Inhabitation

“ One solitary old labourer, a dreary bachelor, inhabited, it is true, a corner of the old roomy house, calculated for the convenient accommodation of the patriarchal family of sons and daughters, men-servants and maid-servants, of which a farmer's household consisted in former days ”

“ Consequently many really marry just to obtain a home — which is foolish enough, although the natural consequence of social conditions. We remember one case in this city — a young Frenchman who was continually changing his quarters for years, never being able to find rest or comfort in any one house. ”

“ By yourself alone you had sustained the tottering house, and the house, overwhelming you with labours and cares, was separating your own from you. It is the penalty of material necessities,—they do not leave time enough for the guardianship of souls. ”

“ Presently, the man who had bought the house came to him and said, ‘Look thyself out a lodging, for I have need of my house.’ So he bethought himself and considering that he had nothing requiring a house, except his wife, who had borne him a son and daughter,—for he had not a servant left,—hired a room in one of the mean lodging houses and there took up his abode, after having lived in honour and luxury, with many servants and much wealth, and came to lack of one day’s bread. ”

“ When I thought what must be the condition of the families which alone would ever occupy or had occupied them, what must have been the tragedy of the winter evenings spent by human beings around their hearths, these houses, though they were meant for human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. ”

“ Each presented circumstance of fertility or shelter, salubrity or beauty, may be named as what is wanting to a much greater number of the occupants of the world, than those to whom the "lines are fallen in such pleasant places." ”

“ In what affluence might we not all have flourished! The old homestead, a fire burning in the grate, the stern and relentless parent, and outside in the cold and wet father, the outcast son, the disowned, the homeless one, about to ride off into the night in the service of his country—never to return. ”

“ These habitations are, of course, held only by the poor and outcast, yet, in spite of circumstances, they live merrily from hand to mouth how they can, and by means, perhaps, not always of the most legitimate description. ”

“ When, therefore, thou hast perceived that we are coming, thou shalt gather together all thy household under thy roof, and they shall be saved; but as many as shall be found without the house shall be destroyed. ”

“ He lived to see his boys grow up unprincipled men, undutiful sons,—the one a drunkard, the other a thief! He lived to see his home in the hands of a stranger, and to be himself, in his old age, compelled to seek the dreary shelter of a workhouse. ”

“ Here, we think it impossible to live without a house or permanent abode; they look upon this as a voluntary imprisonment, and regard it as much more convenient, to be at liberty to change their habitation, when, and unto wherever it is most agreeable to them, fabricating it in the evening, for the use of the night and the next day, either in the valley, on the side of the mountain, or in the plain. ”

“ The overcrowding which fills every separate room of a tenement with a human litter, and compels family life from the cradle to the grave to be lived within the four walls of a single apartment, must go on reproducing in endless succession all the terrible evils which such a state of things must inevitably create. ”

“ We have no large houses, as you have, to worship the Great Spirit in: if we had them to-day, we should want others to-morrow; for we have not like you a fixed habitation—we have no settled home except our villages, where we remain but two months in twelve. ”

“ Unwilling to quit the village without first satisfying myself whether what I had seen was a solitary instance or a sample of its general state, or whether the extremity of poverty I had just beheld had arisen from peculiar improvidence and want of management in one wretched family, I went into an adjoining habitation, where I found a poor old woman of eighty, whose miserable existence was painfully continued by the maintenance of her granddaughter. ”

“ The gloomy, half-closed house, the garden paths, green with damp and thick with weeds, the servants acting entirely upon their own authority, and the master querulous, impatient, and unjust, either shut up in his own room brooding over the past and present, or freely distributing oaths, complaints, and sometimes even blows, amongst the unfortunate inmates of his household. ”

“ Households were changed by absence, or death, or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us on imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother earth. ”

“ Here then was no asylum for me: a place of rest must be sought at some neighbouring habitation; it was probable that one would be found at no great distance; the path that led from the spot where I stood, through a gate into a meadow, might conduct me to the nearest dwelling ”

“ On the way she loses the address of the house she is going to, is snapped up by the keeper of a lodging-house, and there lives as a slavey a life of dreadful drudgery and of suffering from unpleasant boarders. ”

“ And they were naked, without house or harbour, for they were without God, and he has been the dwelling-place of his people in all ages; in him alone the soul of man can find rest, and safety, and all suitable accommodations. ”

“ We have houses to shelter in, beds to sleep on, inns to quarter at,—meat and bread. But as to any of yourselves emigrating—how could you leave property, business, friends to lead the life of a rustic? ”

“ In the dwellings of the working class, overcrowding and limited space is the chief characteristic, while in the dwellings of the helpless, homeless, and foodless, the vault of heaven is their canopy, the cold flag-stones their couch of rest. ”

