Empty houses and crowded apartments.

LEETONIA, OHIO

DEAR ATLANTIC, I have read with interest 'The Missing Rooms' by Mr. John Carter, in the February Atlantic, and the subsequent comments, and it seems to me they have all missed the point. Mr. Carter attributes the housing shortage in cities to the fact that there are approximately one million marriages yearly in this country and only half that many new living quarters provided. The real explanation is to be found in the great number of abandoned farmhouses not only in New England but over all the states which are dotted with manufacturing towns.

From our home in eastern Ohio we can see five empty farmhouses-not shacks, but six-, eight-, and ten-room houses. Similar conditions prevail throughout the county, state, and the states to the east. In the city of Cleveland (sixty miles away) it is estimated that there are fifteen hundred former residents of Columbiana County. They have formed an association, which makes facts more easily obtainable. Few of them went directly to Cleveland from the farms, but a great many moved first to the small towns and thence to the city. Youngstown, Akron, Pittsburgh, and Detroit probably have as many each of this county's ex-residents. Many of the old families who were all with us twenty-five years ago have not one representative on our farms to-day, but are scattered from coast to coast, mostly in cities.

For many years the returns from farming have been inadequate as compared with other industries. To those living near industrial towns the contrast has been too glaringly apparent and the alternative right at hand. They have gone where there is more money and less arduous work and most of them seem to be moderately prosperous. They dress better and have more of what the world calls luxuries and pleasures than their old neighbors who have continued to farm, but when they die their estates, on an average, do not foot up any better. A few have returned because they could not get the fondness for country life out of their systems. A very few who have been eminently successful - Mr. Firestone, of tire fame, for example-have made their old homesteads into show farms which are a credit to the community but add nothing to the contentment of the dirt farmers' who must make their money out of their farms.

Everybody cannot have everything. If you prefer to live in cramped apartments in congested cities and push buttons, that is your privilege. I'd rather have a real home in the country with trees, flowers, friendly birds and animals and kindly folks for neighbors, and time for meditation, the unappreciated luxuries, - - though it

means hard work, wearing last year's garments, and having no buttons to push - yet. Many farms hereabout now have electricity and all may have it when these empty houses are again inhabited. If any others feel like this about it, there are many places where farms, neglected but productive if cared for, can be bought for less than the buildings on them are worth. The West has been overdeveloped and overadvertised. The only place where one can get something for nothing to-day is in the forgotten agricultural East, where we have all the advantages of a longestablished civilization, are comparatively free from drouths, floods, devastating storms, and great extremes of temperature, can grow anything common to the temperate zone, and are at the very gates of the big Eastern markets-not always satisfactory markets, but always markets. We are more prosperous and on a firmer agricultural foundation than any other part of the United States at the present time, and some of these days the public will wake up to the fact. MARY CALDWELL

I want to thank you. The occasion for it is your 'Hardscrabble Hellas,' appearing in the February Atlantic, which reached me just last evening. It was a very great delight indeed. I should want to thank you if for no more than the insight revealed in those two short sentences about the interior of the hearts of boys. "The heart of youth is not Hebraic. It is Hellenic.' The entire article has the tonic effect of an October day either in my native Ohio or in my adopted New England.

Perhaps one reason I appreciated it so much is because of the hardscrabble conditions of life

No one can foretell how far we are going to advance materially. Our Captains of industry, young men in the main, are thinking clearly in straight lines. They are specializing as never before. Mass production and distribution is in evidence everywhere. It's called chain, as in stores; groups as in Hotels; plants as in printing. They are all of a pattern. New ideas in what is called old line businesses makes for a rapidity of mass accumulation that is amazing. You want to see to believe.

In this forward specialization, men are truly attending to their own business. If they are steel makers they make steel, and buy their printing, paper boxes, etc., from a specialized concern. Pride of effort is confined to pride in their own line. No matter how big they are, they are doing that which they know best, and doing it so well their competitors have to give all their time to the making of the goods they are selling.

Pride of location may be all right for homes; but pride of location in business has now come to be exactness in location. Where the greatest good can be done for the greatest number and distributed in the shortest period of time. This is good business. This is good civilization.

