Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1901 — NORWEGIAN HOMES. [ARTICLE]

NORWEGIAN HOMES.

Always Clean No Matter How Poor May Bo the Otcnpante. Wholesome lodgings are to be had in Christiania and other Norwegian cities at an exceedingly low rental, pot more than 10 or 15 per cent,, o t what would be charged for similar accommodations in an American city,, lays W, E. Curtia, in the Chicago Rec-ord-Herald. They are not convenient, nor even comfortable, but they are clean. Everything in Norway is clean—even the slums, or what corresponds to them, are unlike those of other great cities. The odors are not always agreeable, but the evidences of soap and water and scrubbing are to be seen wherever a human being lives in Norway. The tenement houses have no sanitary arrangements, but the people use plenty of water and elbow grease. _ Few Norwegians suffer from poverty or privation, even through the cold and gloomy winters that are eight months long. Qur own people might die, or at least suffer seriously under the same circumstances, but the Norwegians ere a hardy race. They have inherited the power of endurance and the ability to survive hunger and thirst and cold and discomforts better than most races.

Frugality and thrift are also national characteristics. Among civilized nations there is scarcely another that is so fortunate with regard to its social conditions. There are no privileged nobility, no “capitalistic vampires,” no large estates, no millionaires, and a very slight difference, compared with other countries, between the rich and the poor. The land is divided among a large number of freeholders, who constitute the productive class and the bone and sinew of the nation. The highest stratum of society is not so far removed from the lower but that there is sympathy and reciprocity between them. The* primary school, which every child by law must attend,‘is the great equalizer, and not only insures an education to every citizen but inculcates democratic sentiments among children so thoroughly that they are never outgrown, while at ths same time it elevates the self-respect and the ambition of those who belong to the working classes.