Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/642

624 boundaries; but it is a question for them to consider, whether the cause of Christianity has been actually benefited by their policy. It is a question whether the sample preaching of the present camp-meeting style is as effectual as were the direct and incisive appeals of those whose voices are now hushed in the grave. Is it not more after the manner of "trial-efforts"? Which can do the best? Who can make the best impression? It may be ornate, picturesque, and beautiful. It may captivate the senses and satisfy the taste of the hearers; but does it meet the needs of the multitudes who come to hear?

Again, are immense crowds of people wholesome? Are there always vigor and force and efficiency in numbers, unless there is exact unity?

In such promiscuous multitudes as crowd the cottages and the strand, and as go in and out of tents and barracks, coming as they do from all parts, and representing as they do various grades of social life, there must be forces and influences that are constantly at work, and whether their influence is toward the better or worse side of human nature it is hard to say. They are not all Christian professors, and they are all human. They are loosed from the restraints of home, and are on a vacation for pleasure. They are crowded together, and, in order to be physically healthy and morally pure, their environment must do much to assist them. In this regard their relation to space and surroundings should be, if possible, essentially promotive of such conditions. How is it? In the number of cottages and tents, especially those appropriated to cheap boarding, we venture to say that there are more people lodged and fed than can be found in any equal number of dwellings in any other city or community of an equal population of well-to-do people. This is of itself demoralizing. It is out of harmony with the spirit of the age, which demands freedom and space, in proportion to population, in a ratio that is overlooked or disregarded at such sea-side resorts. There is, however, one conservative and redeeming fact in connection with this practice of promiscuous crowding, and that is, that the season is short and the people live most of the time out-of-doors. The time is at hand, however, when there will be a change. It will not be tolerated by a sanitary-wise people that there shall continue an unwholesome contact of dwellings, with cess-pools and water-wells within stepping-distance of each other and from the kitchen-doors. Nor should buildings continue to be so contiguous that one may walk from roof to roof, under which people live in contracted apartments, separated by thin board partitions, which, even for purposes of common privacy and propriety, are scarcely sufficient. It is true, and justice demands its utterance, that later improvements have, to a good extent, avoided these evils, and that the class of private homes and boarding-houses now being built are more in accord with a civilization that, at a Christian resort especially, should be conspicuous.