Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1873 — Emigrant’s Home. [ARTICLE]

Emigrant’s Home.

BY PROF. J. D. BUTLER.

' Lincoln, lß73. Nebraskians talk about the Emigrants’Home at the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad station, in Lincoln, as a new thing under the sun. Yet Solomon was right in saying there is no such new thing, Analogous establishments abound abroad, and may be traced back a thousand years. In Hamburgh, traveling workmen live in lodging houses, called “Herbergen," or harborages, belonging to their various trades —and are furnished with the loan of such tools as they heed. But they pay the cost of whatever is furnished them; while, in Lincoln, shelter and lodgingroom are free—answering to the negro’s definition of grace, as “something for nothing.” Herbergen—or industrial caravansaries, each serving as a house of call or labor mart—still survive in Prussia also. But the best counterparts of the Nebraska Emigrants? home are in_ Switzerland. At Olton, Stanz, Berne, and throughout the canton of Neuchatel, itinerant workmen find beds or other accommodations, free of charge. Moreover, the ‘‘Hospices.” scattered over the passes of the Alps, opentheir dpors and tables to all Crugers. The writer' has himself been entertained in more than one of them, on the St. Bernards (Great and Little), St. Gjfthard, &c. No payment, is t expected from the poor, but other people are led carefully to the* contribution box in the chapel, • . , ' All these European homes of hospitality deserve the highest praise. Tqe

difference between them and that in Lincoln is this:—that they all send forth their guests to toil on the same low level as before, while the Lincoln house is a stepping stone to a* higher plane. It was, last year, a refuge for hundreds of new immigrants till they could command higher wages than they had ever earned, and for hundreds more till they secured homesteads, which raised them into the rank of landlords and lords of the land. The Alpine establishments are obsolescent and ready to vanish away, as having outlived their usefulness, that beyond the Missouri is still in its cradle, but is yearly doubling its development. All of them arc as suns to' guides gladden aud save; but, in spite of astronomy, the grand sun is setting in the East and rising in the West. Helped on their way by the sister Reception Houses in Burlington and Lincoln, 4,525 farm hunters had bought 478,988 acres of railroad land before New Year's, 1873, on ten years credit, six per cent, interest, and on contracts made since that date, paying nothing of the the. end of the fourth year.