Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/168

 tion to the mass of the population. This system previously had been much more developed in America and elsewhere than with ourselves; but we eventually carried it out with a comprehensive application surpassing all precedent, and we thus solved, more effectually than anywhere else, the previously hard and protracted problem of the sufficient and healthful housing of our poorer population, at expenses still completely within even their limited means. Our special trust system was not needed in this business, extensive and national as it was, because the profits of the enterprise were sufficiently obvious and attractive. After some experience in this right direction, it was soon seen that there was more economy of management, and readier adaptation to wants, than could have been expected in such an application of the trust system.

One point chiefly to be noticed in this system was the custom, which eventually became general, of the hotel occupants purchasing respectively the small but separate houses they occupied in the common edifice, and effecting this object by means of regular small payments spread conveniently over a few years. The additional sum required weekly of the tenant for the ultimate redemption of his house was even more than saved by the economies of the system. Ere very long the tenants found themselves transformed into owners, and such great hotels—edifices of unsurpassed grandeur they became—entirely their own property.

These great and convenient combinations of houses took the name of Mechanics' Hotels; and the mechanics' hotels of the twentieth century, like the mechanics'