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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12366 ***
+
+THE
+COST OF SHELTER.
+
+
+By
+ELLEN H. RICHARDS
+
+
+Instructor in Sanitary Chemistry,
+Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
+
+
+1905.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSEHOLD EXISTS FOR ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING REASONS:
+
+
+Two or more persons form an alliance
+
+(a) for protection against the outside world;
+
+(b) for protection against the outside world and for the rearing of
+    children;
+
+(c) for the greater gain in convenience which the common life can give
+    over that of single effort;
+
+(d) for companionship;
+
+(e) for the greater independence it gives to the group;
+
+(f) for the greater ease in satisfying one's prejudices or whims.
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+  THE HOUSE AND WHAT IT SIGNIFIES IN FAMILY LIFE. TYPIFIED IN
+  PIONEER AND COLONIAL HOMES, THE CENTRES OF INDUSTRY AND
+  HOSPITALITY
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+  THE HOUSE CONSIDERED AS A MEASURE OF SOCIAL STANDING
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+  LEGACIES FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, ILL ADAPTED TO CHANGED
+  CONDITIONS, CAUSE PHYSICAL DETERIORATION AND DOMESTIC FRICTION
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+  THE PLACE OF THE HOUSE IN THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF THE TWENTIETH
+  CENTURY
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+  POSSIBILITIES IN SIGHT PROVIDED THE HOUSEWIFE IS PROGRESSIVE
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+  COST PER PERSON AND PER FAMILY FOR VARIOUS GRADES OF SHELTER
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+  RELATION BETWEEN COST OF SHELTER AND TOTAL INCOME TO BE EXPENDED
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+  TO RENT OR TO OWN: A DIFFICULT QUESTION
+
+
+
+
+THE COST OF SHELTER.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+  THE HOUSE AND WHAT IT SIGNIFIES IN FAMILY LIFE; TYPIFIED IN
+  PIONEER AND COLONIAL HOMES, THE CENTERS OF INDUSTRY AND
+  HOSPITALITY.
+
+  "There is no noble life without a noble aim."--CHARLES DOLE.
+
+The word Home to the Anglo-Saxon race calls to mind some definite house as
+the family abiding-place. Around it cluster the memories of childhood, the
+aspirations of youth, the sorrows of middle life.
+
+The most potent spell the nineteenth century cast on its youth was the
+yearning for a home of their own, not a piece of their father's. The
+spirit of the age working in the minds of men led them ever westward to
+conquer for themselves a homestead, forced them to go, leaving the aged
+behind, and the graves of the weak on the way.
+
+There must be a strong race principle behind a movement of such
+magnitude, with such momentous consequences. Elbow room, space, and
+isolation to give free play to individual preference, characterized
+pioneer days. The cord that bound the whole was love of home,--one's own
+home,--even if tinged with impatience of the restraints it imposed, for
+home and house do imply a certain restraint in individual wishes. And
+here, perhaps, is the greatest significance of the family house. It cannot
+perfectly suit _all_ members in its details, but in its great office, that
+of shelter and privacy--ownership--the house of the nineteenth century
+stands supreme. No other age ever provided so many houses for single
+families. It stands between the community houses of primitive times and
+the hives of the modern city tenements.
+
+As sociologically defined, the family means a common house--common, that
+is, to the family, but excluding all else. This exclusiveness is
+foreshadowed in the habits of the majority of animals, each pair
+preempting a particular log or burrow or tree in which to rear its young,
+to which it retreats for safety from enemies. Primitive man first borrowed
+the skins of animals and their burrowing habits. The space under fallen
+trees covered with moss and twigs grew into the hut covered with bark or
+sod. The skins permitted the portable tent.
+
+It is indeed a far cry from these rude defences against wind and weather
+to the dwelling-houses of the well-to-do family in any country to-day, but
+the need of the race is just the same: protection, safety from danger, a
+shield for the young child, a place where it can grow normally in peaceful
+quiet. It behooves the community to inquire whether the houses of to-day
+are fulfilling the primary purposes of the race in the midst of the
+various other uses to which modern man is putting them.
+
+As already shown, shelter in its first derivation, as well as in its
+common use, signifies protection from the weather. Bodily warmth saves
+food, therefore is an economy in living. From the first it also implied
+protection from enemies, a safe retreat from attack and a refuge when
+wounded. But above all else it has, through the ages, stood for a safe and
+retired place for the bringing up of the young of the species.
+
+The colonial houses of New England with large living-room, dominated by
+the huge fireplace with its outfit of cooking utensils, with groups of
+buildings for different uses clustered about them, giving protection to
+the varied industries of the homestead, illustrate the most perfect type
+of family life. Each member had a share in the day's work, therefore to
+each it was home. To the old homestead many a successful business man
+returns to show his grandchildren the attic with its disused loom and
+spinning-wheel; the shop where farm-implements were made, in the days of
+long winter storms, to the accompaniment of legend and gossip; the dairy,
+no longer redolent of cream. These are reminders of a time past and gone,
+before the greed of gain had robbed even these houses of their peace. The
+backward glance of this generation is too apt to stop at the transition
+period, when the factory had taken the interesting manufactures out of the
+hands of the housewife and left the homestead bereft of its best, when the
+struggle to make it a modern money-making plant, for which it was never
+designed, drove the young people away to less arduous days and more
+exciting evenings.
+
+This stage of farm life was altogether unlovely, not wholly of necessity,
+but because the adjustment was most painful to the feelings and most
+difficult to the muscles of the elders.
+
+Because the family ideal was the ruling motive, the house-building of the
+colonial period shows a more perfect adaptation to family life than any
+other age has developed.
+
+Where is the boasted adaptability of the American? He should be ready to
+see the effect of the inevitable mechanical changes and modify his ideas
+to suit. For it cannot be too often reiterated that it is a case of
+_ideas_, not of wood and stone and law.
+
+This homestead has passed into history as completely as has the Southern
+colonial type, differing only in arrangement. Climate, as well as domestic
+conditions, demanded a more complete separation of the manufacturing
+processes, including cooking, laundry, etc., otherwise the ideal was the
+same. "The house" meant a family life, a gracious hospitality, a busy hive
+of industry, a refuge indeed from social as well as physical storms. Work
+and play, sorrow and pleasure, all were connected with its outward
+presentment as with the thought. For its preservation men fought and women
+toiled, but, alas! machinery has swept away the last vestige of this life
+and, try as the philanthropist may to bring it back, it will never return.
+The very essence of that life was the _making of things_, the preparation
+for winter while it was yet summer, the furnishing of the bridal chest
+years before marriage. Fancy a bride to-day wearing or using in the house
+anything five years old!
+
+There are no more pioneer and colonial communities on this continent.
+Railroads and steamboats and electric power have made this rural life a
+thing of the past. Let us not waste tears on its vanishing, but address
+ourselves to the future.
+
+There are two directions in which great change in household conditions has
+occurred quite outside the volition of the housekeeper. They are the
+disappearance of industries, and lack of permanence in the homestead.
+Those who are busily occupied in productive work of their own are
+contented and usually happy. The results of their efforts, stored for
+future use--barns filled with hay or grain, shelves of linen and
+preserves--yield satisfaction.
+
+Destructive consumption may be pleasurable for the moment, but does not
+satisfy. The child pulls the stuffing from the doll with pleasure, but
+asks for another in half an hour. The delicious meal daintily served is a
+joy for an hour. A room put in perfect order, clean, tastefully decorated,
+is a delight to the eye for three hours and then it must be again cleaned
+and rearranged. Is this productive work? Is there any reason why we should
+be satisfied with it or happy in it?
+
+In an earlier time, that from which we derive so many of our cherished
+ideals, the house built by or for the young people was used as a homestead
+by their children and their children's children. Customs grew up slowly,
+and for some reason. Furniture, collected as wanted, found its place; all
+the routine went as by clockwork. Saturday's baking of bread and pies went
+each on to its own shelf, as the cows went each to her own stall. If the
+duties were physically hard, the routine saved worrying.
+
+To-day how few of us live in the house we began life with! How few in that
+we occupied even ten years ago! And this number is growing smaller and
+smaller. The housewife has not time to form habits of her own; she engages
+a maid and expects her to fall at once into the family ways, when the
+family has no ways.
+
+In the sociological sense, shelter may mean protection from noise, from
+too close contact with other human beings, enemies only in the sense of
+depriving us of valuable nerve-force. It should mean sheltering the
+children from contact with degrading influences.
+
+Charles P. Neill, United States Commissioner of Labor, in his address at
+the New York School of Philanthropy, July 16, 1905, said: "In my own
+estimation home, above all things, means privacy. It means the possibility
+of keeping your family off from other families. There must be a separate
+house, and as far as possible separate rooms, so that at an early period
+of life the idea of rights to property, the right to things, to privacy,
+may be instilled."
+
+There may be such a thing as too much shelter. To cover too closely breeds
+decay. Are we in danger of covering ourselves and our children too closely
+from sun and wind and rain, making them weak and less resistant than they
+should be? The prevalence of tuberculosis and its cure by fresh air seems
+to indicate this. The attempt to gain privacy under prevailing conditions
+tends this way.
+
+Hitherto students of social economics have usually considered the most
+pressing problem in the life of the wage-earner to be that of sufficient
+and suitable food. But in any large city and in most smaller communities
+there are found those who have refined instincts, aspirations for a life
+of physical and moral cleanness, who by force of circumstances are obliged
+to come in contact with filth and squalor and careless disorder in order
+to find shelter. If they can be kept from degenerating, their rise when
+it comes will lift those below them, but it is a Herculean task to lift
+them by lifting all below as well. The burden which presses most heavily
+on this valuable material for social betterment is that of shelter rather
+than of food.
+
+The thought underlying this whole series on Cost is that the place to put
+the leaven of progress is in the middle. The class to work for is the
+great mass of intelligent, industrious, and ambitious young people turned
+out by our public schools with certain ideals for self-betterment, but in
+grave danger of losing heart in the crush due to the pressure of society
+around them and above them. They fear to incur the responsibility of
+marriage when they see the pecuniary requirements it involves.
+
+This growing body makes up so large a proportion of the whole in America
+that, once aroused, it may become an all-powerful force for regeneration,
+thanks to the pervading influence of public-school education when enlisted
+on the side of right. Faith in the uprightness of American youth is so
+strong that strenuous effort for their enlightenment is justified. Once
+they have their attention drawn to the need of action, they will act.
+Self-preservation is one of the strongest instincts, and it may be
+dangerous to call upon the self-interest of these inexperienced souls; but
+for the sake of the results we must risk the lesser evil, if we can
+develop a resolution to secure a personal and race efficiency.
+
+When the young people, with a deep appreciation of the possibilities of
+sane and wholesome living, marry and attempt to realize their ideals, the
+conditions are all against them. They find little sympathy in their
+yearnings for a rational life, and soon give up the effort, deciding that
+they are too peculiar. They slip almost insensibly into the routine of
+their neighbors. There is great need of a cooperation of like-minded young
+married people to form a little community, setting its own standards and
+living a fairly independent life. Two or three such groups would do more
+than many sermons to awaken attention to the problem before the race
+to-day. Shall man yield himself to the tendencies of natural selection and
+be modified out of existence by the pressure of his environment, or shall
+he turn upon himself some of the knowledge of Nature's forces he has
+gained and by "conscious evolution" begin an adaptation of the environment
+to the organism? For we no longer hold with Robert Owen and the socialists
+that man is necessarily controlled and moulded by his surroundings, that
+he is absolutely subject to the laws of animal evolution. A new era will
+dawn when man sees his power over his own future. Then, and not till then,
+will come again that willingness to sacrifice present ease and pleasure
+for the sake of race progress, which alone can make the restrained life a
+satisfaction.
+
+The environment is, more largely than we think, the house and the manner
+of life it forces upon us. Therefore the first point of attack is the
+shelter under which the family life of the newly married pair establishes
+itself. If it is too large for their income, it leads to extravagance and
+debt before the first two years have passed; if it is too small, it cramps
+the generous and hospitable impulses. If unsuited to this need, it
+irritates and deforms character, as a plaster cast compresses a limb
+encased in it.
+
+Imagine the young people beginning life in the average city flat, at a
+rent of twenty to thirty dollars a month, with its shams, its makeshifts,
+its depressing, unsanitary, morally unsafe quarters for the maid, its
+friction with janitor and landlord--the whole sordid round necessitated by
+the mere manner of building, and by that only.
+
+A few strong souls flee to the country. Counting the cost and finding that
+all the earnings go to mere living, they decide to get that living in
+company with nature under free skies--their own employers. Such may live
+in Altruria with the happy zest of the authors of that charming sketch.
+
+It is not given to many of earth's children to be so well mated and so
+heavenly-wise. The young man has been brought up to consider the house the
+young wife's prerogative, and she--well, she has been trained to believe
+that housewifely wisdom will come to her as unsought as measles.
+
+Two thirds the friction in the early years of married life is caused by
+the house and its defects, resulting in dissatisfaction, disenchantment,
+and the flight to a hotel or non-housekeeping apartment.
+
+If some of the problems to be faced and the difficulties in solving them
+could be presented to the young people to be studied and discussed before
+the actual encounter came, they would be more prepared.
+
+In discussing this part of the subject, as in the consideration of the
+Cost of Living in general and the Cost of Food, we shall deal in
+particular with incomes of from $1000 to $5000 a year for families of
+five, recognizing that under present-day conditions the annual sum of
+$1500 to $3000 means the greatest struggle between desires and power of
+gratifying them.
+
+On the surface it appears that the things which go to make up delicate
+cleanly living cost more and more each year, with no limit in sight. It is
+not only the poet who moves from one boarding-house to another; the young
+clerk and struggling business man go into smaller and smaller quarters
+until the traditional limit of room to swing a cat is reached.
+
+The constantly diminishing space occupied by a family seems to prove that
+the 40% increase in the cost of living within a few years is not caused
+by an advance in the necessary cost of food; it is certainly not due to
+the increased cost of necessary clothes. It is more than probable that the
+increasing cost of shelter and all that it implies--increased
+water-supply, service, repairs, etc.--is the main factor in the
+undoubtedly increased expense. This will be considered in some detail in
+Chapter VIII.
+
+While the socialist may take the ground that salaries must be raised to
+keep pace with the rise in living expenses, the student of social
+ethics--Euthenics, or the science of _better_ living--may well ask a
+consideration of the topic from another standpoint. Is this increased cost
+resulting in higher efficiency? Are the people growing more healthy,
+well-favored, well-proportioned, stronger, happier? If not, then is there
+not a fallacy in the common idea that more money spent means a fuller
+life?
+
+Recent examination of school children in various cities in England and
+America has revealed a state of physical ill-being most deplorable in the
+present, and horrifying to contemplate for its future results. One has
+only to keep one's eyes open in passing the streets to become aware of the
+physical deterioration of thousands of the wage-earners. One has only to
+listen to the housewife's complaints of inefficiency, lack of strength
+among the housemaids, to realize that the world's work is not being well
+done in so far as it depends upon human hands.
+
+This loss of efficiency is usually attributed to insufficient food and
+long hours, but it is at least an open question if housing conditions are
+not the more potent factor not only in the case of the very poor, but even
+in the case of the family having an income of $2000 a year. Life in a
+boarding-house adapted from the use by one family to that of five or six
+without increase of bathing and ventilating conveniences, with old-style
+plumbing, cannot be mentally or bodily invigorating.
+
+The house cannot be said to be a place of safety so long as the "great
+white plague" lurks in every dark corner--tuberculosis, colds, influenza,
+etc., fasten themselves upon its occupants. Explorers exposed to extremes
+of weather do not thus suffer. The dark, damp house incubates the germs.
+
+But homes there must be: places of safety for children, of refuge for
+elders. Men will marry and women may keep house. How shall it be managed
+so as to be in harmony with present-day demands? Certainly not by ignoring
+the difficulties. Progress in any direction does not come through wringing
+of hands and deploring the decadence of the present generation. President
+Roosevelt's advice is to bring up boys and girls to overcome obstacles,
+not to ignore them. Let the educated, intelligent young people join in
+devising a way to surmount this obstacle as the engineers of 1890 invented
+new ways of crossing impassable gorges and "impossible" mountain ranges.
