The word homestead is derived from two roots, both fertile of words. Thus hatch, hedge, hold (of a ship), hat, hide and holy (set apart), all growing from the same root with home, alike carry as an essential sense the idea of shelter or defence by a method which involves seclusion. Home is that which does this for a family. Stead is from a root which is the parent of stow (to fit a thing snugly to a place), stop, stay, stand, stable, stall, settle, and stake, all conveying the idea of attachment to a place. As an active verb, it means to support, to assist. Thus Shakespeare says, “It nothing steads us.”

A homestead then is a house together with so much of the ground about as, with the house, forms a constituent part of the seclusion and abode of a family.

A homestead then is a place prepared and furnished suitably for the [983]seclusion, shelter and staying of a family. Not the mere shelter from the elements alone of a family, but all that which being of a fixed rather than a moveable character pertains to the locality of which such a shelter is the centre and supplements what it provides for the comfort of the family staying thereat.

It is not necessary that the means of maintaining the family with food and clothing, whether in a farm or shop, should be a part of the homestead. A seafaring man may have a homestead for his family. That which produces, increases or maintains the means of supporting a home is not an essential part of a homestead. The farm or garden or shop which in some cases is attached to a homestead may be laid waste and entirely removed or disconnected with it and the homestead remains unimpaired, or even be the better for it. All conveniences for mere commercial gain should therefore be considered apart from the homestead. But as supplies of various kinds—more especially of food—are essential to the maintenance of a homestead, it follows that a homestead cannot be conceived of apart from its outlets and inlets, including those belonging to others in common with it, and generally in law what is called the public road is not possessed wholly by the public; every householder or homestead holder has a special right of property in that part of it which adjoins his private land. It cannot be closed against him. It is therefore a part of his homestead.

The first question is, what is essential to be associated (in contiguity) with the shelter of a house. Vegetables and fruit can be brought in from a distance; so can flowers. These therefore may be put away till other things are secured. What is wanted that can’t be in a house? Flowers can be brought in; trees and turf cannot; open air cannot. We must have facilities for enjoying open air outside.

Most of us or of our fathers, on emigration were advanced in but a comparatively small degree, if at all, above the savage condition in this respect. See how the laboring, servile and vagabond classes of the Old World (and not one in ten thousand of us came from any other classes) live at the present day, and it will be obvious that this could be no otherwise. In the last centuries when most of our parents were brought out, the life of the great body of the people of the old countries was greatly less civilized than at present, and pioneer life is by no means favorable to direct advance in refinement, only sometimes to the formation of a strong common sense base for refinement. The true and last and only safe measure therefore of real prosperity in the United States is a measure of the willingness of the people to expend study and labor with reference to delicate distinctions in matters of form and color. The test of prosperity is advance in civilization; the test of civilization is delicacy. The test of delicacy in civilized progress, I may add, is whatever shows ability to finely see truth and to follow it in an exact way.

Therefore, it is not enough that a house affords a shelter for a family from rain and wind and sun, which bunting off of a certain class of animal discomforts is all that a savage requires of a house; nor is it enough that it [984]should be adapted to protect its inmates from many other discomforts which those who live in wigwams accept meekly, such as dirt, darkness and vermin, for instance. Nor is it enough that means for regulating the degree of temperature and of light in its different parts, advantages of neatness, conveniences for association and for retirement and other provisions against discomfort should exist in it. The slightest apprehension of discomfort from the neglect of such provisions should not be possible. The existence of such provisions, therefore, should be made obvious with scrupulous truthfulness, not with ostentation or extravagance,— that is to say, but with delicacy and refinement, which is to say, in the way of truth followed with painstaking delicacy. But then, though this is much and any appearance of design or effort of decoration without it is childish folly—in no better taste than the gewgaws hung from the nose of a filthy savage—it is not all; it is not even civilization; it is merely release from barbarism. Active, positive civilization comes with the addition of the positive pleasures which are given by a nice adaptation of the forms and lines and colors of all the parts and which are secured at no sacrifice of the finest truth, of none of the requirements of negative comfort before named, and at no extravagant cost, or sacrifice of other desirable things of any kind whatever, but which add positive beauty to these. That is to say, beauty which is good in itself and not beauty the good of which is dependent on its fitness for or expression of something else that is good, as light, air, warmth, and so on. However rich a man may be by comparison with a savage, a peasant or a slave, who is not able to desire, to pay for, and to enjoy this in his homestead, he is an utterly poor man measured by a truly civilized standard of wealth.

In all Fifth Avenue there are not a score of homes the outsides of which do not fail not merely of beauty but which do not fail even in that without which the effort at beauty is nasty, honesty of expression. Hundreds of farm houses, which have cost not so many thousands as these tens of thousands, show at least this degree of wealth, and to this degree of wealth positive beauty might be added, did their owners but care enough for it, at a cost of a tenth part of what has been wasted in barbarous decorations laid upon the brown stone skins of these metropolitan wigwams. And no patriot should flatter himself that they are better within. No, the true wealth of our country is in its homesteads. The rest is mainly rubbish, the more barbarous for the deceitful glaze which much of it has. And the field of investment in which the real wealth of the country can be most rapidly multiplied is this field of the improvement of homesteads. The way in which investment can alone be made in it is by the expenditure of sincere, patient, painstaking study, in the consideration of what is desirable, and of the means of procuring that which is desirable. There can be no question in the mind of a competent student that every dollar that is earned in the United States would be worth many times as much as it is, if our people were able to exercise their common sense in a fine way with as much ability as they do exercise it in a coarse way. Delicacy is not in great demand, nor is it much cultivated in the management of corn, tobacco, wheat [985]or cotton crops, in fatting swine, beef or mutton, in mining, in lumbering or in many other undertakings wherein we are consequently successful and make money. Thus while the average money wages of a man in such employments are much greater than in Europe, and capital is accumulated several times more rapidly, a given amount of money is commonly exchanged in Europe for, a vastly greater amount of comfort, because positive comfort, in distinction from mere brute satisfaction, is dependent mainly on the satisfaction of delicate requirements, and our means of education, extraordinary as they are up to a certain point, are so poor beyond that point that we generally blunder in a most distressing way in trying to buy a small degree of positive comfort. This is particularly the case in respect to all homestead comfort.