heated by stoves and have no water nor gas supply. Box privies and outhouses abound. They are occupied by white tenants, many of whom own their homes. The building of such dwellings appears to have nearly ceased. This was the only community where white laborers were found, except in a row of old frame dwellings at Fort Reno.

"Ivy City is a negro village, situated near the railroad tracks back of Kendall Green, far from any car line, and reminds one of 'Mrs. Wiggs' Cabbage Patch'; when the city reaches out and surrounds this settlement there will be a new slum district to contend with. New dwellings are occasionally erected here by the colored people themselves, but there is no active building going on. The dwellings here do not differ much from those described as existing

within the city; they have more ground around them, however, and the structural deficiencies are somewhat compensated by the unavoidable sunlight and fresh air.

"Deanwood, East Deanwood, and Burrville are scattered villages, merging into each other, and situated along the Chesapeake Beach Railway; here dwell colored people almost entirely. The villages are for the most part composed of new and respectable cottages owned by their occupants. Here and there may be seen dilapidated shacks occupied, while alongside stands a new cottage empty and for rent.

"Barry Farm is situated on the outskirts of Anacostia; this is another negro settlement, and is a curious mixture of comfortable cottages, even handsome homes, owned by well-to-do colored people, and tumbledown hovels that bring exorbitant rents.

"Garfield and Good Hope are also colored communities on the order of Barry Farm; these villages are situated on the hills to the east of

Anacostia. The majority of the houses here are owned by their occupants. There are no public service advantages in these outlying regions, with the exception of public water supply in Ivy City; but even here the people do not have water within their houses, nearly always obtaining it from the street hydrant.

"The communities just described are the only considerable aggregations of people of the laboring class to be found without the city limits. The character of old dwellings located in them is little better than we would condemn within the city. Nothing is being done to improve the quality of dwellings, and the new dwellings are of the cheapest kind.

Moreover, the people who live in these suburban places are not the pick and shovel men, the cart drivers, the hod carriers, the stable men of the city. They are for the most part more independent folk, such as messengers and skilled laborers in the departments; colored men who work from place to place as porters, waiters, or house servants, and who keep their wives and children in these little homes. They are the kind who will not rest until they own 'a little place in the country,' it matters little what sort of dwelling may be upon the 'place.' The worst hovels are occupied by driftwood; widows, who subsist by doing laundry work for the neighbors in better circumstances; old people, supported by sons and daughters in the city, and the children of the sons and daughters.

"It appears that suburban dwellings are very seldom built with the intention of renting them. Suburban houses, as a rule, are built for sale; are built by the promoters of a subdivision for the purchaser of a lot, payments made monthly; or are built by lot owners, the money obtained from Building Associations frequently. The inquiry, 'Do you own your house or rent it?' very frequently elicited the answer, 'Well, we're trying to own it.' Unfortunately, if the information had is reliable, in some of the colored communities, notably such as East Deanwood, Burrville, and Garfield, 'trying to own a home' frequently meets with failure. House and lot, it is said, may change hands three or four times, in default of installments of purchase money, before title is secured by the purchaser. Thus the profit of the real estate promoter or of the Building Association is augmented several times before the property is finally relinquished.

"The total impression gained by the survey was that there is as little, or less, benevolence in the suburban real estate business as elsewhere; that the laboring man has nothing to gain by seeking a residence outside the city limits; and that only grim determination will succeed in securing a home by mechanics, clerks, and the like with a better and more certain income."

III.

TYPES OF WASHINGTON HOUSES OCCUPIED BY THE LABORING CLASSES.

The shacks shown in Figure 3 were erected during the Civil War as temporary barracks for soldiers, and have been occupied since by colored people of the lowest class, until the year 1905, when they were demolished, after the erection of a row of two-story brick houses on the opposite side of the street by the Washington Sanitary Housing Company. There are many other frame structures in the alleys of the city, and even facing upon the streets, which are little, if any, better than these shacks. While such apologies for shelter are to a great extent occupied by idle and dissolute colored people, some of the tenants, although ignorant and low in the scale of intelligence, are honest and hard-working. Day laborers may go from such hovels to their long day of toil, returning to them for shelter and the necessary sleep which kind nature bestows upon the tired brute, but often refuses to the pampered child of wealth and fashion. Laundresses bring to such places baskets of soiled clothes from the houses of the well-to-do and return them to the owners apparently clean, but possibly soiled with the germs of some infectious disease. Children grow up in such shacks, and a certain proportion of the girls, no doubt, go into domestic service and learn something of civilized methods of living. But the tendency