+
+The writer has no ready-prepared panacea to offer. Patent medicine is not
+the remedy. This kind cometh out only by fasting and prayer. A long course
+of diet is needed to cure a chronic disease.
+
+This little volume is intended merely as a spur to the imagination of the
+indolent student, to arouse him to the mental effort required to deal with
+the readjustment of ideas to conditions before it is too late.
+
+It is no exaggeration to say that the social well-being of the community
+is threatened. The habits of years are broken up; sad to say, the
+middle-aged will suffer unrelieved, but the young can be incited to
+grapple with the situation and hew out for themselves a way through.
+
+Certain elements in the problem will be touched upon in the following
+pages as a result of much going to and fro in the "most favored land on
+earth." Certain questions will be raised as to what constitutes a home and
+a shelter for the family in the twentieth-century sense of both family and
+shelter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+  THE HOUSE CONSIDERED AS A MEASURE OF SOCIAL STANDING.
+
+  It is not what we lack, but what we see others have,
+  that makes us discontented.
+
+There has been noted in every age a tendency to measure social preëminence
+by the size and magnificence of the family abode. Mediaeval castles,
+Venetian palaces, colonial mansions, all represented a form of social
+importance, what Veblen has called conspicuous waste. This was largely
+shown in maintaining a large retinue and in giving lavish entertainments.
+The so-called patronage of the arts--furnishings, fabrics, pictures,
+statues, valued to this day--came under the same head of rivalry in
+expenditure.
+
+In America a similar aspiration results in immense establishments far
+beyond the needs of the immediate family. But, unlike society in the
+middle ages, social aspiration does not stop short at a well-defined line.
+In the modern state each level reaches up toward the next higher and,
+failing to balance itself, drops into the abyss which never fills.
+
+There is no contented layer of humanity to equalize the pressure; heads
+and hands are thrust up through from below at every point. Democracy has
+taken possession of the age and must be reckoned with on all sides.
+
+At first sight sumptuous housing might seem to be the least objectionable
+form of conspicuous waste. Safer than rich food, less wasteful than
+gorgeous clothing, but, as Veblen truly says, "through discrimination in
+favor of visible consumption it has come about that the domestic life of
+most classes is relatively shabby. As a consequence people habitually
+screen their private life from observation." This is from a different
+motive than the instinct of privacy, of personal withdrawal for rest and
+quiet. This shabby private life is why true hospitality is disappearing.
+The chance guest is no longer welcome to the family table; we are ashamed
+of our daily routine, or we have an idea that our fare is not worthy of
+being shared. Whatever it is, unconscious as it often is, it is a canker
+in the family life of to-day. It leads to selfishness, to a laxness in
+home manners very demoralizing. It is doubtless one of the great factors
+in the distinct deterioration of children's public manners.
+
+Because the house is held to be the visible evidence of social standing,
+because its location, style of architecture, fittings and furniture may be
+made to proclaim the pretensions of its inhabitants, it is often dishonest
+and one of the sources of the prevalent untruth in other things, since
+dishonesty in housing has been not infrequently one of the first signs of
+dishonesty in business. To move to a less fashionable quarter is to
+confess financial stress at once.
+
+It is because the concomitant expenses of an establishment may be
+curtailed without attracting public notice that a moral danger exists. The
+outside shell is not the whole nor even the chief outlay. The operating
+expenses run away with more money than the house itself, and it is in
+these that the family, conscious of impending ruin, curtail, and thus
+become dishonest in their own souls.
+
+The moral of it all is to live just a little below the probable limit,
+whatever that may be, rather than to assume a greater income than is quite
+certain. Granted that in the quickly changing conditions of to-day this is
+difficult, it is not often impossible.
+
+It is only needed to set some other standard of social position than
+shelter and to use the house for its legitimate purposes only, that of an
+abode of the family in health and joyful cooperation. The class for which
+this series is written should seek a shelter sufficient for these normal
+uses, and make it so home-like that friends will gladly share it when
+permitted.
+
+Let good manners, keen intelligence, bright and entertaining conversation
+take the place of the showy but frequently uncomfortable houses and
+wholesale entertainments of to-day.
+
+It is time that a beginning was made of that form of social pleasure and
+mental recreation which the century must develop, or fail of its promise.
+
+What is the value, of present-day knowledge if not to stimulate the
+conscious group, through the individual perhaps, but the group finally, to
+better use of its powers and opportunities toward a higher form of social
+life?
+
+We have been told that the house should be as much an expression of
+individuality as clothes. Since clothes are constantly and easily changed,
+and a family home built to order is comparatively permanent, such
+expression in wood or stone should be carefully thought out; but how
+rarely do we gain a pleasant impression from the houses built for the
+purpose of setting forth social standards! The owner and the architect
+have neither of them the highest ideals, and a sort of ready-made,
+composite, often irritating, always displeasing result follows. The
+pretence shows through more often than the occupant realizes.
+
+Society has the power to regulate its own conventions. Once convinced that
+it is dangerous to put the strain of living on to mere superficial
+pretence, mere location, ornament, new standards will be set up; as,
+indeed, they are under other conditions. In frontier life, for instance,
+where shortness of tenure is recognized, dress and the table take the
+place of the house as indications. In a mining town, one is astonished at
+the costumes seen on persons issuing from insignificant houses, and at the
+excellent bill of fare in a restaurant with the barest necessities of
+furnishing. Cursory observation often reads the signs of civilization
+wrongly. The eastern traveller, accustomed to the outward glitter and the
+finish of settled communities, fails to interpret the real efficiency of a
+more flexible society. West of the Mississippi, that new empire we are
+just beginning to appreciate, good food is recognized as of prime
+importance, dress gives an opportunity for showing conspicuous waste, and
+buildings are made for show only when permanence of residence is assured.
+
+Let society once thoroughly understand that safe shelter is essential to
+its very life, that this safety is threatened, if not lost, by present
+habits, and, by quick money-making schemes in house-building, it will
+establish standards of living which shall not only be for the material
+welfare, but for the mental, moral, and spiritual progress of the race.
+
+This progress can be secured by applying centrifugal force to congested
+districts, by interesting capitalists to consider housing at the same time
+with manufacturing plants, not only providing safe, economical houses, but
+by making it socially possible to live in them on moderate incomes.
+
+The rising half, we must remember, is more affected by social conventions
+than the submerged tenth.
+
+The well-to-do should consider more conscientiously those who recruit
+their ranks, who, if started right without danger of debt, will have
+freedom to advance. The present muddle has come about in part because no
+one has taken the trouble to investigate the reasons. The young family
+with $3000 a year has ideals for the manners and morals of the children
+which are not satisfied with those of the inexpensive tenement quarter.
+Prevention they consider better than cure, hence they pay higher rent than
+the income warrants to secure elevating examples and morally wholesome
+surroundings.
+
+[Illustration: The Morris Company's Block of Single Houses, with Central
+Heating Plant (*remainder cut off).]
+
+[Illustration: The Morris Building Company's Block of Single Houses, with
+Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]
+
+A single family cannot control a whole street, although cooperation can
+accomplish a great deal in the way of congenial neighborhoods. But the
+risk involved, the liability to error of judgment, as well as the large
+outlay of capital, at once prevents the adoption of this means of
+satisfactory housing for the business and professional class to any great
+extent, at least in the city. The acumen needed to discover the profitable
+in real estate, the skill to acquire large contiguous tracts of land, both
+belong to the capitalist. Only when he is a philanthropist besides, is the
+housing question safe in his hands. Such an example we find in the Morris
+houses, Willoughby Ave., Brooklyn, N.Y. This set of family dwellings was
+put up to meet this very need. Congenial neighborhood, safe
+playgrounds for the children, labor-saving devices for the housekeeper.
+When first built they were in advance of anything in an eastern city of
+their class. To-day Mr. Pratt has even more advanced ideas which will take
+form in the future.
+
+[Illustration: Aerial-view Drawing: The Morris Building Company's Block of
+Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]
+
+These attractive and comfortable houses, so near the working places of
+the teachers and professional and business men who occupy them, were
+possible only because of the comparative cheapness of the land, which had
+been held undesirable for high-class single houses, not for sanitary
+reasons, but solely on account of social conditions. This cluster of forty
+houses makes its own atmosphere. This is the lesson to be learned. Let
+groups of like-minded families make their own surroundings. The capitalist
+will soon learn where his interest lies.
+
+[Illustration: Floor-plan Drawing: The Morris Building Company's Block of
+Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]
+
+[Illustration: Floor-plan Drawing The Morris Building Company's Block of
+Single Houses, with Central Heating Plant, Brooklyn, New York.]
+
+Very probably it will be necessary to enlarge the scope and, perhaps, to
+build two stories higher, so that the elders and perhaps bachelors of
+both sexes, who do not care for the garden, may help to bear the expense
+of the children's playground. Whatever form the advance may take, this is
+a sign-post in the right direction.
+
+In the nature of things, however, the first experiments will be costly and
+must be combined with business of a sure kind. In this instance the
+heating and hot-water supply was made possible by a combination with
+factory plant. But if a larger group of, say, one hundred houses were run
+by a central establishment, the Morris Building Company estimates the cost
+at about fifty dollars per year.
+
+These houses will be referred to again under Chapter VI, but the especial
+value of this experiment was its social significance. How much better to
+keep desirable land for residential purposes by such means than to permit
+families to move away and give up satisfactory dwellings solely because
+the lower end of the street has a few foreigners! Our older cities abound
+in instances of this quick abandonment of most desirable streets without
+any concerted effort to retain their character.
+
+The dangerous sanitary degeneration of these abandoned houses is one of
+the worst features of the situation and a prolific cause of the
+overcrowding of cities.
+
+The more thoughtful students of progressive tendencies are grouping
+themselves in "parks" where houses are put up with the aid of the
+capitalist under such restrictions as to price as is supposed to insure a
+congenial neighborhood, and under such regulations as to land as to
+prevent manufacturing establishments. When these plans are not purely
+speculative, designed to entrap the young people by their best hopes of a
+permanent home, much satisfaction may come from the plan. But even in this
+country or suburban life the shadow of fashion falls sooner or later, and
+the savings vanish with the years. Some deeper principle must come into
+play, some stronger force than mere whim of society leaders, before our
+young people can be released from the bondage of living on the right side
+of a street under penalty of social ostracism.
+
+There are gratifying indications of an awakening. The following statement
+appeared in a newspaper of a recent date:
+
+"A corporation of women has been formed in Indianapolis, Ind., for the
+purpose of building small but artistic houses for people of moderate
+means. All of the directors are business women; one of the vice-presidents
+is Miss Elizabeth Browning, the city librarian, and another is the
+principal of one of the public schools. The secretary has for some time
+been in charge of the office of a savings and loan association and is the
+only woman member of the Indianapolis fire insurance inspection board. Six
+houses are to be erected at once in various parts of the city."
+
+No better use of money or effort can be made at the present time than in
+similar endeavors to meet the needs of the time. The study of conditions
+will prove an education in itself and a stimulus to invention.
+
+When the social conscience is once awakened the bride with $2000 a year
+will not be expected to begin where her mother left off.
+
+The young people will be provided with just as comfortable and just as
+sanitary homes, but they will not be expected to entertain lavishly in
+order to show the wedding presents before they are broken. They will be
+visited, even if they live in an unfashionable quarter on a side street.
+Is it not more honest?
+
+If society would put its stamp on the manner of life adapted to the
+welfare of the young people, it would not be unfashionable to live within
+one's income.
+
+The tyranny of things is very real and most distressing in connection with
+this problem of shelter and all that it involves.
+
+There is only needed a social awakening to result in an adjustment of
+men's views as to what is good and right. New social habits adapted to the
+age we live in will be accepted by the next generation as good form.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+  LEGACIES FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOT ADAPTED TO CHANGED
+  CONDITIONS CAUSE PHYSICAL DETERIORATION AND DOMESTIC FRICTION.
+
+  "A large part of the evils of which we complain socially to-day
+  are due to the kind of houses we live in and the exactions they
+  make upon us."--H.G. WELLS.
+
+Four classes of houses have come down to us:
+
+(1) The family homestead in the country set low on the ground with damp
+walls and dark cellar, one of a cluster of rambling buildings; with a
+well, the only water supply, in close proximity to various sources of
+pollution. These houses are for the most part now abandoned to the
+foreigner, who uses them for the primitive purposes of shelter without the
+ennobling intellectual life they once harbored. Now and then a grandson
+rescues the old place, brings water from a spring or brook, digs a drain,
+lets light into the cellar, and builds on a kitchen and dining-room.
+
+The expense is often greater than to build anew, but the effect is usually
+very good when the changes are made under sanitary supervision.
+
+(2) The village or suburban house set in its own grounds, too near the
+street usually, but with garden and fruit-trees in the rear, and possibly
+a stable for horse and cow. This was the compromise made by the generation
+just from the free life of the farm-house, who, consciously or
+unconsciously, clung to the green of grass and trees, and the blue of the
+sky. So long as habit or love of caring for the things lasted all went
+well. The father found his recreation in planting the garden before
+breakfast, as in his boyhood. The mother cared for flower and
+vegetable-garden, as she recalled her mother's life; she picked her own
+beans and corn, even if she did not cook the dinner.
+
+But the _children_ had to hurry off to school, and it was a pity to call
+them early: they had lessons to learn in the afternoon. To them the garden
+was work, not play as it should have been; so they failed to gain that
+contact with mother earth which gives inspiration as well as health; they
+failed to acquire a love of nature, became infected with the germ of
+gregariousness, preferred the glare of lights, the rush of hurrying
+crowds, and lost the relish for fresh air and quiet. This second
+generation came to the city boarding-house and flat as soon as they were
+free, leaving their parents' houses to go the same way as the
+grandfather's farmhouse, into the hands of the foreigner not yet
+Americanized to high standards of cleanliness and orderliness.
+
+These houses, too, are settling down into unkempt grounds with
+dilapidated porches and blinds. Such eyesores as one finds on the
+trolley-lines in any direction! They may have town-water supply, or they
+may depend on wells, but they are frequently without sewer-connection.
+
+It is costly to be neat and clean, and only those whose minds require such
+surroundings in order to be comfortable will pay the cost in time,
+trouble, and money.
+
+(3) Some families made a compromise and built what is called a modern
+house with bath-room and furnace (after the air-tight-stove craze passed),
+with jigsaw ornamentation outside and in, pretentious-looking dwellings
+with no proper kitchen accompaniments, and an unsavory garbage-barrel in
+the small back yard, under the next neighbor's windows. These houses are
+so close together that sounds and smells mingle; there is so little land
+that there is no satisfaction in caring for it. Houses of this sort are
+altogether too frequently found, occupying good locations and jarring on
+the nerves of the better-trained young people of to-day. What is to be
+done with them? They are too expensive to pull down, and hence are the
+last resort of those who find they must retrench. They are mere temporary
+shelters, not loved homes.
+
+The plumbing is usually of a cheap order, and the drains are not
+infrequently broken, so that sanitarily these dwellings are often more
+suspicious than the abandoned farmhouse.
+
+(4) The influx from village and country made demand for city housing of
+an inexpensive sort, and there came into being all over the land the type
+of the family house squeezed by the price of land to four stories high, 16
+to 20 feet wide, built in long rows and blocks. The "ugly sixties" bred
+not only distressful village "villas," but unpleasant city houses of this
+type, which are to-day a real menace to wholesome living. Many such blocks
+may be found in any of our older cities, casting a depressing influence
+upon all who come in sight of them, and deteriorating the manners and
+morals of all who live in them. For these have gone the way of the other
+classes mentioned and become perverted from the uses they were designed
+for. In the seventies there were still motherly women who had come to town
+to make a home for the children no longer content out of it. They were
+willing and capable of mothering a few other children and lonely teachers
+and clerks, so the boarding-house began as a real family home for the
+homeless. There were not enough of these women to go around, and soon
+boarding-houses began to be run for profit only. Home privileges were
+fewer and fewer, the common parlor was rented, the one-family kitchen was
+made to do duty for twenty persons. The house became pervaded with burned
+fat and tobacco-smoke--a most villainous combination, gossip flourished,
+and the limit of discomfort was reached. What wonder that a good Samaritan
+built the first flat where the wearied nerves could find peace in the
+thicker walls, and could escape the eternal "fry" by going out to meals!