“ The need for food, shelter, or protection will not differentiate the gregarious from the non-gregarious forms of life, nor the social from the merely gregarious. All forms of life require food, protection, and shelter ”

“ Deploring the appetites of one's ancestors is a frustrating pastime. I did not indulge in it now. Climbing the four flights of stairs to my apartment, I thought instead of my imminent marriage, hoping to take the edge off my loneliness. ”

“ I beg your pardon,—I said;—all I meant was, that men, as temporary occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future generations. This is the final cause of the underlying brute instinct which we have in common with the herds. ”

“ There was once a poor peasant who sat in the evening by the hearth and poked the fire, and his wife sat and span. Then said he, “How sad it is that we have no children! With us all is so quiet, and in other houses it is noisy and lively.” ”

“ From the time of my reception into my father’s house, I lost the sense of homelessness which had more or less possessed me since my entrance upon the new life, and felt myself becoming again a member of an organized society, with definite duties as well as assured pleasures before me. ”

“ The particular habitations in which our lot is cast, the place of our nativity and of our settlement, are of God's determining and appointing, which is a reason why we should accommodate ourselves to the habitations we are in, and make the best of that which is. ”

“ For more than a year the sorely-smitten family had been deprived even of this scanty means of subsistence, the poor woman's uninterrupted exertions by day and by night having brought on a severe illness, and laid her paralytic--lame, hand and foot--in bed, surrounded by her raging husband, and the three half-naked and starving children. ”

“ Even if he lives somewhere else, it is still his house. Now in the case of this woman, the house would belong to her husband, and when he died he would give her the house, and then it would be her house. ”

“ All furniture was thrown out into the street, old men, women, small children, exhausted and famished, were obliged to drag themselves away to the place of destination. If a woman sank down fainting by the way, the husband had to go on notwithstanding. ”

“ It is simply the dwelling place of a family of people who are daily expecting to be evicted because they can’t pay the rent, the father having been unable, through sickness, to work all of the season. ”

“ These wretched tenements seldom consisted of more than two rooms, in one of which the whole family, however numerous, were obliged to sleep, without distinction of age, or sex, or suffering. With the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter, the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of childbirth, gives forth another victim to our thoughtless civilization ”

“ But when we turn from these privileged young persons—the pretty, daintily dressed young women in their Easter bonnets, who worship at our fashionable churches—and from some height look out over wide stretches of streets with every house alike, the homes of the average working population, and reflect that every house shelters the consequences of a marriage, shall we ask pitilessly, "How came ye so?" ”

“ When the housing, for example, is of such a character as to make a healthy home life impossible, the boys and girls are driven to the streets, the men into saloons, and thus society is diseased at its source. ”

“ Since my residence is no longer in an elegant mansion, and I have suffered myself somewhat to fade out of fashionable society, here and there one may have permitted an intimacy, of which they were formerly boastful, to subside into indifference or neglect. ”

“ But how will they explain the magnificence of one habitation as compared with the squalid misery of another? Through what medium can the idea of servitude enter their minds? When will they comprehend the great and miserable fact—the evidences of which appeal to their senses everywhere—that one portion of earth’s lost inhabitants was rolling in luxury while the multitude was toiling for scanty food? ”

“ Sometimes he sallied forth from his dismal abode at midnight, like one risen from the dead, howling and cursing like a fiend, breaking into houses, frightening the inhabitants from their beds, and driving them to seek shelter in the streets and the fields. ”

“ It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent no houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms, unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies and chattels. ”

“ This housing of the poor is of immense moral significance in all cases; and it is growing to be a recognized fact that no help which can be rendered them is of much avail, when they are left in these little, one or two room dwellings. ”

“ Strange how the word echoes through these sweaters’ tenements, where starvation is at home half the time. It is as an all-consuming passion with these [Pg 34] people, whose spirit a thousand years of bondage have not availed to daunt. It breaks out in strikes, when to strike is to hunger and die. ”

“ I’m a widower, with a living wife; a parent of three children with only one. I bewail my homelessness, yet run from an offered home. I confess to being useless, yet see a mission most important at my own door. ”

“ Houses were invaded by perfect strangers who insisted in pointing out the rooms in which they were born and in which they had been married, and in telling the present proprietors how fortunate they were to live in dwellings thus blessed. ”

“ For five weary months it was our portion to live amid these scenes of destruction, desolation, poverty, want, and woe; sometimes in tents, sometimes without; in rain and mud, and a lack of the commonest comforts, until we could build houses to shelter ourselves and those around us. ”

“ Only the most reckless and thick-skinned of the poorer population will adventure on marriage and the bringing up of a family whilst the odds against decent and reasonable housing persist as at present. ”

“ You are carried to the poor house. There you had a very different home from your father's. You are dressed in the coarsest garments. You have the meanest food, and are compelled to be obedient, and to do the most servile work. ”