In the basement there are to be bath-rooms and a barber’s shop, while in some part of the building I shall have a large room which can be divided by sliding-doors. One part shall be a nursery, where mothers who want to go out can leave their children in good charge for a trifling fee, and the other half of the room shall be used as a kindergarten.

In the evening these rooms will be occupied by the grown people for club meetings and a reading-room. When desired, both rooms can be thrown together for a lecture or entertainment.

I have in mind sewing schools and gymnastic classes and all sorts of good things, for which this will be the centre.

I am more and more convinced that the quickest way to revolutionize whatever needs revolutionizing in this world is to get at the hearts and souls of people. Open a man’s heart, give him an idea, in other words, convert him, and self-respect, industry, and good manners will soon appear.

I think I have found just the right man and woman to help me make my scheme feasible. They are a couple about fifty years old, Pennsylvania Quakers, whose daughter has just been graduated from Professor Adler’s kindergarten training school, and who is bubbling over with zeal to begin her work. All three are to live in the building and give their whole time to the work that may be needed, each one having his or her separate department to attend to, and being responsible for everything in that department. For all this a good salary will be paid to each of the three.

I have found that my original plan has grown on my hands, and as it is often easier to do a thing on a large scale than on a small one, I have decided to put up four large buildings around a hollow square, each one to contain one hundred sets of tenements of from one to four rooms. Each house will accommodate perhaps four or five hundred people. Most of the suites will contain two rooms suitable for a family of four. But I shall have also many single rooms for bachelors, there being a good demand for them, I find.

You know my enthusiasm for our Puritan history. Behold my opportunity to indulge my taste in that direction! I am going to christen these hobbies of mine, so long a dream, now so soon to be materialized, by bestowing upon them some good old names that ought never to be forgotten. These four are to be called the “Pilgrim Homes.” One will be named Scrooby, another Leyden, one Plymouth, and one the Mayflower. If these prove successful I shall have four more, named Bradford, Brewster, Carver, and Winslow. However, I must not romance, for that perhaps will be far in the future.

You have no idea of the endless details I have had to consider. I have been over every single model tenement I could find in New York and Brooklyn, which is not saying much, for there are not many. Now, although not a stone is yet laid, I feel as if a load had rolled off my shoulders and the thing were nearly complete.

I shall watch with the greatest anxiety the outcome of this experiment. If it can be shown, as I think it can, that the lowest poor can be comfortably housed at the prices which they now pay for their wretched slums, and if it can be demonstrated, as I think it can, that health and happiness increase and vice decreases in proportion to the opportunity which is offered for decent living, then I shall be ready to devote a goodly number of my millions to what seems to me about the best use that can be made of them.

As soon as it can be fully proved just what needs to be done, if a state or city loan can be obtained, I mean to try to persuade some of these wealthy men and women whom I have been meeting of late to join with me and engage in the work of tenement house reform on a gigantic scale. There is no good reason why the crying evils which now exist should be perpetuated another year. Since planning all this I have been greatly interested to learn of what Glasgow has recently been doing in this direction; buying up and destroying a mass of vile old rookeries, and building sanitary homes for the poor in place of them.