retailer's per-centage added, to pay part of the
costs of the establishment. All the profit is
returned to the good of the Home community,
and the labour required goes also to the general
good: fit persons among the wives and daughters
of the resident workmen being employed in
selling, book-keeping, dress and shirt-making,
washing, as well as in any other service
required. The washing is done in winter, in a
laundry and drying-room; in summer, at the
lavatory by the river; so no damp unwholesome
vapours infect the air of the Home. The housewife
in this Workman's Home may save her
fuel in summer, or her time in winter, by buying
the meals of her household ready cooked at
the refreshment-room and restaurant, also
attached to the building; or a family may adjourn
thither to take any meal. The single man in
furnished lodgings, usually gets all his meals at the
restaurant, where they cost him from
sevenpence-halfpenny to tenpence a day. His
furnished room, with linen, bedmaking, sweeping,
&c., costs him from six-and-eightpence to
eight-and-fourpence a month: generally, less than
two shillings a week. There is a dormitory, in
which a separate bed can be had for a penny a
day. For unfurnished lodging in this nest of
homes, the charge is at the rate of three-and-ninepence
a month for each room. A home of
five rooms and a kitchen, with numerous
cupboards and conveniences, costs, free of all taxes
and repairs, eighteen pounds a year. It is such
a home as, on a third floor in Paris, would be
considered cheap at one hundred and twenty
pounds a year.

We may be very sure that a manufacturer
who has got so far as this, in his notion of a
duty to his workpeople, understands that amusement
is a necessary aid to health, comfort,
and the proper use of life. There belong to
the building, therefore, its own place of recreation,
with reading and news-room, provided also
with chess, draughts, dominoes, and so forth,
and well lighted and warmed; a billiard-room;
and a refreshment-room. There is also a great
practising-room on the ground floor for the
Philharmonic Society, whose band delights the
children in the court, and the women as they
sit at work in the galleries. This Philharmonic
Society of the Familistery is furnished by M.
Godin with a professional leader, to secure
good training, and the instruments belong to
the establishment. But it is a self-governing
body, freely admitting amateurs from the town,
and enrolling also M. Godin's son among its
sociable members. A fête at the Familistery,
with dancing on the smooth pavement of the
lighted and decorated court, and this band of
eighty in its glory, is a brilliant sight, and all
the three galleries around the court are then
thronged with the people of Guise, who come
to look on.

The workmen of this Home form themselves
into a benefit club for medical attendance and
sick pay. However clean the bill of health,
their doctor comes to the gate every day, to ask
whether there be any one who wants his
services. He is not in much request, for even
epidemics in the town pass by the Familistery, and
thus far the infant mortality has been eight per
cent below the average.

For the infant, in this Home, from birth to two
years old, there is—of course within the walls,
near every mother at her work, and freely
accessible to her at any moment—a well-appointed
nursery, called, from poupon, a chubby-faced
baby, the Pouponnat. In it are provided elegant
iron cradles, furnished with curtains and linen,
constantly renewed; baby-food of all sorts is
prepared and warmed in an adjoining room; and
baby-linen, food, cradle, medical attendance, all,
are the free right of the mothers in the Home,
who may take their infants in and out as they
will, suckle them at home or in the Pouponnat,
have them to sleep, at will, at home or in this
nursery, where day and night the little ones
are carefully tended by wives and daughters of
workmen who have taken on themselves that
charge. In this nursery a gallery is provided,
in which little ones may sit, pull themselves up
by a bar, practise themselves in standing, and
tumble without hurt. Coloured balls and toys
are provided, and there is much baby-prattle,
with but little screaming, to be heard.

At two years old, when these little people can
walk alone, there is an infant school ready to
take charge of them: that school being called,
from the Italian word for a very young child,
the Bambinat. Here, they are small students
until the age of six: being, of course, fed and
clothed by their parents. They learn the alphabet
to sounds of music, sing their multiplication-table,
learn arithmetic with mechanical help,
some of the simpler facts of life by help of
bright pictures, and copy outline drawings on
their slates. They march and sing and use their
limbs freely: the Bambinat being a sort of cross
between the Kindergarten and the English
lnfant School.

At six years old, the children of the Familistery
pass from the Bambinat to the School, where
they are arranged in four classes, according to
attainment. But in the teaching of elder as of
younger children, M. Godin rightly accounts it
most conducive to good manners and good
morals, to teach boys and girls together. Boys
sit on one side of the room, girls on the other.
M. Godin's right idea is that the young girl of
sixteen or eighteen is safest in the constant,
open, unmysterious companionship with youth
of the other sex; that such intercourse leads to
a sense of cousinship and an intimate knowledge
of character, which gives, both to a young man
and to a young woman, the best chance of
marrying a suitable companion.

The boys and girls in the School write from
dictation into copy-books with neatness, and
with early facility in spelling. All the lessons
are unusually well learnt; in part because of
the prevalent good spirit; in part because of the
honour paid to individual exertion. The first
place in a class is given every week, not to the
pupil who is naturally quickest, but to the pupil
who has taken most pains to do well: marks being