THE PLACE OF THE HOUSE IN THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
"We have entered upon the period of conscious evolution, havebegun 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;howcan the $2000 man have them, not whywillhe 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 theeffective 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.
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 whodoes; 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 engineering2which is based on the direction of the vital forces of nature and the doing of things for mankind."
2["Ability to do and thedoing, 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;butonly 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 buildingen massedifficult. 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.
Butonce 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." Mypossessions, 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;thenis 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.
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.
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).
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 alivablehouse, not merely one which shows off well as first built.
Weneedsixty 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:3
3[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 tablehas stoodin 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."4
4[H.G. Wells.]
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 epoch5"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.