A great philanthropic experiment, commenced by the late Mr. Stewart,
the millionaire, of New York, and completed by his widow, has failed. Ile erected a grand hotel for working- women, in which 1,000 women were to be respectably lodged and fed for a dollar a day. There were refectories, lavatories, libraries, and drawing-rooms, on the largest scale, the furniture alone costing £60,000, and the total outlay, irrespective of site, being £750,000. The hotel was opened about two months ago, but the working women of New York would not enter it. Only fifty persons took rooms, and as the expenses exceeded £100 a day, without reckoning rent, the building has been closed, and will be converted into an ordinary hotel. The true reason of failure appears to have been the absurdity of certain rules, to which all inmates bound themselves to submit. The working- women were forbidden to see any male friend, however closely related, in their own rooms, or to ask him to any meal in the common rooms ; or to stay out after eleven o'clock, or to purchase any furniture whatever, or to introduce any room ornaments, or to keep any living pets, canaries included. They decided, therefore, that they preferred inferior lodging-houses or poor cottages, to the grand hotel where they were treated more strictly than children are, and were, in fact, under penitential discipline. The experiment would not, however, have been abandoned so soon, but that Judge Hilton, Mr. Stewart's exe- cutor, and a man with decided opinions, believed the whole scheme to be a foredoomed failure. He says women want to be married, and any scheme which forbids that is sure to end badly.
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