Straight line business men are seeing in distribution the success of the present and future. They are paying wages so you can buy. Shortening hours so you may enjoy. Working in logical centers so that the goods are distributed to reach you at the lowest fraction of cost. The result is more people get more things and in turn give greater employment to employer and employee alike.

We are no longer afraid of bigness.

We are learning its value its utility - its assistance in lowering the cost of finished products and increasing the earning capacity of all on the job.

In what is now said to be the dark days, before the advent of the art of printing, as much as fifty years were spent in writing a book. To-day, by way of illustration, you find The Cuneo Press in a position to set up in type, and do what is called in the trade, make ready for the press, ten complete newspapers per day of forty-eight pages each. This would include news matter and advertising pages as well.

The Cuneo Press is undoubtedly the largest printing and binding concern in the world. Is the largest in the country and is the largest in Chicago, as well.

The concern operates eight plants, employs more than four thousand five hundred men and women, skilled workers. The highest wage is paid.

They print catalogues, magazines, books, directories, booklets, etc. This mass effort has gone forward.

As an illustration, one workman told the writer, his particular plant got out twenty-two million flyers annually. Then was unfolded that a flyer is a catalogue of one hundred or less catalogue size pages, sent out before and after the 1500 page catalogues were shipped. They are really seasonable and bargain offering catalogues.

Upwards of one hundred and twenty million magazines are printed, folded, bound and distributed from the central plants of the Cuneo Press of Chicago annually. Some of these magazines are of four hundred pages in standard size, often containing fifty and more two or three or four color pages. These magazines are distributed to every nook and cranny of the country,

Monthly prints of over two and a half million, one million and lesser amounts in thickness of from sixtyseven to four hundred pages. They are carrying aid, comfort, information to the housekeeper, fashions of the hour, the new ideas of life. These ten million magazines monthly are moulding and cementing the entire nation.

We are indebted to them for aid in maintaining our food supplies pure

for showing the fashions of the hour, for the inspirations that come from our advanced thinkers, and for the cheerfulness they promulgate. They cheer, as they aid the nation into right thinking.

The Cuneo Press is in operation day and night. Main offices and central plants are in Chicago. Other plants are located in New York City, Bloomfield, New Jersey, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These plants are individually complete printing establishments superintended by efficient managers.

The Cuneo press will execute an order for twenty million, or for one thousand printed books, magazines, catalogues, etc. Service not size dominates. Every type and kind of press is in use.

There are more than two hundred and twenty presses. One hundred of these are rotary presses.

The last word in four-color presses can be seen in the large battery of Cuneo's four-color presses with parafine spraying attachments that is at once a saving of time and a practical means of reproducing in all its beauty exactly the item portrayed.

These four-color presses are compact. Each covers a space eighteen by forty-eight feet, stands twelve feet high, with fifteen rollers for each color, making sixty color rollers on the press. In its simple operation sheets are fed into the machine automatically about

color is printed individually. Color is printed on top of color, making the various shades, tints, tones that you see in the magazines, books or catalogues. Light colors are first printed; yellow, for instance, followed by red making different shades of brown. Then would come blue, etc. Forms of the article reproduced are usually in black. This is all done instantly and must be accurate. Really a true registry, one color must fit on the other color with accuracy, yes, the accuracy of a hair line. After the sheet is printed a fine spray of parafine is sprayed thereon, drying the entire sheet equally, quickly, in order that no off set or blurring of colors or spoiling of shades, tones can prevail. One sheet piles on the other so rapidly it looks instantaneous, yet there is time for drying in the interval.

The first impressions off the press are scrutinized, analyzed, criticized and carefully studied with the naked eye, as well as with powerful magnifying glasses. The parafine must be just right. It must dry evenly, accurately. Every precaution is taken in advance to make up the rolls correctly, requiring sometimes the labor of many hours by an expert pressman of that particular press. When all is well the printed sheet comes out and magic is the only word to describe the result. You see four colors and their color combinations, you see one hundred or more shades, tones, tints, depending on the amount of objects illustrated.

The writer compared a blanket portrayed and the portrayal and both looked the real article. These perfected Cuneo four-color presses were made to order, improved to order and costly in themselves they have a value to the organization greater than money.

It would take probably two and a half years to get a similar battery of four-color presses from the manufacturer.