical principles of industrial life, as the progress
of business has developed them, an increasing number of large
manufacturers have deemed it to their interest not only to furnish shops
and machinery for their operatives, but dwellings as well, and in some
instances the equipments of village life, such as schools, chapels,
libraries, lecture and concert halls, and a regime of morals and
sanitation. Probably the most expensive investment of this sort 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investments originally made on business principles, with a view to the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