+It is a perfectly natural evolution from the impossible conditions which
+the eighties and nineties developed.
+
+The early attempts, built on the old lines after the old ideas, before the
+new life was accepted, are not satisfactory and, being built of brick or
+stone, they are even more difficult to get rid of than the preceding. So
+each type goes down in the scale of decent living. A given roof is made to
+cover more people crowding closer and closer, causing home in the sense of
+privacy and comfort to recede farther and farther away, until the lover of
+his kind stands aghast at the magnitude of the problem before society when
+it awakens to the task confronting it. Fortunately these rows of houses
+are disappearing under the demand of business. The invasion of the
+residential district is a real blessing, in that it pulls down these
+houses which in twenty years have outlived their usefulness and can serve
+a good purpose no longer.
+
+Let us hope that either the demands of business or the common sense of
+society will also sweep away the fifth class: (5) City flats put up by the
+conscienceless money-maker with only that idea of giving the public what
+the public wants (because it knows no better) which gives the newspaper
+its pernicious influences. At first it was supposed the flat-dwellers
+would keep house, and arrangements of a sort were made. This compressed
+the work of the house into such small quarters that the maid was given a
+room down in the basement along with the furnace, or in the top story
+adjoining ten or more other rooms--a dormitory arrangement without
+supervision and without the quiet needed for rest. The difficulty of
+securing good service under these conditions, together with the thousand
+and one annoyances of living at too close quarters, noisy children and
+pianos, grumpy janitors, smelly garbage, have led to the latest phase:
+non-housekeeping flats with daily care of a sort supplied by the janitor
+if desired, a kitchenette where eggs and coffee for breakfast and dishes
+for invalids may be prepared, and restaurants galore for other meals. Thus
+the women of the family are set free to roam the streets in search of
+bargains and to join others like unto themselves for matinées and
+promenades.
+
+This sort of shelter is increasing more rapidly than any other in all the
+cities investigated. An estimate has been made that 80 or 90 per cent of
+the recent building has been of this sort. Six rooms in an unfashionable
+locality rent for about $25 or $30 a month; in a fashionable quarter, for
+$200 to $250 per month, with a floor-space one half larger. These latter
+cost about 50 cents per week per room for daily care, whereas the former,
+if cared for from outside, are served only at intervals of two weeks or a
+month. The inmates do most of the daily care themselves. While the
+building is new and fresh this means little work; but as time goes on the
+poor construction shows, the surface varnish wears off, cracks come, and a
+general shabbiness appears, so that the tenant prefers to move into a new
+building. The owner, or more probably the agent, puts on a little shining
+varnish, and rents again without real repair, and these buildings also go
+from bad to worse. Many of them are known to change tenants two or three
+times a year. There is always a demand for the newest house.
+
+A study of social conditions reveals the fact that for the larger part of
+the wage-earners the house has come to be the place where money is spent,
+not earned or even saved. It has gone back to its primitive use--shelter
+from weather and a sleeping-place, a temporary one at that. A real-estate
+authority has made the assertion that three fifths of the rent-payers in
+large cities are made up of non-householders and one half of these are
+confined to one room--mostly women. This indicates a change in
+requirements for the housing of the individual as distinguished from the
+family. And it is this element which has complicated city living to a
+great extent, and to which attention has been drawn by the accusation that
+home life is shirked by it.
+
+To the bachelor man and maid are added the commercial traveller who leaves
+wife and possibly child behind four fifths of the time. For him, as for
+several other classes of young business men, the locality which he can
+choose for headquarters changes with the requirements of business. He is
+under orders and must go at a moment's notice across the continent,
+perhaps. It is not his fault but the exigency of business that destroys
+the desire for a permanent abiding-place. The numbers of such homeless
+young people are far greater than any one but the real-estate agent
+realizes. Then this loosening of the home tie renders easy the shifting
+from city to country and seashore. A considerable proportion of the $2000
+to $5000 class shut up the flat or leave the boarding-house several times
+in the year. There is usually one place where the furniture and
+bric-a-brac and the other season's clothing are kept, but it is only a
+storehouse or a temporary retreat that holds their property, growing less
+and less as they move, until they may practically live in their trunks.
+
+The legacy which outranks all the others in disastrous consequences is the
+notion that the young people must begin where their parents left off; that
+the house must be, if anything, a little more elaborate. Therefore in
+starting life the rent is allowed to consume one third the income in
+sight, without considering the cost of maintaining such an establishment.
+With a probable income of $2000 a year the young man does not hesitate to
+pay $500 for a house, not realizing that at least half as much more should
+be spent on wages for the care of the nineteenth-century house, and as
+much more on incidentals, car-fares, and unexpected demands. What wonder
+that the young people find themselves in debt by the second year?
+
+The parents are quite as much, if not more, to blame for encouraging this
+extravagance. The father and mother are entitled to their ease and to the
+use of their income for it, but the newly married pair have, in this age,
+no right to assume the same attitude. They have their way to make, their
+work to do in the years ahead of them. They should not mortgage the future
+for the sake of the present luxury; and because of the uncertainties of
+occupation and of health it is wise to take out of the expected income one
+fourth or one third for a reserve fund and divide the remainder for
+expenses. For instance, from $2000 a year subtract $500, then divide the
+$1500 into $300 for rent, $300 for food, $300 for operating expenses, $200
+for clothing, $200 for travel, leaving $200 for the other expenses. If
+unlooked-for expenses must be incurred, there is the $500 to draw upon;
+but do not court the extra outlay: save the nest-egg if possible.
+
+The ideals of the home are said to rule the world. The young business man
+who does not take the sane view of his own expenses will not rightly
+consider his employer's interests. It is more than probable that the
+much-deplored laxness, to call it by no harsher name, in business circles
+is directly traceable to this falseness and dishonesty in standards of
+home life. This moral effect is what makes the housing problem so serious.
+It leads to an outward show not balanced by an ability to maintain an
+inner life in harmony. It leads to an attempt to carry on a four-servant
+house with two servants, or a three servant establishment with one.
+
+Lack of study and experience leads the family living in the suburbs, in
+one of the worst legacies of the past, to attempt the same style as
+friends maintain in a lately built apartment house, without in the least
+understanding wherein the difference lies.
+
+From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Maine to Texas, comes the same dull
+and sullen roar of domestic unrest. Lack of faithful service is causing
+the abandonment of the family home, and the fear of the obstacles in the
+way of establishing new ones threatens the whole social fabric.
+
+The housewife is inclined to connect this state of things almost entirely
+with food preparation, and is prone to fancy that if eating could be
+abolished peace would return.
+
+The trouble goes much deeper, however, even to the foundations. The
+nineteenth-century house is not suited to twentieth-century needs. In
+other words, lack of adaptation to present conditions of the houses we
+live in is a large factor in the prevailing domestic discontent. The next
+largest has been referred to as attempting a style of living beyond one's
+income.
+
+In all other walks of life, in transportation, in manufacturing, machinery
+has come in to replace the heavier and more mechanical portions of labor.
+The steam-shovel, the hoisting-engine, an infinite combination of
+mechanical principles have been applied to the doing of things to save
+human muscle. To stand by the machine which turns out the familiar
+grape-basket, ready to fill with the fruit, and then to watch the
+housemaid bending over some piece of work, is to realize the difference.
+In few, very few operations is it necessary to-day that men should bend
+their backs, but in how many household processes is the worker expected to
+get down on all fours? The free-born American rebels. Perchance it is the
+unconscious protest over a four-footed ancestry, or it may be that disuse
+has really weakened the spinal column. Whatever the cause, the fact
+remains. It is not the idea of work, of service, but of bending the back
+to work that is so repugnant; likewise the effect on the hands of hot
+water and scrubbing. Close observation has convinced me that care of the
+hands has become an indication of freedom from manual labor quite
+unthought of fifteen or twenty years ago. The increase of
+manicuring-rooms, like the increase of restaurants, is a clear sign of the
+trend of the times. Not only the class who likes to waste conspicuously,
+but many a teacher, many a young man in State or Government employ with
+an income of one, two, or three thousand a year patronizes these rooms.
+
+This daintiness reflects downward, and the girl whose acquaintances in her
+high-school days are in a position to keep well manicured, if not
+"lily-white," hands does not like to have hers show the effect of
+housework, when that means scrubbing the floor and cleaning the stove.
+Gloves? Ah, well, James Nasmyth once wrote: "Kid-gloves are great
+non-conductors of knowledge." I believe that gloves of any kind are a
+makeshift in real cleaning of dirty corners; but _there should not be
+corners to catch dirt_.
+
+The unnecessary nastiness of the scrub-water with its fine soot which
+works into every pore is a great objection to the girl who must work for
+her living. If she goes to visit her friends, her hands betray her. She
+can remove the other badges of her toil, her cap and apron; she may go out
+on the street as brave as her mistress; but the moment her gloves are
+removed her hands tell the tale. With the means at hand this need not be.
+It is one of the legacies which have come down to us, and which we have
+connected with the servant problem. The work in the most modern apartments
+does not require the soiling of the hands in a serious way. With hard wood
+floors, bright gas-stoves, porcelain lined dishes, no pots and kettles,
+all the stairs, halls, etc., cared for by the janitor, the work is of a
+far less smutting kind than in the suburban house, where there is still
+need for much cleaning up of a roughening sort which cannot be escaped.
+This has more to do than we are apt to think with the distaste for the
+country, unless several servants are kept, some for this work only. In the
+old type of city house the travel up-and down-stairs to answer bell and
+telephone has demanded strength of back not possessed by the modern maid.
+The house is not yet adapted to the new demands of the workers, and they
+shun it. The mistress herself finds it beyond her strength, even if the
+traces of rough work were not quite so distasteful to her.
+
+Miss Pettengill in her story of domestic service brings out the great part
+played by sooty dust, sifting in even through closed windows, in the
+burden of the waitress who is expected to keep the dining-room immaculate.
+
+This is only one instance where the blame really belongs on the actual
+material house rather than on the mistress, except that she does not
+discover a remedy, does not even know where to look for the cause. I have
+great faith in the business woman, who does see much that is better done
+and who will bring it back into the home.
+
+Fashions in philanthropy do not yet tend in the direction of house
+betterment.
+
+"A busy man cannot stop his life-work to teach architects what they ought
+to know," says Wells; but on the other hand "we cannot be expected to
+teach men and their wives, as well as draw plans for them," says the
+architect who has tried it.
+
+The centrifugal forces that our social prophets are so fond of invoking,
+holding that the words "town" and "city" may become as obsolete as
+"mail-coach," will have to reckon with these features of country life.
+
+It is assumed that the work of women is "housekeeping." I should like to
+put the question suddenly to a thousand men. What is twentieth-century
+housekeeping? I venture the guess that less than a hundred would take into
+account the utter difference in their wives' duties from their mothers',
+as they remember them; and yet the house, even the flat, is built more or
+less along the old lines. The women do not know enough to assert
+themselves, and have not the skill to show the builder what is wrong. The
+architects could tell tales if they would. The utter ignorance of what a
+house means, of the steps necessary to make a successful livable place, is
+appalling. The young man who has $3000 as a legacy feels he can build. His
+wife chooses the location near her friends whose houses she likes, and the
+architect is called in. Do you wish back stairs? Are you to keep three
+servants or none? Do you wish the rooms separate or connecting? All such
+questions find a blank stare. "What difference does that make in the style
+and price?" the would-be owner says. The architect is not always able to
+show him that these little things are the whole problem in building a
+_home_. The house as a home is merely outer clothing, which should fit as
+an overcoat should, without wrinkles and creases that show their
+ready-made character. The woman, born housekeeper as she considers
+herself, is rigid in her ideas of what she thinks she wants, but when the
+builder has followed her plans she is far from satisfied with the result.
+She is used to material which puckers and stretches in her clothing; she
+cannot understand the inflexibility of wood and stone. The remedy is for
+high-school girls, probably even grammar-school pupils as well, to have
+along with their drawing some problems in house-planning and some lessons
+in carpentry.
+
+It will be seen from the foregoing glance at the rapid change and steady
+deterioration of houses that the care of such living-places must involve
+special discomforts in most cases.
+
+The time required to keep clean old splintered floors, to carry pails of
+water up and down stairs, to dry out the cloths--the base boards with
+their grimy streaks tell the story of carelessness--is not counted in the
+wage schedule.
+
+Why is there so much dirt brought into the house? Because shoes and
+streets are muddy. Why is there so much lint? Because we have too many
+things in a room--too much wear and tear.
+
+And unnecessary dirt is found even in the newer apartment-houses with the
+ever-changing population and ever-lessening space for maids' quarters,
+together with the sham character of construction due to the fact that most
+of these houses have been put up by speculators at the lowest cost of the
+cheapest materials which will show wear in a few months. Flimsy
+construction is a direct result of the notorious lack of care taken by the
+tenant, so that quick returns must be the rule; also of the probability
+that the neighborhood will deteriorate and that a class which will bear
+crowding and be less critical will replace the first tenants.
+
+Conveniences for doing work in the houses built to rent, that is to bring
+in the greatest returns in the shortest time, will not be put in (for the
+first cost is great) unless the house will rent for more. The sharpest
+Hebrew or Irish landlord will allow his architect to add bathtubs if he
+believes the flat will rent for a few dollars more, where he will not do
+it for the sake of cleanliness. The supply of hot water, together with the
+gas stove, has done much to reconcile the housewife who does her own work
+to the cramped quarters of the flat, and also has done more than anything
+else to render the maids discontented with that legacy from the nineteenth
+century which requires the building of a coal fire before hot water can be
+had. The coal fire makes necessary rising an hour earlier and this, after
+the late hours the seven-o'clock dinner enforces, causes friction all
+along the line.
+
+The acceptance by young women without a study of cause and effect of
+whatever presents itself makes them bad housekeepers, in the sense of
+ignorant ones unable to cope with present conditions, because lack of
+experience is not supplemented by a spirit of investigation and a
+resolution to work out the problem. They seem to think that housekeeping
+is to go on in the same old way no matter whatever else may change,
+whereas it is most sensitive to the general direction of progress if they
+but knew it. The wage-earner is more fully aware of the currents of the
+irresistible river modern life has become (the slow-moving car of
+Juggernaut is no longer an adequate symbol) than is the money spender.
+
+Indeed is any part of the house, as we now most frequently find it,
+adapted to the uses of the twentieth century?
+
+The careless capitalist who makes possible the "cockroach landlord," he
+who sublets and crowds and skimps the tenants for his own gain, is greatly
+to blame for the distressing conditions of the lower income limit of the
+wage-earner, but I fear he is not altogether blameless for the sort of
+house the $1500 man has to look for in the city. Decent living with light
+and air within half an hour of work is growing so rare that society must
+take a hand in the matter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+  THE PLACE OF THE HOUSE IN THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF THE TWENTIETH
+  CENTURY.
+
+  "We have entered upon the period of conscious evolution, have
+  begun the adaptation of the environment to the organism."--Sir
+  OLIVER LODGE.
+
+
+The hopeless pessimism of the past, that saw in the unmerciful progress of
+organic evolution no escape for the human animal from the grip of fate, is
+about to give way to the enthusiasm of conscious directing and controlling
+power.
+
+This is the beneficent result of the age of the machine. Man has
+discovered that he can not only change his environment, but that by this
+change he can modify himself. The hope of the future lies in the moulding
+of man's surroundings to his needs. In physiological terms, "the
+adaptation of structure to function."
+
+The day is long past when shelter implied chiefly a tight roof and a dry
+floor. The housing of the twentieth-century family means location, central
+and fashionable. It means in cost far more than what the roof covers and
+the floor supports. It means plumbing and interior finish; it also means
+a finish on the outside, smoothly shaven lawns and immaculate sidewalks.
+
+Sigh as we may for the colonial house, we confess that the standards of
+the time did not include the comfort of hot baths, polished floors,
+plate-glass windows, elevators, ice-closets, and lawn-mowers. These are
+necessary adjuncts to what is held as merely decent living; _how_ can the
+$2000 man have them, not why _will_ he not?
