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,