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