+
+What then is the house and the life in it to become for the great majority
+of families and individuals with an income of $3000 a year and necessarily
+nomadic habits. I say necessarily, because these families are at the mercy
+of business and social conditions quite beyond their control and
+impossible to foretell.
+
+So far as prophetic vision sees through the mists of time, the aim of the
+twentieth century is to live the _effective life_.
+
+The simple life has been preached, the strenuous life has been lauded,
+but, as William Barclay Parsons recently stated it:[1] "We need force, we
+need a vigorous force; we need that direction and avoidance of the
+unnecessary which is simplicity, but with either one alone there is
+something lacking. Instead of latent force and great energy without
+control, instead of quiet gentleness, of power of control without vigor
+to be controlled, what we need is force and energy applied where necessary
+and always under control, always working to a definite purpose, and at the
+same time avoiding complications and unnecessary friction.
+
+[Footnote 1: William Barclay Parsons, N.E.A., Asbury Park, 1905. _Eng.
+Record_, Aug. 12, 1905.]
+
+"That is to have a life whose great underlying motive is effectiveness.
+Instead of speaking of the strenuous life or the simple life, let us have
+as a doctrine 'the effective life.'
+
+"What we need is not merely a man who acts, but one who _does_; that is,
+one who will do what he has to do regardless of intervening obstacles.
+Efficiency and effectiveness are the key-notes of success in actual life.
+They are also the lessons taught by every parable in the New Testament,
+even if that work is regarded as a code of ethics, and they form the
+spirit of that stirring definition of engineering[1] which is based on the
+direction of the vital forces of nature and the doing of things for
+mankind."
+
+[Footnote 1: "Ability to do and the _doing_, efficiency, and the use of it
+all for mankind."--Tredgold's definition of Engineering.]
+
+Manufacturing concerns have found it pays them to provide decent tenements
+for their workers, but society has not yet awakened to the fact that the
+rank and file of the great army of salaried employees is left to fend for
+itself in a world only too prone to take advantage of its necessities.
+There is danger in this neglect of wholesome living surroundings, because
+from this stratum develops normally the intelligence of the future, and
+how can mentally active children grow up under the prevailing unsightly
+and unsanitary conditions?
+
+Of course with the passing of pioneer conditions will pass in a measure
+the courage and adaptability which braced itself to meet and overcome
+obstacles. The salaried position in a great combine, instead of work for
+one's self in an independent business, tends to magnify the value of mere
+money-income gained through smartness rather than by ability. If life is
+made too easy, men will settle into indolent sterility, just as animals
+and plants degenerate with too much food.
+
+The future will surely bring greater mechanical perfection and thus leave
+it possible for the individual, for each member of the family group, to do
+for himself many little things which are not comfortable to do now. But
+will he be willing to do them? Not unless he feels it to be a duty or a
+pleasure. Not unless there is an undercurrent of principle which carries
+him along. Without this principle strong enough to give an impetus over
+hard places in the early stages of life, the individual and the family
+will surely drift into the hotel and boarding-house, where everything is
+done on a money basis and nothing for love of one's kind; where a tip
+salves the hurt of menial work. These habits once gained are hard to break
+up; therefore it is much better for young people to begin life doing some
+things for themselves in a house where machinery responds to their call
+without a tip, where they may economize without loss of self-respect. We
+need to revive some of the pagan ideals of the beauty and value of the
+human body and human life which consists in the care and use of this body.
+There is no menial work in the daily living rightly carried out; that
+which the last century wrongly permitted is made needless by the machinery
+of to-day.
+
+The point of view is most important.
+
+The first steps toward social betterment will come through a cooperation
+of three forces: (1) a recognition of the need; (2) an awakening of social
+conscience to the duty of supplying the need; and (3) the movement of
+moneyed philanthropy to fulfil the requirement quickly.
+
+As was natural, sympathy flowed first to the class which had the most
+visible need, not necessarily the greater need.
+
+The New York Model Tenement Association has shown the world how easy it
+is, when there is a will, to find a way. That association has already
+taken the first step in advanced housing, and reduced the cost of safe and
+rentable city shelter to its lowest terms. Fireproof, sanitary, and
+convenient so far as rooms go (it is quite a climb for the mother with a
+baby in her arms to the sixth story), with neighbors carefully sorted,
+repairs well looked after, a sympathetic woman as agent always in the
+office; _but_ only a minimum of light and air and sun; bedrooms 7x8,
+living-rooms 10x13; the smallest spaces the law allows; no grass, no
+flowers outside, no pets, nothing of one's own that cannot be put in a
+cart; common stairways where only partial privacy is gained; clothes-yards
+on the roof, and laundry in the basement, to be used in turn by twenty
+tenants. Because this is better than the slums for the emerging class, and
+because they like the gregariousness, is no argument for continuing the
+type up into the range of the $2000 group. But this is just what most of
+the small apartments do--those built to make all the money that they will
+bear. Hardly any better facilities are given. It will be easy for more
+roomy living-places to be built on similar plans, with elevators and
+labor-saving devices, and yet within the limit of moderate incomes, such
+blocks to be always under competent sanitary supervision.
+
+From these model tenements it will not be difficult to advance to the
+suburban square with sufficient variety in house plans to content those
+who are willing to yield small personal whims. Hitherto the erratic fancy
+of would-be tenants, the dissatisfaction with the arrangements provided,
+has made building _en masse_ difficult. As long as the builder was called
+upon to suit those who had lived in houses of their own for many years his
+task was difficult, but now he will have to do with the young people who
+know no other life and who will more readily fall in with the standards
+set by the house itself.
+
+For this very reason those who have social welfare at heart must come to
+the rescue, and devise and put up samples, of the best that modern science
+can offer, to rent for $300 to $500 a year. Let any one who loves his
+kind, if he have a talent this way, not wrap it in a napkin, but give it
+to the builder and the philanthropist to materialize. Now is the time to
+set standards for the next thirty years. The electric car is opening new
+country as never before. Who will make the practical advance?
+
+These new houses will be roomy and yet, I think, will not fail of
+sun-parlors or enclosed piazzas which will serve as extensions of the
+house when occasion demands. I am sure they will not contain the
+forbidding "front room" set apart for weddings and funerals and rare
+family gatherings. More open-air life will be fashionable and practicable
+as soon as we have learned that a wind-break and not a tightly-enclosed
+space is what we need. In northern latitudes especially it is the wind
+which makes the climate seem so inclement. The amount of accessible
+sunshine may be doubled with great advantage in most of the
+semi-country-houses. Shelter should not suggest a prison.
+
+The education of the child demands that housing shall include land for
+pets, for vegetables and flowers; not merely to increase beauty and
+selfish pleasure, but for the ethical value of contact with things
+dependent on care and forethought. The thoughtful sociologist recognizes
+as one of the greatest needs for the children of to-day a closer
+companionship with fathers--is urging that even money-making should be
+secondary to the time given to moulding the character of the little ones,
+instead of leaving them to nurses and coachmen or to the school of the
+streets. Companionship in the garden-work will secure this opportunity in
+a natural way.
+
+It is only by going into the country that sufficient land for a simple
+house with yard in front and garden in the rear--the ideal English
+home--can be had. There will be a sacrifice of some of the things the city
+gives, but a compromise is the only possible outcome of many claims.
+
+Those who are feeling the return to Nature, who find pleasure in gardening
+and in all the soothing effects of country life, or who can bring
+themselves to it with moderate pleasure for the sake of the children who
+must be encouraged to delight in it, should go out at least ten miles from
+the city. In a well-regulated household the early breakfast will be a
+natural thing, and the meal will be no more hurried than any other. It is
+the class which tries to be both city and country that fills the columns
+of the magazines with the trials of the commuter. The father need not see
+less of his children, and the common occupation and interest will furnish
+opportunities for wise counsel. Much nonsense is written about the perils
+of habit and the dangers of routine. It all depends upon what those habits
+are. All animal functions are better performed as a matter of habit,
+without thought; it saves energy for more intellectual pursuits, which, I
+grant, are better kept under volitional control. The animal act of
+breakfasting at a given hour, of taking a given train, can be accomplished
+as unconsciously as breathing. Early rising should be the rule, because
+the children are then available as they are not at night.
+
+We shall assume that the sane man will hold the little home in the country
+with all outdoors to breathe in as worth the half-hour journey and the
+early breakfast, and that the woman will have time set free by the
+labor-saving devices sure to come as fast as she will use them wisely.
+This free time she will give to the aesthetic side of life and will make
+of her home a more attractive place than the club.
+
+_But_ once a week let them both go into town either to the club or to some
+other place for dinner and an entertainment afterward. This will be
+sufficient to keep them out of an intellectual rut, will brighten the
+appetite with needed variety, and make the next quiet evening more
+delightful.
+
+Once a week is sufficient to break the monotony of diet and routine, and
+not often enough to create that insatiable appetite for the glare of
+lights and the rush of people which makes all family life "deadly dull,"
+as one café-haunting woman confessed.
+
+While this country life is the only thing for a family of young children
+and for those who really enjoy the country, there is a larger number
+needing rational housing which will be left behind, let us hope with more
+room because of the flitting of these others.
+
+Much as I deprecate the evils of the present apartment system, I do
+believe that an idealized modification will be needed for many years,
+especially for the elderly, for the commercial traveler, for the bachelor
+men and maids temporarily or permanently living single, for the newly
+married as yet unsettled in business or profession, for the man who does
+not know his own mind or whose employers do not know theirs. An instance
+has come to the writer's knowledge of a young man who, after his wedding
+cards were out, was ordered to take charge of an office in another city.
+
+Marrying for shelter is and should be no longer necessary; and as for the
+fear that this habit of bachelor quarters will be hard to break up and
+tend to delay marriage, it will all depend upon whether it comes from the
+merely animal layer of the brain or from the intellectual.
+
+This housing of the individual instead of the family has introduced an
+entirely new problem into house-building.
+
+Formerly when a widow or widower, a maiden aunt, a homeless uncle or
+cousin made his home with relatives, it was "as one of the family"; only
+the minister was recognized as having need for a separate sitting-room.
+The trials of this forced companionship have been told in many a witty
+story; and pathetic instances that never came to print are matters of
+common knowledge.
+
+Will any one dare question the fact that the sum of human happiness has
+been increased by the freedom given to these prisoned souls by the small
+independent apartment?
+
+I have been reminded that here is no provision for the different
+generations to live together under the same roof; that the nineteenth
+century held it to be of great social value to have the children grow up
+with the elders. I am sorry for the twentieth-century grandparents if they
+are obliged to live in a flat with the twentieth-century child; some
+readjustment of manners and ideals must be made before such living will be
+comfortable, and it seems as if they are better apart until the new order
+is accepted or modified. The comfort of those whose work is done and who
+have leisure to enjoy life was never so easily secured as to-day. To turn
+the key and take the train at an hour's notice, leaving no cares to
+follow, tends to a serene old age.
+
+Moralists may squabble over the discipline of living with one's
+mother-in-law, and of the loss to the children of grandmother's petting,
+but at least physical content and mental satisfaction have increased. Has
+selfishness also? Who shall say? And anyway it is a part of the progress
+of the age, and what are we to do about it?
+
+For one group of single persons the change has been only beneficial. It
+was a strict code of the early nineteenth century that a single woman
+should find shelter under the roof of some family house, however
+independent, financially, her condition. Latch-key privileges were denied
+her. Result, the boarding-house of the later half of the century,
+nominally a family home, actually a hotbed of faultfinding and gossip,
+most wearing to the teacher and fledgling professional woman, however
+acceptable to the milliner and seamstress. Privacy could not be maintained
+in a house built for a family of five made to do duty for twelve, with one
+bath-room, thin-walled bedrooms with connecting doors through which the
+light streamed when one wished to sleep, and words frequently came not
+intended for outsiders. Who that has experienced the two could ever think
+the bachelor apartment with its neat bath-room and double-doored entrance
+an objectionable feature in modern intellectual life? Ah! here is the key.
+We are to-day living a life of the intellect far more than ever before,
+and for that a certain amount of withdrawal from our fellow man is
+needed, at least a withdrawal from that portion which finds its interest
+in the affairs of others.
+
+But if we eliminate the house itself, and the heavy furniture from the
+"home" possessions, what have we left? The little girl was right: "My home
+is where my dishes is." My _possessions_, whatever they are--the things I
+can call my own under all circumstances make my home. These circumstances
+change from time to time, but the ideal is there. As a concrete instance:
+let us have books, not a lot of books, but books that are friends with
+whom one may spend a comforting hour anywhere; books that have power to
+charm away the gloom of discontent, books to lend gayety to festal days.
+
+Rugs and draperies a few, those you find satisfying to your sense of
+color, of design, and with which you feel at home. Ugly tables, chairs,
+and "sofas" disappear under an Indian shawl. A Persian or a Navajo blanket
+covers a multitude of aesthetic sins. Only let these harmonize with each
+other, let them be chosen once for all to go in company; then if they are
+distributed, it will not matter; but in any case avoid the "museum" look
+given by mere collecting. Alas! these are expensive articles, and the
+young people may not be able to get all at once. Let society then turn
+over a new leaf in the wedding-present line, and cease this senseless
+giving of cut-glass and silver to those who may go to a mining-camp in the
+Rockies or to Mexico, or even into a ten-by-twelve New York apartment.
+Let there be a committee--we are so fond of committees--to receive
+contributions in a money-bank or in sealed envelopes, and then when all is
+collected, let this committee scour the shops for articles of value, and
+when found consult the bridal pair as to their preferences. The choice may
+be made of one or more, as the money permits. The particular gift will
+still be a surprise and yet of permanent value. Lace and embroideries are
+always good, but let the waste of money on the "latest" in orange-knives,
+oyster-plates, go up higher, that is, to the class with money for
+conspicuous waste, if it must still exist, but let sensible people be
+sensible, and not require the young folks to live up to their hopes for
+future advancement. Wedding gifts are meant to be kindly help to a young
+housewife, not a burden which drags her down to the level of a drudge. But
+if the house is surely their own, and in the country, there will be
+shelves to fill and walls to cover; _then_ is the opportunity for
+individual gifts of china, glass, and pictures.
+
+To make the best of the increasing tendency to a semi-country living,
+there is need for students of domestic architecture, women with a trained
+taste added to an experience in doing things, not merely seeing them
+already done. Let these evolve beautiful exteriors, with interiors so
+finely proportioned that they will be a delight to all beholders, so
+adapted to their purposes that no one will wish to change them. There is a
+right dimension, in relation to other dimensions, which is always
+satisfying and independent of furniture or decoration.
+
+The ugly houses, ill adapted to any useful purpose, which line the
+roadside bear witness to the ignorance of the women of to-day. The effort
+for mere decoration, for pretentious show, is so evident that one wishes
+for an earthquake to swallow them all.
+
+Another cause for rise in rent demanded for a given space is the heavy tax
+borne by real estate for public improvement, for good lighting, clean
+streets, plentiful water, sufficient sewerage, free baths, parks, and
+schools. Again, this falls heaviest on our three- to five-thousand dollar
+class, who pay more than their share, especially when the millionaire
+shirks his duty by paying his taxes elsewhere. What can the man with
+limited income do but avoid the responsibility of a family? Has he a moral
+right to bring unhappiness to his wife and two children? Having been
+caught in the trap, why give him all the blame if he tries to increase his
+income by speculation?
+
+The more one studies this question of shelter for the salaried group, the
+more is one convinced that it lies at the root of our social discontent
+and is a large factor in our moral as well as physical deterioration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+  POSSIBILITIES IN SIGHT PROVIDED THE HOUSEWIFE IS PROGRESSIVE.
+
+  "We are far from the noon of man:
+  There is time for the race to grow."--TENNYSON.
+
+  "There appears no limit to the invasion of life by the machine."
+  H.G. WELLS.
+
+The house as a centre of manufacturing industry has passed (for even if
+village industries do spring up, the work-rooms will be separate from the
+living-rooms); the house as a sign of pecuniary standing is passing: what
+next? Why, of course, the house as the promoter of "the effective life."
