ones play all day long, or paddle in the fountains, warmed with
steam-pipes in the winter, and cooled to an agreeable temperature in a
summer which has almost lost its terrors for the stay-at-home New-Yorker.
Each child has his or her little plot of ground in the roof-garden, where
they are taught the once wellnigh forgotten art of agriculture.

The improvement of the tenement-house has gone hand in hand with that of
the apartment-house. As nearly as the rate of interest on the landlord's
investment will allow, the housing of the poor approaches in comfort that
of the rich. Their children are still more numerous, and the playgrounds
supplied them in every open space and on every pier are visited
constantly by the better-to-do children, who exchange with them lessons
of form and fashion for the scarcely less valuable instruction in
practical life which the poorer little ones are able to give. The rents
in the tenement houses are reduced even more notably than those in the
apartment-houses, so that now, with the constant increase in wages, the
tenants are able to pay their rents promptly. The evictions once so
common are very rare; it is doubtful whether a nightly or daily walk in
the poorer quarters of the town would develop, in the coldest weather,
half a dozen cases of families set out on the sidewalk with their
household goods about them.

The Altrurian Emissary visited this country when it was on the verge of
the period of great economic depression extending from 1894 to 1898, but,
after the Spanish War, Providence marked the divine approval of our
victory in that contest by renewing in unexampled measure the prosperity
of the Republic. With the downfall of the trusts, and the release of our
industrial and commercial forces to unrestricted activity, the condition
of every form of labor has been immeasurably improved, and it is now
united with capital in bonds of the closest affection. But in no phase