+Rebel as the artistic individual may at this word, it expresses the spirit
+of the twentieth century as nothing else can. Social advance must be made
+along the line of efficiency, even if it lead to something different and
+not at first sight better. The appeal to self-interest is soonest
+answered. The man or woman with any ambition will keep clean, will buy
+better milk for the baby, will pay more for rent if he or she is convinced
+that it will bring in or save money in the end, because money has been the
+measure of success in the nineteenth century. But as the full significance
+of this "machine-made" age is grasped it will be seen that it has set free
+the human laborer, if only he will qualify himself to use the power at
+his hand. The house will become the first lesson in the use of mechanical
+appliances, in control of the harnessed forces of nature, and of that
+spirit of cooperation which alone can bring the benefits of modern science
+to the doors of all. One family cannot as a rule put up in a city or in
+the suburbs--and half the world lives in cities--its own idea of a house
+without undue expenditure; but ten families may combine and secure a
+building which fairly suits them all. I say fairly, because all
+cooperation means some sacrifice of whim or special liking. The
+well-balanced individual will, however, choose the plan yielding on the
+whole the greater efficiency, thus following a law of natural selection
+which, so far, the human race has ignored--a neglect which has been
+carrying him toward destruction as surely as there is law in nature. Is
+this neglect to go on, or is man to turn before it is too late to a
+cultivation of the effective life? In everything else he has advanced, but
+in his intimate personal relations with nature and natural force he has
+acted as if he believed himself not only lord of the beasts of the field,
+but of the very laws of nature without understanding them. Mechanical
+progress has come from an humble attitude toward the powers of wind and
+water. Home efficiency will arrive just as soon as the home-keeper will
+put herself in a receptive frame of mind and be prepared to learn her
+limitations and the extent of her control of material things. When she
+will stop saying "I do not believe" and set herself to learn patiently the
+facts in the case, then will housekeeping take on a new phase and the
+house become the nursery of effective workers who will at the same time
+enjoy life. To manage this machine-driven house will require delicate
+handling; but let women once overcome their fear of machinery and they
+will use it with skill.
+
+The undue influence of sentiment retards all domestic progress. Because
+our grandfather's idea of perfect happiness was to sit before the fire of
+logs, we are satisfied with the semblance in the form of the
+asbestos-covered gas-log. "It is not for the iconoclastic inventor or
+architect to improve the hearth out of existence." Sentiment is a useful
+emotion, but when it held open funerals of diphtheria victims, society
+stepped in and forbade. With a certain advance in social consciousness
+public opinion will step in and regulate sentiment in regard to many
+things depending on individual whim.
+
+Heating might now be accomplished without dust and ashes, without the
+destructive effects of steam, if enough houses would take electricity to
+enable a company to supply it in the form of a sort of dado carrying wires
+safely embedded in a non-conducting substance, or in the form of a carpet
+threaded with conducting wire. Both heating and cooling apparatus could be
+installed in the shape of a motor to replace the punkah man and the
+present buzz-wheel fan, and to give fresh air without the opening of
+windows which leads to half our housekeeping miseries. O woman, how can
+you resist the thought of a clean, cool house, sans dust, sans flies and
+mosquitoes, sans the intolerable street-noise, with abundance of fresh
+filtered air at the desired temperature! It is all ready at your hand. A
+windmill on the roof can store power, or a solar motor can save the sun's
+rays, or capsules of compressed air may be had to run the machine, if only
+you were not so afraid of the very word machine that no man dares propose
+it to you. Of what use is all the invention of the time if it cannot save
+the lives of the children, half of whom fall victims to house diseases, if
+it cannot sweep away consumption and influenza and all the kindred
+diseases arising from over-shelter and under-cleanliness of that shelter
+(lack of air). Both men and women are sentimental and non-progressive, but
+education is assumed to make wiser human beings. Women are said to be
+monopolizing the education; is it making them more amenable to
+reasonableness and less under the control of unprogressive conservatism?
+
+It does require quick adaptation to keep up with the possibilities of
+invention, but should we not aim at that which will advance our race on a
+par with its opportunities? Every other department is getting ahead of us.
+We should hang our heads in shame that we have neglected so long the means
+for saner living.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 6.--Old Kitchen Remodelled. (Stone, Carpenter &
+Wilson, Architects, Providence, R.I.) Looking toward the range. Servants'
+sitting-room beyond; porcelain sink at left; boiler (*remainder cut off).]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 7.--Old Kitchen Remodelled. Showing glass shelves
+and labelled glass jars for all stores. Glass mixing table at left
+(*remainder cut off).]
+
+It has been said that the highest modern civilization is shown not so
+much by costly monuments and works of art as by the perfection of house
+conveniences. Where then do we stand? And in what direction are we to look
+for the coming advance? We have had some sixty years of public sanitation;
+we have secured a supply of sanitary experts to whom all questions
+affecting the physical welfare of masses of people may be referred. We
+have a few architects who know the requirements of a _livable_ house, not
+merely one which shows off well as first built.
+
+We _need_ sixty years of private-house sanitation. We need to educate
+house experts, home advisers, those who know how to examine a house not
+only while it is empty but while it is throbbing with the life of the
+family. This adviser must be, for many years at least, able to suggest
+practical methods of overcoming structural defects (more difficult than
+fresh construction), as well as of modifying personal prejudices.
+
+These house experts will, I think, be women of the broadest education,
+scientific and social. They will have not only a certain amount of medical
+knowledge, but also the tact and enthusiasm of the missionary which will
+bring them as friends and benefactors to the despairing mother and the
+discouraged householder.
+
+That there is a beginning of this demand, I can testify; that it will
+grow, I believe. As soon as a group of trained women are ready, they will
+find occupation if the advance in housing conditions which I foresee is to
+become a reality.
+
+Within the last two or three years the author has received requests from
+all over the country for suggestions as to kitchen design and
+construction.
+
+The two illustrations here given show one little step in the right
+direction. The cuts represent a remodelled kitchen in Providence, R.I.
+
+The floor is of lignolith laid down in one sheet and carried up as a
+wainscoting so that no crevice exists for entrance of insects or dust.
+Such floors are yet in their infancy and need suitable preparation for
+laying, just as macadamized streets fail if the foundation is faulty. The
+idea is all that we are here concerned with. One of the features to be
+especially noted is the use of glass for shelves. Why should the hospital
+monopolize the materials for antiseptic work? When it is understood how
+much hospital work is caused because of dirt in the preparation and
+keeping of food, the kitchen will receive its share of attention.
+
+To-day the cost of shelter is about one third for the house and two thirds
+for the expense of running it, largely due to dirt and its consequences.
+Mr. Wells wisely says: "Most dusting and sweeping would be quite avoidable
+if houses were wiselier done."
+
+When the real twentieth-century house is put up our young engineer and
+college instructor will be willing to pay $400 to $500 rent, because wages
+and running expenses will be $100 less and the company owning the houses
+will not expect more than 4%, largely because repairs will be less and
+permanence of tenure more assured. The old type of wooden house used by
+the old type of tenant could not be expected to last more than a few
+years, which justified a higher rate of interest. For the tenement tenant
+of the better class twenty years has been the estimate, so that the cost
+of building could not be distributed over fifty years as it should be.
+
+The house will be made of reinforced concrete or its successor; certainly
+not of wood. Whether a single house or one of two or more "compartments,"
+each family will have a side, that is, the entrance doors will not be side
+by side. Such have been built in Somerville, Mass., by a railroad company
+for its employees. Those who wish to have a garden may; but no one will be
+obliged, for there will be regulations about the general appearance of the
+whole park, and every man his own lawn-mower will not be true. The
+cultivation of taste will have so far advanced that the grouping advised
+by the landscape architect will appeal to the occupant more than his own
+fancied arrangement.
+
+Since the heating will be supplied from outside, there will be a hothouse
+and cold-frames for those who wish to have a share in the garden, just as
+now there are bins in the basement. The care of these may replace the
+exercise now gained in scrubbing the front steps. The windows of the house
+will be dust-proof, fly-, mosquito-, and moth-proof; the air supplied will
+be strained by galleries of screens, if indeed social advance has not
+eliminated soot from chimneys and grit from the streets. Most certainly
+dirt will not be permitted to come in on shoes and long dresses. Warmed or
+cooled, moistened or dried air will be circulated as needed. In such a
+house rugs may stay undisturbed for a month or more, books for years, and
+the dust-cloth be rarely in evidence; the redding will consist of putting
+back in place the things used; but as each member of the family will do
+this as soon as he is old enough, there will be but a few minutes' work.
+
+The breakfast will be of uncooked or simply heated food, parched grains
+and cream, fruit fresh or dried, and nuts. If coffee or cocoa is desired,
+the electric heater serves it to the requisite degree of heat. Each adult
+member of the family will probably take this in his own room or at his own
+convenience, without the formality of a meal. The few glasses and other
+dishes may be plunged into a tank of water and left for future cleaning.
+Luncheon will depend altogether on the habits of the family, but dinner,
+at whatever hour that may be, will be the family symposium. Dressed in its
+honor, with a sprightly addition to the conversation of experience or
+information or conjecture, there will be form and ceremony of a simple,
+refined kind, such that once again the family may welcome a guest without
+anxiety. Good conversation and fresh interests will thus come into the
+children's lives. How much they have missed in these days of the barring
+out all hospitality! Is it perchance one reason, if not the chief, why
+manners have degenerated?
+
+This meal will not have more than four courses of food carefully selected
+and perfectly cooked, whether in the house or out matters not so it is
+served fresh and of just the right temperature. No kind of cooking will be
+permitted which "meets the guest in the hall and stays with him in the
+street"; therefore the dishes may be washed by neatly dressed maids or by
+the children, who thus learn to care for the fitness of things; plenty of
+towels and hot water, with all hands doing a little, leaves everything
+snug and no one too tired. We will let Mr. H.G. Wells describe the bedroom
+of the future house:[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: A Modern Utopia, p. 103.]
+
+"The room is, of course, very clear and clean and simple: not by any means
+cheaply equipped, but designed to economize the labor of redding and
+repair just as much as possible.
+
+"It is beautifully proportioned and rather lower than most rooms I know on
+earth. There is no fireplace, and I am perplexed by that until I find a
+thermometer beside six switches on the wall. Above this switchboard is a
+brief instruction: one switch warms the floor, which is not carpeted, but
+covered by a substance like soft oilcloth; one warms the mattress (which
+is of metal with resistance coils threaded to and fro in it); and the
+others warm the wall in various degrees, each directing current through a
+separate system of resistances. The casement does not open, but above,
+flush with the ceiling, a noiseless rapid fan pumps air out of the room.
+The air enters by a Tobin shaft.
+
+"There is a recess dressing-room, equipped with a bath and all that is
+necessary to one's toilet; and the water, one remarks, is warmed, if one
+desires it warm, by passing it through an electrically-heated spiral of
+tubing. A cake of soap drops out of a store-machine on the turn of a
+handle, and when you have done with it, you drop that and your soiled
+towels, etc., which are also given you by machines, into a little box,
+through the bottom of which they drop at once and sail down a smooth
+shaft. [Better stay in the box and not infect the shaft.--Author.]
+
+"A little notice tells you the price of the room, and you gather the
+price is doubled if you do not leave the toilet as you find it. Beside
+the bed, and to be lit at night by a handy switch over the pillow, is a
+little clock, its face flush with the wall [no dust-catcher].
+
+"The room has no corners to gather dirt, wall meets floor with a
+gentle curve, and the apartment could be swept out effectually by a
+few strokes of a mechanical sweeper [sucked out by the now-used
+cleaning-machine.--Author]. The door-frames and window-frames are of
+metal, rounded and impervious to draft. You are politely requested to
+turn a handle at the foot of your bed before leaving the room, and
+forthwith the frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bedclothes
+hang airing. You stand in the doorway and realize that there remains not
+a minute's work for any one to do. Memories of the fetid disorder of many
+an earthly bedroom after a night's use float across your mind.
+
+[In America the use of the sleeping-room as a sitting-room is more common
+than in England, and the fetid disorder is far greater.]
+
+"And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, sweet apartment as
+anything but beautiful. Its appearance is a little unfamiliar, of course,
+but all the muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless ornament that
+cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, the curtains to check the draft
+from the ill-fitting windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures, usually a
+little askew, the dusty carpets, and all the paraphernalia about the dirty
+black-leaded fireplace are gone. The faintly tinted walls are framed with
+just one clear colored line, as finely placed as the member of a Greek
+capital; the door-handles and the lines of the panels of the door, the two
+chairs, the framework of the bed, the writing-table, have all that
+exquisite finish of contour that is begotten of sustained artistic effort.
+The graciously shaped windows each frame a picture--since they are
+draughtless the window-seats are no mere mockeries as are the window-seats
+of earth--and on the sill the sole thing to need attention in the room is
+one little bowl of blue Alpine flowers."
+
+The true office of the house is not only to be useful, but to be
+aesthetically a background for the dwellers therein, subordinate to them,
+not obtrusive. In most of our modern building and furnishing the people
+are relegated to the background as insignificant figures. This is largely
+why the home feeling is absent, why children do not form an affection for
+the rooms they live in.
+
+Let there be nothing in the room because some other person has it; this
+shows poverty of ideas. Let there be nothing in the room which does not
+satisfy some need, spiritual or physical, of some member of the family.
+How bare our rooms would become! Let the skeptical reader try an
+experiment. Take everything out of a given room, then bring back one by
+one the things one feels essential not merely because it fills space but
+for the presence of which some one can give a good and sufficient reason.
+It will mean a trial of a few days, because it is not easy to separate
+habit from need. A table _has stood_ in a certain spot: that is no reason
+in itself why it should continue to stand there unless it supplies a need.
+
+If a fetish stands in the way of social progress, do away with it. If the
+idea of home as the shell is standing in the way of developing the idea of
+home as a state of mind, then let us cast loose the load of things that
+are sinking us in the sea of care beyond rescue.
+
+It is quite possible that we may return to that state of mind in which
+there was a pleasure in caring for beautiful objects. The housewife of
+colonial days did not disdain the washing of her cups of precious china or
+doing up the heirlooms of lace and embroidery. When our possessions
+acquire an intrinsic value, when all the work of the house which cannot be
+done by machinery is that of handling beautiful things and has a meaning
+in the life of the individual and the family, service will not be required
+in the vast majority of homes: then we may approach to the Utopian ideal
+of the nobility of labor.
+
+"The plain message that physical science has for the world at large is
+this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well
+contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic
+operating-plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now, at the present
+moment, be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the smallest
+fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now make human life
+so doubtful in its value. There is more than enough for every one alive.
+Science stands as a too competent servant behind her wrangling, underbred
+masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid
+to use."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: H.G. Wells.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+  THE COST PER PERSON AND PER FAMILY OF VARIOUS GRADES OF SHELTER.
+
+  "The strongest needs conquer."
+
+An outlay of $1500 to $2500 will secure a cottage in the country, or a
+tenement with five or six rooms in the suburbs, for a wage-earner's
+family. The rent for this should be from $125 to $200 per year, but, as in
+the case of the model tenements in New York, a minimum of sanitary
+appliances and of labor-saving devices is found in such dwellings. They
+are adapted to a family life of mutual helpfulness and forbearance.
+
+The lack of this kind of housing has been a disgrace to our so-called
+civilization. Public attention has, however, been directed to the need,
+and it is gratifying to find in the report of the U.S. Bureau of Labor,
+Bulletin 54, Sept. 1904, a full account, with photographs and plans, of
+the work of sixteen large manufacturing establishments in housing their
+employees.
+
+Euthenics, the art of better living, is being recognized as of money value
+in the case of the wage-earning class, but the wave of social betterment
+has not yet lifted the salaried class to the point of cooperation for
+their own elevation. They are obliged to put up with the better grade of
+workmen's dwellings, or to pay beyond their means for a poor quality of
+the house designed for the leisure class. In either case, the weight bears
+hardest on the woman's shoulders, and it is to her awakening that we must
+look for an impetus toward an understanding of the problems confronting
+us.
+
+The college-educated women of the country believe so fully that the
+twentieth century will develop a civilization in which brain-power and
+good taste will outrank mere lavish display, that they have sent out a
+call to their associations to devise methods of sane and wholesome living
+which shall leave time and energy free for intellectual pleasure--some, at
+least, of that time now absorbed by the house and its demands as insignia
+of social rank.
+
+Trained and thoughtful women are convinced that the first step in social
+redemption is adequate and adaptable shelter for the family. Just so long
+as tradition and thoughtlessness bind the wife and mother to that form of
+housekeeping which taxes all the forces of man to supply money and of
+women to spend it, so long will the most intelligent women decline to
+sacrifice themselves for so little return.
+
+The constructive arts dealing with wood, stone, and metal have been
+conceded to be man's province. He has used new materials and labor-saving
+devices in railway stations and place of amusements, not selfishly, but
+because of the appreciation of the travelling public. It is the fashion to
+decry labor-saving devices in the house, because they do away with that
+sign of pecuniary ability, the capped and aproned maid. The obvious saving
+of steps by the speaking-tube and telephone-call is frowned upon for the
+same reason. It is this attitude of society which stands in the way of the
+adoption of those mechanical helps which might do away with nearly all the
+drudgery and dirty heavy work of the house.
+
+The new epoch[1] "is more and more replacing muscle-power fed on wheat at
+eighty cents a bushel, by machine-power fed on coal at five cents a
+bushel," thus liberating man from hard and deadening toil. As his mental
+activity increases his needs in the way of the comforts and decencies of
+refined living increase. More sanitary appliances are demanded, more
+expense for fundamental cleanliness is incurred, and for that tidiness and
+trimness of aspect inside and outside the house which adds both to the
+labor and to the cost of living, especially in old-style houses.
+
+[Footnote 1: The New Epoch. Geo. S. Morison.]
+
+While we can but applaud this desire, we must confess that the new
+building laws, the increased cost of land, and the higher wages of workmen
+have raised the cost of shelter for human efficiency to double or treble
+that of the so-called workman's cottage. A fair rule is that each room
+costs $1000 to $2000 to build.
+
+This means that our lowest limit of income, $1000 a year with $200 for
+rent, can have only two or at most three rooms and bath, and those without
+elevators and janitor service. It is only when the income reaches $2000 to
+$3000 a year that the family may have the advantage of good building in a
+good locality, and even then it means some sacrifice in other directions.
+It is clear that the common theory that a young man must have a salary of
+$3000 a year before he dares to marry has some foundation when $600 to
+$800 is demanded for rent.
+
+The increased sanitary requirements have doubled the cost of a given
+enclosed space, the finish and fittings now found in the best houses have
+doubled this again, so that it is quite within bounds to say that a house
+which might have been put up to meet the needs of the day in 1850 for,
+say, $5000 will now cost $20,000.
+
+Much of the increase is for real comfort and advance in decent living, and
+so far it is to be commended. Such part of the increase as is for
+ostentation, for show and sham, is to be frowned upon, for this high cost
+of shelter is to-day the greatest menace to the social welfare of the
+community. When the average young man finds it impossible to support a
+family, when the professional man finds it necessary to supplement his
+chosen work by pot-boiling, by public lectures and any outside work which
+will bring in money, what wonder that scholarship is not thriving in
+America? Pitiful tales of such stifling of effort have come to my ears,
+and have in large part led me to make a plea for a scientific study of the
+living conditions of this class, and for a readjustment of ideals to the
+absolute facts of the situation.
+
+We may give sympathy to those Italians who pay only $2 a month for the
+shelter of the whole family, but we must give help to the harder case of a
+family with refined tastes and high ideals who can pay only $200 a year.
+
+In the real country, at a distance from the railroad, air, water, and soil
+are cheap. Here a house may be put up with its own windmill or gas-engine
+to pump water, with its own drainage system, giving all the sanitary
+comforts of the city house, for about $5000. The same inside comforts in
+one quarter the space, minus the isolation and garden, may be had in a
+suburban block for one half that sum. This is probably the least expensive
+shelter to-day for the family whose duties require one or more members of
+it to be in the city daily, for, as the centre of the city is approached,
+land rent increases, so that dwelling space must be again curtailed one
+half or rent doubled. The majority take half a house or go into the city
+and put up with one quarter the space.
+
+The curtailment of space in which families live is going on at an alarming
+rate, although not yet seriously taken into account by the sociologist
+for the group we are studying.
+
+[Illustration: Figs. 8 and 9.--House for "Mrs. L.," Anywhere in temperate
+America, to cost $5000, if it must not more (*remainder cut off).]
+
+[Illustration: Figs. 10 and 11.--House for "Mrs. L.," Anywhere in
+temperate America, to cost only $3000, if possible. (Josselyn & Taylor
+Co., Cedar Rapids, Iowa).]
+
+This crowding is causing the refinements of life to be disregarded, is
+depriving the children of their rights, and doing them almost more harm
+than comes to the tenement dwellers, for they have the parks to play in
+and are not kept within doors.
+
+Mr. Michael Lane in his "Level of Social Motion" claims that present
+tendencies are leading to a level of $2000 a year and a family of two
+children as an average. Mr. Wells claims as a tendency in living
+conditions the practically automatic and servantless household. In
+connection with the Mary Lowell Stone Home Economics Exhibit a design of
+an approach to this kind of a dwelling was asked for in sketch. The
+accompanying plans were made by a firm who have had not only experience in
+this kind of domestic building, but who have sympathy with and personal
+knowledge of similar conditions in widely separated parts of the country.
+
+These sketches are not of an _ideal_ house and not for a given plot of
+land, but only a hint of what Mrs. Michael Lane "must expect if she
+attempts to build in the country or suburbs."
+
+Since these were drawn many changes have come about in costs and in
+materials available. The architects expressly disclaim the word "model" in
+relation to them. Mrs. Lane and her two children will do their own work,
+and therefore steps and stairs must be few, and yet they wish light and
+air and cleanliness.
+
+The author hopes that her readers will make a study of house-plans, not
+the cheap ones, but those that will bear the test of time and living in.
+
+The increased cost of shelter should mean both more comfort and greater
+beauty. If it does not, something is wrong with society.
+
+It appears from all that has been gathered that single houses for a family
+of five will cost about $5000 to $10,000 for some years to come; that
+these houses should be so constructed and cared for as to rent for $300 to
+$400 if the occupant is to keep the grounds in order, to use the house
+with care, and furnish heat and light.
+
+The question of return on capital invested and of care of exteriors and
+grounds must be studied most carefully in the light of the new conditions,
+and a new set of conventions devised by society to meet the various
+circumstances arising out of them.
+
+This suburban living is the vital point to be attacked, because in cities
+the matter is already pretty well settled; there is in sight nothing that
+will greatly change the rule already given, a cost of $1000 per room of
+about 1200 cubic feet, with the finish and sanitary appliances demanded.
+
+Our family of five must pay for rent $500 to $800 for the smallest
+quarters they can compress themselves into. Subtracting the cost of heat
+and light and the car-fares, this may be no more expensive than the
+suburban house at $300 or $400, _but_ the difference comes in light and
+air. The upper floors of an isolated skyscraper give more than a country
+house, but at the expense of other houses in the darkened street.
+
+In the city the question is then not so much one of cost of construction
+as of a fair arrangement of streets and parks, so as to avoid the loss of
+light and air for living-places. The single individual may find shelter of
+a safe and refined sort in all respects except air for $200 to $300 a year
+in the newer apartment-houses, and two friends to share it may halve this
+sum. A great need is for as good rooms to be furnished in the suburbs
+where more light and air may be had.
+
+The content of the country house costing $5000 to $10,000 will be
+approximately 50,000 to 70,000 cubic feet, or 10,000 for a person. The
+suburban block will furnish about 12,000 to 20,000 for the family, while
+the city apartment of six so-called rooms renting for from $400 to $500 a
+year shrinks to 6000 to 8000 cubic feet, giving only one tenth the
+air-space the country house affords, as well as far less outside air and
+sunshine. The best city tenements cost $1 a week for 600 cubic feet
+air-space. What wonder that the sanitarian is aghast at the prospect!
+
+According to the President of the English Sanitary Inspectors' Association
+it seems probable that if the nineteenth-century city continues to drain
+the country of its potentially intellectual class and to squeeze them into
+smaller and smaller quarters, it will dry up the reservoirs of strength in
+the population (address, Aug. 18, 1905).
+
+The houses of the Morris Building Co., illustrated in Chapter II, show
+what may be done. These houses rent for $35 to $45 a month with constant
+heat and hot water, so that the heavy work is reduced to a minimum; but
+the exigencies of family life are illustrated in the fact of the almost
+universal demand of the tenants for continuous heat and hot water night as
+well as day. The ordinary childless apartment house banks its fires at
+night. A supplementary apparatus would mean work by the tenants, however.
+This is a good example of the balance which must be struck in all new
+plans until they are tested.
+
+The change in what one gains under the name of shelter, what one pays rent
+for, must be kept clearly in mind. Two or three decades since it was a
+tight roof, thinly plastered walls, and a chimney with "thimble-holes for
+stoves," possibly a furnace with small tin flues, a well or cistern, or
+perhaps one faucet delivering a small stream of water. To-day even in the
+suburbs there is furnished light, heat, abundant water, care of halls and
+sidewalks. The elevator-boy takes the place of "buttons," the engineer and
+janitor relieve the man of the house of care, so that it may not be so
+extravagant as it sounds to give one third the $3000 income for rent,
+since it stops that leaky sieve, that bottomless bag of "operating
+expenses." The income may be pretty definitely estimated in this case,
+especially if meals are taken in the café. If the family dine as it
+happens, the cost mounts up. Here are a few estimates for verification and
+criticism:
+
+Rent of an apartment............$ 600.00 to $ 700.00
+Meals........................... 1200.00  "  1000.00
+Clothing........................  400.00  "   600.00
+Incidentals, amusements, etc....  200.00  "   300.00
+Savings, _nil_.
+                                ---------   --------
+Total income................... $2400.00 to $2600.00
+
+If the wife can manage the "kitchenette" and part of the clothing, about
+$600 may be saved, but in that case it represents her earnings, and should
+be at her disposal. If it should be possible for safe shelter to be had
+for $400, then with the wife's help $700 should be the sum in the "region
+of choice." I hold that, unless the income can be managed so as to secure
+_choice_, all the daily toil is embittered. Even if some is spent
+foolishly, it is safer than the burden "just not enough."
+
+The more common cost of decent living in our Eastern cities is:
+
+Rent...............................$1000 to $1500
+Meals.............................. 1200  "  1400
+Clothing...........................  500  "   700
+Incidentals........................  300  "   600
+Savings, _nil_.
+                                   -----    -----
+Total..............................$3000 to $4000
+
+This goes far toward justifying the saying that a young man cannot afford
+to marry on less than $3000 a year.
+
+With these figures in mind, what can our $2000 family with two children
+do? The rent that they can pay will not cover service or heat. There must
+be a maid to fill the lamps, see to the furnace, help with the cooking,
+and the wife must stay by the house pretty closely and probably decline
+most invitations. For the five persons, ten dollars a week for raw-food
+materials and five for its preparation is the lowest limit likely to be
+cheerfully submitted to.
+
+Rent, heat, light, etc..................... $400
+Food.......................................  800
+Clothing hardly less than..................  400
+Children's education, even with free
+  schools, and their illnesses will use up.  100
+Car-fares, church, etc.....................  100
+Wages and sundries.........................  200
+                                           ------
+Total..................................... $2000
+
+In the bank nothing.
+
+But what shelter can this refined, intelligent family find to-day for
+$400? Certainly nothing with modern conveniences. The lack of these is
+_made up by women's work_--hard, rough work. And that is the crux of the
+servant problem to-day. It is the reason why more families do not go into
+the country to live. The work required in an old house to bring living up
+to modern standards is too appalling to be undertaken lightly.
+
+In England the Sunlight Park and other plans, in America the Dayton and
+Cincinnati schemes, are samples of what is being done for the $500 to $800
+family, but where are the examples (outside the Morris houses) for the
+salaried class for whom we are pleading? The great army of would-be
+home-makers are forced into a nomadic life by the exigencies resulting
+from the great combines--a shifting of offices, a closing of factories, a
+breaking up of hundreds of homes. I believe this to be the _chief factor_
+in the decline of the American home--a hundred-fold more potent than the
+college education of women.
+
+The unthinking comment on this rise in the cost of shelter is usually
+condemnation of greedy landlords and soulless capitalists; but is that the
+whole story?
+
+In the present order of things it seems to be inevitable that the gain of
+one class in the community is loss to another. Probably the law has always
+existed, and only the very rapid and sudden changes bring it into
+prominence, because of the swift readjustment needed, an operation which
+torpid human nature resents when consciously pressed.
+
+For instance, the efforts of the philanthropist and working man together
+have succeeded in shortening hours of labor and increasing wages--without,
+alas! increasing the speed or quality of the work done, especially in the
+trades which have to do with materials of construction, so that
+house-building has about doubled in cost within twenty-five years, largely
+due to cost of labor. This increased cost has fallen heavily on the very
+group of people least able to bear it, the skilled artisan, the teacher,
+and the young salaried man. Again I call attention to the need of a
+philanthropist who shall raise his eyes to that group, the hope of our
+democracy, those whom he has held to be able to help themselves--and given
+time would do so; but time is the very thing denied them in this motor
+age. Help to make quick adjustment must come to the rescue of those to
+whom time more than equals money.
+
+One used to wait patiently for seed-sown lawns to become velvety turf.
+Money can bring sod from afar and in a season give the results of years.
+So the housing of the $2000 family can be accomplished just as soon as it
+seems sufficiently desirable. It needs a research just as truly as the
+cancer problem or desert botany, and affects thousands more.
+
+One other cause of increased cost in construction and operation which
+does, if wisely carried out, increase health and efficiency is the
+sanitary provision of our recent building laws.
+
+The instalment of these sanitary appliances becomes increasingly costly
+because of the rise in wages of the workmen, plumbers, masons, etc. The
+careful statistics of the Bureau of Labor show conclusively that all
+building trades have decreased hours of labor and increased wages per
+hour, so that cost of construction has doubled, and the sanitary
+requirements have again doubled the cost, so that it is easy to see why
+the family with a stationary income has quartered its dwelling-space.
+
+The end is not yet: the new devices mentioned in previous chapters will at
+first increase cost of construction.
+
+From lack of business training the public is at fault in estimating
+relative costs. A well-built "automatic house" costs too much, they say.
+Yes, but what does it save? Cost looms large, saving seems small.
+Moreover, the value of mental serenity, of that peace of mind consequent
+on the smooth running of the domestic machine, is undervalued. The
+American child such as he is is largely the product of the American house
+and its ill adapted construction. I must reiterate my belief that the
+modification of the house itself to the life the twentieth century is
+calling for is the first step in social reform.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+  THE RELATION BETWEEN COST OF HOUSING AND TOTAL INCOME.
+
+  "It must be made possible to live within one's income."
+
+The thrifty French rule is one fifth for rent. In towns where land is
+cheap and wood abundant, or in college communities exempt from taxes,
+comfortable housing is found in this country for as little as fifteen or
+eighteen per cent of the total income. In some mining towns where all
+prospects are uncertain and the house has no particular social
+significance the rent may be even lower, although it is often very high.
+It depends on the demand, on competition rather than quality. In our older
+and more settled communities it is most common for rent to use up one
+fourth the salary of all town dwellers with incomes within our limits.
+This was true in Boston fifty years ago, and it is true to-day in dozens
+of cities and towns personally investigated. It is not unknown that a
+teacher or business man should exceed this in the hope of a rise in
+salary by the second year. Adding the expenses of operating the house, of
+repairs and additions and improvements if the house is owned, nearly half
+the money available must go for the mere housing of the family.
+
+If it is true, as I believe it is, that for each fraction over one fifth
+spent for rent a saving must be made in some other direction--in the daily
+expense, less service, less costly food, or less expensive clothing, or,
+last to be cut down, less of the real pleasure of life,--it will be seen
+what a far-reaching question this is, how it touches the vital point, to
+have or not to have other good things in life.
+
+A large part of the increase is due, as we have said, to increased demand
+for sanitary conveniences, but far more potent is the pressure resulting
+from the price of land.
+
+This pressure has led to the building of smaller and smaller apartments,
+so that four and six rooms are made out of floor-space sufficient for two.
+It sounds better to say we have a six-room flat, even though there is no
+more privacy than in two rooms, for the rooms are mere cells unless the
+doors are always open. It is not uncommon in such suites renting for $50
+to $60 per month for six rooms, to find three of them with only one window
+on one side, with no chance for cross-ventilation unless the doors of the
+whole suite are open.
+
+This style of building prevails even in the suburbs where air and
+sunshine should be free. The would-be renter looking at such suites with
+all the doors open and the rooms innocent of fried fish and bacon does not
+think of the place as it _will be_ under living conditions when privacy
+can be had only by smothering.
+
+The model tenements in New York rent for one dollar per week per room; the
+better houses for double, or two dollars for 450 cubic feet. Many of those
+I have examined renting for forty to sixty dollars per month give no more
+space for the money, only a little better finish--marble and tile in the
+bath-room, for instance.
+
+The three-room tenement does, however, shelter as many persons as the
+six-room flat, hence there is more real overcrowding. In all these grades
+of shelter it is fresh air that is wanting. What wonder the white plague
+is always with us? What remedy so long as millions sleep in closets with
+no air-currents passing through?
+
+Accepting the French rule, the artisan who rents the model tenement at
+$3.50 per week should earn $3 a day wage for six days. If he earn only $2,
+then more than one quarter must go for housing. There are hundreds of
+Italian families in New York who pay only $2 _per month_ for such shelter
+as they have, but it is only providing for the primitive idea of mere
+shelter, not for the comforts of a true home life. After the fashion of
+early man, these people spend their lives in the open air, eat wherever
+they may be, and use this makeshift shelter as protection from the weather
+and as a place of deposit for such articles as they do not carry about
+with them and for such weaklings as cannot travel.
+
+As man rises in the scale of wants he pays more, in attention and in
+money, for housing, because he leaves wife and children to its comforts
+while he goes forth to his daily tasks. As ideals rise, the proportion
+rises until even one third of his earnings goes for mere shelter. But this
+limits his desires in other directions, so that it becomes a pertinent
+question, when is it right to give as much as one third of the moderate
+income for housing? As every heart knows its own bitterness, so every man
+knows his own business and what proportion of his income he is _willing_
+to spend for a house, for the comforts of life pertain largely to bed and
+board. It must be acknowledged, however, that comfort and discomfort are
+so largely matters of habit and personal point of view that education as
+to ideals is an important duty of society in its own defence.
+
+If two people without children prefer to spend more on shelter than on any
+other one thing, then with $3000 a year, $1000 may be given for rent if
+that covers heat, light, and general outside care. But the _family_ with
+children to consider must not think of allowing one third for rent under
+our very highest limit of $5000 a year, and it is unwise even then. In
+fact the ratio must be governed by circumstances. It is true, however,
+that the conditions must be interpreted by a fixed principle in living and
+not by any mere fashion or prejudice of the moment.
+
+The one question every person asks when these suggested improvements are
+discussed is, but how much will it cost? Thus confessing that cost, not
+effectiveness, is the measure; that old ideals as to money value still
+rule the world. It costs too much to have a furnace large enough to warm a
+sufficient volume of air, it costs too much to put in safe plumbing, it
+costs too much to keep the house clean, and so on through the list. We
+have been too busy getting and spending money to study the cost of neglect
+of cardinal principles of right living. The farmer knows the cost of his
+young animals, but the father cares little and knows less of what it ought
+to cost to bring up his children--of the economy of spending wisely on a
+safe shelter for them.
+
+A new estimate of what necessary things must cost has to be made before
+the present generation will live comfortably in presence of the
+account-book.
+
+Here again a readjustment is coming; some expenses in house construction
+common now will be lessened or done away with; for example, fancy shapes,
+grooved and carved wood, projecting windows and door-frames.
+
+It is usual, when the various new methods are brought up, to estimate the
+cost as additional to all that has gone before, rather than to see in it a
+substitute for much that may go.
+
+Our family with $1500 income may safely pay $300 for rent, if that covers
+enough comfort and does not mean too much car-fare.
+
+The house may cost $3000 if built on the old lines, and if the land it is
+placed on is not too expensive.
+
+A fire-proof house such as is described in the July number of the
+_Brickbuilder and Architect_, 85 Water St., Boston, and probably also a
+house of reinforced concrete, will cost at present some $10,000 besides
+the land. Because of freedom from repairs it should be possible to rent
+such houses for $500, which will bring them within the reach of our $3000
+a year family, but not within the means of the $2000. What is to be done?
+
+It will be remarked by some that little attention has been given in these
+pages to the various so-called cooperative plans, like Mrs. Stuckert's
+oval of fifty houses connected by a tramway at each level, with a central
+kitchen from which all meals come and to which all used dishes return,
+with a central office from which service is sent, etc.
+
+Frankly, to my mind this is not enough better than the apartment hotel, as
+we now know it, to pay for the effort to establish it. As now evolved by
+demand, the establishments renting from one to fifteen thousand a year are
+on progressive lines. According to Mr. Wells, this shareholding class is
+on the way to extinction in any case, fortunately he also thinks, and the
+student of social economics need not concern himself with its future, only
+so far as its example influences the real bone and sinew of the republic,
+the working men and women who make the world the place it is.
+
+Within the ten-mile radius it has been usual to include a front yard, if
+not a garden, in the house-lot. The cost of keeping this in the trim
+fashion decreed as essential, of planting and pruning of shrubs, of
+maintaining in immaculate condition the sidewalks and front steps, like
+most of the items in cost of living, is due to changed standards, just as
+the cost of table-board has advanced from $3 to $6 without a corresponding
+betterment in quality.
+
+Engle's law, "The lodging, warming, and lighting have an invariable
+proportion whatever the income," does not hold under modern conditions for
+the group we are considering, for our wise ones need the best, and not a
+few of them are unwilling to buy their family sanctity at the price of a
+closet in the basement for the faithful maid.
+
+Plans may look well on paper, the completed house may seem attractive, but
+when the family _live_ in the house its deficiencies become apparent.
+Cheap materials, flimsy construction, damp location, any one of a dozen
+possibilities may make the family uncomfortable, may cost in heating and
+doctor's bills, may compel a moving before the year is out. Cheap houses
+in this decade are suspicious; the more need for a knowledge on the part
+of young people of what may be expected.
+
+For this reason it is a part of sound education to give a certain amount
+of attention to living conditions in the high-school curriculum. It is as
+important as book-keeping; for of what avail are money and business, if
+the home life is perilled? Besides, some of the pupils may have attention
+called to deficiencies which they may show talent in overcoming.
+
+Courses in Home Economics and Household Administration in colleges and
+universities should be directed to careful study of this branch of
+sociology.
+
+There is a great opportunity before women's clubs and civic-improvement
+associations to arouse an interest in the provision of suitable shelter
+for the young families in their several neighborhoods. Concerted movement
+by the Federation could revolutionize public opinion within a decade.
+
+The student of social science may well say that the first effort should be
+directed to a rise in the pay of these educated young men; that no family
+should be expected to live on the sums here considered; that it is not
+right even to consider a way out on the present basis. Possibly so. Much
+agitation is abroad in relation to the pay of teachers, clerks, and
+skilled workmen, but that is another question which cannot be considered
+here.
+
+The salaried class has so enormously increased of late years because of
+the great consolidation of business interests that the final adjustment
+has not been made. The one fact of uncertain tenure of position and
+uncertain promotion has profoundly affected living conditions, ownership
+of the family abode, and, incidentally, marriage.
+
+There are prizes enough, however, to keep the young people on the alert
+for advancement, and they feel it more likely to come if they establish
+themselves as if it had arrived.
+
+There is no denying that in the estimation of a large number of the groups
+we are considering, the question of neat and orderly service, the capped
+and aproned maid, the liveried bell-boy and butler, express--like the
+smoothly shaven lawn--a certain social convention; and because it means
+expense, the house in working order means more than shelter: it sets forth
+pecuniary standing in the community. So long as this means social standing
+also, so long will the professional and business family on $2000 a year be
+shut out, because these adjuncts to a luxurious living are impossible. Can
+society afford to shut out the intellectual and mentally progressive
+element, or must it accept as normal these salaries and make it
+respectable to begin on them? It is the strain which unessential social
+conventions give to the young families that leads the business father to
+speculate in order to get into the $10,000-a-year class, and that leads
+the young scientific and literary man to take extra work outside of his
+normal duties. This sort of thing cannot go on without serious danger to
+the Republic. Cleanliness and good manners should be insisted upon, but
+they may be secured on $3000 a year if too much else is not required. How
+to secure them on $1500 is a problem to be solved, for cleanliness costs
+more each decade.
+
+After all is said, if the young people have an earnest _purpose_ in life
+it is easy to plan a method of living and to carry it out. The sacrifices
+one must make in the house superficially, in the consideration of a
+certain class, are cheerfully borne and soon forgotten.
+
+Little discomforts which affect only one's feelings and not one's health
+make rather good stories after they are over. What is worth while? Are we
+become too sensitive to little things? Do we imagine we show our higher
+civilization by discerning with the little princess the pea under
+twenty-four feather beds?
+
+Let our shelter be first of all healthful, physically and morally. If to
+gain these qualities we must take a house in an unfashionable
+neighborhood, it should not cause distress. Why is this particular region
+unfashionable? Is it not merely because certain would-be leaders choose
+to live beyond their means in company with those who are able to spend
+more?
+
+Why not be honest and happy? Live within your income and make it cover the
+truest kind of living.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+  TO OWN OR TO RENT: A DIFFICULT QUESTION.
+
+  "Half the sting of poverty is gone when one keeps house for
+  one's own comfort and not for the comment of one's neighbors."
+  --Miss MULOCK.
+
+When the ideals of an older generation are forced upon a younger, already
+struggling under new and strange environment, the effect is often opposite
+to that intended. The elders in their pride of knowledge, and the
+real-estate promoters in their greed for gain, have been urging the young
+man to own his house on penalty of shirking his plain duty. They say he
+must have a home to offer his bride, as the bird has a nest. Building-loan
+associations, homes on the instalment plan, appeal to the sentiments they
+think the young man ought to heed.
+
+The young man is often modest, almost always sensitive, and he prefers to
+bear dispraise rather than to tell the real reason he hesitates. His ear
+is closer to the ground, he feels even if he cannot express the doubt of
+the disinterestedness of the land-scheme promoter, of the wisdom of his
+father. He knows better than his elders the uncertainties of salaried men,
+young men with a way to make in the unstable conditions of to-day.
+
+The effect of this well-meant advice is not to hasten his marriage, but to
+put it off because he is not allowed to take the course he feels safest.
+Or if he is willing, the parents of his prospective bride are not, and so
+young people do not marry on $1000 a year, for fear of the elder
+generation and their supposed wisdom.
+
+The young people are not justified by present-day conditions in owning a
+house on an income of $2000 a year _unless_
+
+(1) They have money to put into it which it will not cripple them for life
+to lose;
+
+(2) They care so much for the idea of ownership that they are willing to
+take the risk of losing one half the investment should they be compelled
+to move;
+
+(3) They possess the fortitude to give it up at the call of duty after all
+they have lavished on it;
+
+(4) They care enough for the real education and the real fun they will get
+out of it to save in other ways what the running and repairs will cost
+_over and above the amount estimated_. This saving will be largely by
+doing many things with their own hands.
+
+To be bound hand and foot either by unsalable real estate or by sentiment
+is an uncomfortable condition for the young family who may find itself in
+uncongenial surroundings, in an unhealthful situation, or who may need to
+retrench temporarily.
+
+Another serious objection to building and owning a house in the first
+years of married life is the chance that the house will be too large or
+too small, or the railroad station will be moved, or the trolley line will
+be run under the garden window, or a smoking chimney will fill the library
+with soot (although the latter will not be permitted in the real
+twentieth-century town).
+
+A new element has come into the question of ownership by the family of
+limited means which did not meet the elder generation of house-owners. In
+the past the repairs were confined to a coat of paint now and then, new
+shingles, an added hen-house, or a bay window. The well might have to be
+deepened, but little expense was put into or onto the house for fifty
+years. The married son or daughter might add a wing, but the main house
+once built was never disturbed. In the modern plastic condition of both
+ideals and materials this is all changed. In any city well known to my
+readers how many streets bear the same aspect as five years ago? In any
+suburban village made familiar by the trolley how many houses are the same
+as five years ago? Even if their outward aspect is not changed, that worst
+of all havocs, new plumbing, has been put in. The installation of neither
+furnace nor plumbing is accomplished once for all; at the end of ten years
+at most repairs or replacement must be made on penalty of loss of health.
+As the community grows in wisdom and in knowledge it makes sanitary
+regulations more stringent notwithstanding the fact that the increase in
+expense bears most heavily on the small householder with a family whose
+need is out of proportion to the income. Many a parent who grieves the
+loss of his child would gladly have paid a reasonable sum for repairs, but
+would have been in the poor debtors' court if he had allowed the plumbers
+to enter his house. The new laws made since he bought his house require
+diametrically opposite things, and the old fittings must all be torn out
+as well as four times as costly put in.
+
+It is a sad fact that the advantages of all modern sanitation are so often
+denied to those who need and who would appreciate them. The renter has
+here an advantage over the owner. He can call for an examination by the
+city or town inspector before he takes a lease; the capitalist owner must
+then put matters right. But as yet a man has a right to live with leaky
+sewer- or gas-pipes in his own house without being disturbed by an
+inspector. How far into the century this will be allowed is uncertain; in
+time there will be an inspection of the premises of the small owner.
+
+The only remedy in sight is for an investment of capital in up-to-date
+houses of various grades in city, suburbs, and country; such investment to
+bring 4 per cent, not 40, or even 15, unless by rise of land values. No
+better use of idle money could be made at the present time. In
+"Anticipations" Mr. Wells writes: "The erection of a series of
+experimental labor-saving houses by some philanthropic person for
+exhibition and discussion would certainly bring about an extraordinary
+advance in domestic comfort; but it will probably be many years before the
+cautious enterprise of advertising firms approximates to the economies
+that are theoretically possible to-day." This is truer now than when Mr.
+Wells was writing.
+
+The great difficulty in the way is the first outlay. So many things will
+have to be designed, patterns made and machinery built to make them; for
+this advance in construction will not be by hand-made things. There will
+be more head-work put into the various articles, but the mass of
+constructive material must be machine-made, at least for the family of
+limited income. And these articles need not be ugly. There must be many of
+the same kind in the world, to be sure; but if the design fits the
+purpose, this may not be an evil. No one objects to a beautiful elm-tree
+in his field because in hundreds of fields there are similar elm-trees.
+Slight variations in finish, color, etc., can give individuality to the
+simplest chair.
+
+Therefore the first outlay for the new order will be beyond the purse of
+any single family of this group. If we had learned to cooperate sanely, a
+group might undertake it, but the most probable method will be for some
+far-sighted men to agree to sink a certain amount of money in experiment,
+just as they now sink money in prospecting a mine with all the uncertainty
+it brings. Ability to _risk_ in an experiment must go hand in hand with
+capital to use.
+
+The objection commonly made is that all individuality will be taken away,
+that each one must live like every one else in the neighborhood. This is
+not an essential consequence, but will it be so impossible to have a
+certain similarity in the dwellings of like-minded people? In
+"Anticipations" it is declared that "Unless some great catastrophe in
+Nature breaks down all that man has built, these great kindred groups of
+capable men and educated adequate women must be under the forces we have
+considered so far, the element finally emergent amid the vast confusions
+of the coming time."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Anticipations, pp. 153-4.]
+
+The practical people, the engineering and medical and scientific people,
+will become more and more _homogeneous_ in their fundamental culture.
+
+The decreasing of the space one can call one's own within urban limits has
+so steadily increased, and the need for freer air has become so fully
+recognized, that the case of the single householder in the suburbs and
+even in the country is bound to press harder and harder. The group system
+elsewhere referred to, with central heating plant and workers of all
+grades at telephone-call, will make possible at a reasonable rent within
+easy reach of the city the single household of one, two, or three, as the
+case may be, and if without children of their own, to such shelter may
+come some of those homeless little ones we have with us always, to share
+in the sun and wind and garden. In the real country, with acres instead of
+feet of land, much of the same kind of elaborate simplicity will be found.
+Certainly the same kind of fire-proof house of only one story with more
+light, "roofs of steel and glass on the louver principle," will obviate so
+frequent a change of air as a shut-in house requires, and give more
+equable temperature.
+
+In the city? Since physicians will surely be more insistent on light, as
+well as fresh air, roof-gardens and balconies and glazed walls, so to
+speak, will be arranged by the architect so as not to offend the eye and
+yet to accomplish the results. He will cease from trying to put the new
+ideas of the twentieth century into the old houses of the eighteenth or
+fifteenth even, and that beauty, which is fitness, will come forth from
+the tangle of ugliness everywhere. If, as the economist tells us, "cost
+measures lack of adjustment," then the perfectly adjusted house will not
+be costly in reality, it will be adapted to the production and protection
+of effective human beings.
+
+The cellar has for some years been changing to a storage for trunks
+instead of vegetables. The old-fashioned housewife exclaims at the lack of
+storage in the house of to-day, and we are eliminating it still more. A
+twentieth-century axiom is, "Throw or give away everything you have not
+immediate or prospective use for." It is as true of household furniture as
+of books; only the very best is of any value second-hand. Our young people
+may have heirlooms, but they will buy very little in the way of sideboards
+or first editions. The moral of modern tendencies is, buy only what you
+are sure you will need or what you care for so intensely that you will
+keep it come what may. Housing of possible treasures is far too
+costly.
+
+At the foundation of the ethical side of ownership is the primitive
+impulse of possession, that ownership which led to wife-capture, to feudal
+castles, to accumulation of things, and to-day is expressed by the man who
+prefers to have his steak cooked in his own kitchen even if it is burned.
+
+It is notorious that most of us put up with discomfort if it is caused by
+_our own_. A family of eight will use one bath-room without murmur if the
+house is theirs, but will complain loudly if the landlord will not add two
+without increasing the rent.
+
+At the foundation of what seem exorbitant rents is this demand for modern
+improvements in old houses, and the atrocious carelessness of tenants of
+property. It is not their own, and they do not obey the golden rule in the
+use of it.
+
+Every five years or so plumbing laws are changed, and if an old house is
+touched the fixtures and pipes must be all renewed. Tenants have learned
+to fear the sanitation of old houses, and yet abuse the appliances they
+should care for.
+
+Public ownership or corporate ownership or an increased lawlessness are
+accountable for a disregard of others' rights and of property which is
+unnecessarily increasing the cost of living.
+
+I have said elsewhere that it is not because the landlord does not want
+children in the house but because he does not want such ill-bred children,
+vandals, who have no respect for anything. He charges high rent because
+his investment is good for only ten years.
+
+The shibboleth of duty to own a home has so strong a hold on the moral
+sense of the people that it is made use of by the promoter who may in some
+cases think himself the philanthropist he intends others to call him. I
+mean that the duty of owning and the heinousness of paying rent are so
+ingrained that buying on the instalment plan has seemed a righteous thing,
+even with the examples of broken lives in plain sight. As an incentive to
+save, if there were anything to save, it might have been justified in the
+days of feudalism. But for an independent American to confess that he
+cannot put money in the bank, and that he must bind himself and his family
+to slavery, for the sake of owning a bit of property which they will
+probably wish to sell before they have it paid for, is disgraceful.
+Intelligent men should see that here is the profit in the transaction;
+that enough go to the wall to pay for the trouble of the rest, just as in
+life insurance enough die before the expected time to put money in the
+pockets of the riskers.
+
+A drunken father may need to be held, but the young professor, the lawyer,
+the engineer, should have sufficient self-respect and firmness to save
+that which in his judgment is necessary, without being tied by "the
+instalment plan." This method is a very viper in the finances of to-day.
+The wise business man never ventures more than he can afford to lose in a
+risk, but the man who takes bread and milk from his children to invest in
+"a sure thing" takes a risk with what is not his to give.
+
+To buy land for investment is another supposed virtue, an inheritance from
+the time when slow growth, once started in a given direction, kept on, so
+that great acumen was not needed to buy; but that is all changed to-day.
+Only those "in the ring" can tell where the "boom" will go next.
+
+In these days of unparalelled rapidity of change in industrial and social
+conditions it is most undesirable for a man to be hampered by a shell
+which is too large to carry about with him and too valuable to be left
+behind. To each reader will occur instances of the refusal of an
+advantageous offer because the family home could not be realized upon at
+once, the location once so favorable had become undesirable, and the
+values put into it could not be recovered because of social conditions
+following industrial changes.
+
+The keen observer hesitates in view of all these conditions to advise any
+young man to invest in real estate for a home beyond a sum which he can
+afford to lose if need arises to move. These changes carry a need for
+mobilization of its army of workers. The encumbrance of family Lares and
+Penates cannot be tolerated. Only a small per cent of young men are to-day
+sure of remaining in the city in which they begin business. What folly to
+encumber themselves with real estate which, sold at a sacrifice, brings
+barely half its price! Moral exhorters have not carefully considered this
+side of the question in their arguments for house-owning and
+family-rearing as anchors to the young man.
+
+The fact noted earlier is a case in point. After the wedding-cards were
+out the bridegroom was transferred to the charge of the company's office
+in another city.
+
+The expenses necessitated by these frequent removals make an
+unaccounted-for item in many incomes.
+
+If the young couple have saved or inherited between them, say, $3000,
+shall they build a home with it? Decidedly not. Because the house will
+cost $5000 before they are done. Not only because of the unexpected in
+strikes and change in prices of materials, but because, as the plans take
+shape, the wife or the husband or both will see so many little points
+which they will ask for, the paper plan not having conveyed a definite
+idea to either. An excellent plan was carried out by a college woman. She
+made a model to scale in pasteboard, of such a size that every essential
+detail was shown in its relation to other portions of the structure.
+
+Even if these young people do not yield at the moment of building, they
+will probably wish they had yielded when they come to live in the house.
+There will be nothing for it but to mortgage the place to make it
+satisfactory. One cannot take up a newspaper without finding notice after
+notice, reading, "Must be sold to pay the mortgage."
+
+Exorbitant rent is of course social waste, and society must protect its
+ablest young people from their own folly; but when they understand the
+rules of the financial game better they will lend themselves more readily
+to some cooperative plan of relief.
+
+It is, as I well know, rank heresy, but I firmly believe that building and
+owning of houses can be afforded only by those having the higher limit of
+income, $3000 to $5000 a year, _unless_ the person has a permanent
+position or a business of great security, and in these days who can be
+_sure_ of anything?
+
+When the land-scheme promoter advertises homes on the instalment plan,
+beware of the trap!
+
+Let no one buy in the suburbs from a sense of duty and then hate the life.
+
+Comfort in living is far more in the brains than in the back.
+
+It is so easy for a man or woman with one set of ideals to do that which
+another would consider impossible drudgery.
+
+My final advice is that the sensible young couple both of whom agree about
+essentials, and who are willing and glad to work together for a common
+end, and who love nature and gardening and believe in family life so
+strongly as not to miss the crowd and theatres, may safely start a home in
+the country with a garden, and pets for the children, if they have a
+reasonable prospect of ten years in one spot. Let them make the place
+attractive for some family, even if they have to leave it.
+
+The women of this group will, I believe, have the qualities Mr. Wells
+predicts: not only intelligence and education, but a reasonableness and
+reliability not always found to-day.
+
+Unless a reasonable prospect of ten years' occupancy is assured, then
+begin life in a rented house, not necessarily in a flat. Begin with a few
+things of your own some which have been yours for years, some which you
+have bought together and which have a meaning for one of you and are not
+irritating to the other.
+
+Devote a part of your leisure to a critical study of the house you would
+like, draw plans, make sketches in color, study color effects, learn about
+fabrics, collect them for the future. You will find an amusing and
+instructive occupation.
+
+The essential point is to begin this life on two thirds of what you have
+reason to expect as the year's income; keep the rest invested or in the
+bank. There are to-day many temptations to spend for things attractive in
+themselves but not necessary to the effective life. If friends are so
+silly as to rally you on living in an unfashionable quarter, ask them in
+to see your sketches and plans, and talk them into enthusiasm over the
+idea. Do missionary work with them rather than be ridiculed out of your
+convictions. It sometimes seems as if young people had no convictions, as
+if they drifted with the wind of newspaper suggestion. So do not allow
+your friends to drive you to greater expense than you have determined
+upon, lest the end of the first two years of life find you in debt with no
+fair start for the baby, whose life should begin in an atmosphere of quiet
+assurance that all is well. It is not impossible that the nervous
+irritability and recklessness of many are due to the atmosphere of
+childhood. Then remember that _the welfare and security of the child is
+the watchword of the future_.
+
+
+
+
+A FEW BOOKS.
+
+Anticipations. H.G. Wells.
+
+Mankind in the Making. H.G. Wells. Scribners.
+
+A Modern Utopia. H.G. Wells. Scribners.
+
+Twentieth-century Inventions: a Forecast. Geo. Sutherland.
+   Longmans, Green, & Co.
+
+The Level of Social Motion. Michael Lane. Macmillan.
+
+The Theory of the Leisure Class. Thorstein Veblen. Macmillan.
+
+The Woman who Spends. Whitcomb and Barrows.
+
+Physical Deterioration: Its Causes and their Cure. A. Watt Smyth.
+   E.P. Dutton.
+
+Shelter. Syllabus 94, Home Education Dept, Univ. of N.Y.
+   State Library, Albany.
+
+Report of the Tenement-house Commission.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+A
+
+Adaptation
+  lack of
+"Anticipations"
+Advisers, home
+Age, spirit of the
+Air
+Altruria
+Albert's, Prince, advice
+Apartment houses
+Architects
+Architecture, domestic
+Arts, constructive
+
+B
+
+Bachelor
+  apartment
+Back, bending the
+  strength of
+Badges of toil
+Boarding houses
+  origin of
+Breakfast
+Building
+  laws
+  loan associations
+Building trades
+Bureau of Labor, U.S.
+
+C
+
+Capital
+Care of rooms
+  human body
+Carpentry in high school
+Centrifugal force
+Children
+  deterioration of manners of
+Choice
+City
+  houses
+Civilization
+Class to work for
+Cleaning machine
+Cleanliness
+Clothing
+Colonial houses
+  period, housebuilding of
+  Southern type of, houses
+Commuter, trials of
+Companionship
+Compromise
+Concrete
+Consciousness, social
+Construction
+Consumption, destructive
+Conveniences
+Cooperation
+Cost
+  increasing
+  of housing and total income
+  per person and per family
+Country
+Crowding
+
+D
+
+Dayton scheme
+Debt
+Demand
+  business
+Democracy
+Deterioration of houses
+Dirt
+Discomforts
+Discontent
+Dishonesty in standards
+Dole, Charles
+Domestic comfort
+  machine
+  progress, retarded
+  unrest
+Drainage
+Drudgery
+Dust
+
+E
+
+Economics, home, exhibit
+  household
+  social
+Economist
+Economy
+Effective life
+  workers
+Effectiveness
+Efficiency
+  loss of
+Energy
+Engineering, definition of
+Engle's law
+Environment
+Euthenics
+Evolution
+Expense
+Expenses
+  operating
+Experience in doing
+  lack of
+Experts, house
+Extravagance
+
+F
+
+Family
+  table
+Farm life
+Flat
+Flats
+Floors, hard-wood
+  lignolith
+Food
+Force
+  for regeneration
+Foreigner
+Friction due to house
+
+G
+
+Garden
+Gardening
+Gas-stoves
+Group system
+
+H
+
+Habit, perils of
+Habits
+Hands
+Heating
+Home
+  abandonment of
+  advisers
+  Anglo-Saxon meaning of
+  building of
+Home economics
+  feeling
+  life
+  love of
+  makers
+  means privacy
+  ties loosened
+Homeless
+Homestead
+Hospitality
+Hot water
+House
+  building
+  Colonial
+  evidence of social standing
+  -keepers
+  -keeping, twentieth-century
+  -maids, physical inefficiency of
+  planning in High School
+  plans
+  suburban
+Houses
+  city
+  Colonial, of New England
+  four classes of
+  modern
+Housing
+
+I
+
+Ideal
+Ideas
+Improvements
+Income
+Individual
+Industries, disappearance of
+Installment plan
+Invasion of residential districts
+Invention
+Investment
+
+K
+
+Kitchen
+  accompaniments
+  remodelled, in Providence
+Kitchenette
+
+L
+
+Labor, Bureau of
+  -saving devices
+Lack of
+  adaptation
+  business training
+  experience
+  faithful service
+  harmony
+  study
+Land
+Landlord
+Land-scheme promoter
+Lane, Mr. Michael
+Leaven of progress
+Legacy
+"Level of Social Motion"
+Life
+  effective
+  frontier
+  fuller
+  home
+  open air
+  private, shabby
+  restrained
+Light
+Living, decent
+  sane
+  cost of
+Location
+Lodge, Sir Oliver
+
+M
+
+Machinery
+Maid's rooms
+Making of things
+Man, early
+  primitive
+Manners
+Marriage, responsibility of
+Meals
+Mechanical
+  progress
+Menial
+Middle, leaven of progress in
+Model Tenement Association, New York
+Money
+  basis
+  measure of success
+  spender
+  value
+Morison, Geo. S
+Morris Building Co
+Mulock, Miss
+
+N
+
+Nasmyth, James
+Natural selection
+Nature
+  love of
+  return to
+Neill, Chas. P., extracts from address by
+New Epoch, The
+
+O
+
+Opinion, public
+Owen, Robert
+Own or rent
+Ownership
+
+P
+
+Parks
+Parsons, Wm. Barclay
+Patronage of the arts
+Permanence in homestead, lack of
+Pettingill, Miss [Transcriber's Note: Pettengill in text.]
+Philanthropist
+Philanthropy
+Physical ill-being in
+  domestics
+  school children
+  wage-earners
+Place of the house
+Plans
+Plumbing
+Possibilities in sight
+Preeminence, social
+Primitive man
+Principle, fixed
+  race
+Privacy
+Private life shabby
+Productive work
+Progress
+  leaven of
+  race
+Protection
+
+Q
+
+Question, a difficult
+
+R
+
+Race principle
+Readjustment
+Real estate
+Refuge
+Regeneration, force for
+Rent
+  or own
+  -payers
+Residential districts, invasion of
+Responsibility of marriage
+Restaurant
+Restrained life
+Return to nature
+Rights to property, etc.
+Roosevelt, President
+
+S
+
+Sanitarian
+Sanitary
+  English, Inspectors Association, President of
+Sanitation
+Saving
+Schools, public
+Science
+Scrubbing
+Selection, natural
+Self-interest
+  -preservation
+Service
+  faithful, lack of
+Sewer connection, houses without
+Shelter
+Shelter, marrying for
+Sheltering the children
+Simplicity
+Social advance
+  aspiration
+  betterment
+  conditions
+Social conscience
+  consciousness
+  convention
+  economics
+  ostracism
+  pleasure
+  preëminence
+  science
+  significance
+  standing
+  welfare
+Society
+Sociologist
+Sociology
+Somerville
+Space
+  diminishing
+Spender
+Spirit of the age
+Standards
+Stone, Mary Lowell, Home Economics Exhibit
+Structure
+Stuckert, Mrs
+Study, lack of
+Suburban
+  houses
+  living
+  square
+Suburbs
+Sun-parlors
+Sunlight Park, England
+
+T
+
+Table, family
+Tax
+Temporary home
+Tenant
+Tenement
+  N.Y. Model, Association
+Tennyson
+Tenure,
+  permanence of
+  shortness of
+  uncertain
+Transition period
+Tuberculosis
+
+U
+
+U.S. Bureau of Labor
+Unrest, domestic
+Unsanitary
+Utopian
+
+V
+
+Veblen
+Ventilation
+Village houses
+  influx from
+
+W
+
+Wage-earners
+Waste, conspicuous
+Watchword of the future
+Water, hot
+Wedding presents
+Well-being of community threatened
+Wells, H.G.
+White plague
+Wife
+Window
+Woman
+Women, corporation of
+Women's work
+Work,
+  menial
+  productive
+  women's
+Workers, effective
+Working men
+
+Y
+
+Young people
+Youth, American
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Cost of Shelter, by Ellen H. Richards
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12366 ***