Part II 309

_Income._

I.

Rogers, the book-keeper for the past twenty-two years of my friend

Patterson, the banker, told me the other day that he had reared a

family of two boys and three girls on his annual salary of two thousand

two hundred dollars; that he had put one of the boys through college,

one through the School of Mines, brought up one of the girls to be a

librarian, given one a coming-out party and a trousseau, and that the

remaining daughter, a home body, was likely to be the domestic sunshine

of his own and his wife’s old age. All this on two thousand two hundred

dollars a year.

Rogers told me with perfect modesty, with just a tremor of

self-satisfaction in his tone, as though, all things considered,

he felt that he had managed creditably, yet not in the least

suggesting that he regarded his performance as out of the common

run of happy household annals. He is a neat-looking, respectable,

quiet, conservative little man, rising fifty, who, while in the bank,

invariably wears a nankeen jacket all the year round, a narrow black

necktie in winter, and a narrow yellow and red pongee wash tie in

summer, and whose watch is no less invariably right to a second. As I

often drop in to see Patterson, his employer, I depend upon it to keep

mine straight, and it was while I was setting my chronometer the other

day that he made me the foregoing confidence.

Frankly, I felt as though I had been struck with a club. It happened

to be the first of the month. Every visit of the postman had brought

me a fresh batch of bills, each one of which was a little larger than

I had expected. I was correspondingly depressed and remorseful, and

had been asking myself from time to time during the day why it need

cost so much to live. Yet here was a man who was able to give his

daughter a coming-out party and a trousseau on two thousand two hundred

dollars a year. I opened my mouth twice to ask him how in the name of

thrift he had managed to do it, but somehow the discrepancy between

his expenditures and mine seemed such a gulf that I was tongue-tied.

“I suppose,” he added modestly, “that I have been very fortunate in my

little family. It must indeed be sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have

a thankless child.” Gratitude too! Gratitude and Shakespeare on two

thousand two hundred dollars a year. I went my way without a word.

There are various ways of treating remorse. Some take a Turkish bath or

a pill. Others, while the day lasts, trample it under foot, and shut it

out at night with the bed-clothes. Neither course has ever seemed to

me exactly satisfactory or manly. Consequently I am apt to entertain

my self-reproach and reason with it, and when one begins to wonder why

it costs so much to live, he finds himself grappling with the entire

problem of civilization, and presently his hydra has a hundred heads.

The first of the month is apt to be a sorry day for my wife as well

as for me, and I hastened on my return home to tell her, with just a

shadow of reproach in my tone, what Mr. Rogers had confided to me.

Indeed I saw fit to ask, “Why can’t we do the same?”

“We could,” said Barbara.

“Then why don’t we?”

“Because you wouldn’t.”

I had been reflecting in the brief interval between my wife’s first

and second replies that, in the happy event of our imitating Rogers’s

example from this time forth and forever more, I should be able to lay

up over five thousand dollars a year, and that five thousand dollars

a year saved for ten years would be fifty thousand dollars--a very

neat little financial nest egg. But Barbara’s second reply upset my

calculation utterly, and threw the responsibility of failure on me into

the bargain.

“Mr. Rogers is the salt of the earth, a highly respectable man and, if

I am not mistaken, the deacon of a church,” I remarked not altogether

relevantly. “Why should we spend four times as many thousand dollars a

year as he?”

“I wonder,” answered my wife, “if you really do appreciate how your

friend Mr. Rogers lives. I am quite aware that you are talking now for

effect--talking through your hat as the children say--because it’s

the first of the month and you’re annoyed that the bills are worse

than ever, and I understand that you don’t for one moment seriously

entertain the hope that our establishment can be conducted on the same

basis as his. But I should just like to explain to you for once how

people who have only twenty-two hundred dollars a year and are the

salt of the earth do live, if only to convince you that the sooner we

stop comparing ourselves with them the better. I say ‘we’ because in

my moments of depression over the household expenses I catch myself

doing the same thing. Our butcher’s bill for this month is huge, and

when you came in I was in the throes of despair over a letter in the

newspaper from a woman who contends that a good housekeeper in modest

circumstances can provide an excellent dinner for her family of six

persons, including soup, fish, an entrée, meat, pudding, dessert, and

coffee, for fifty-three cents. And she gives the dinner, which at

first sight takes one’s breath away. But after you prune it of celery,

parsley, salted peanuts, raisins, red cabbage, salad, and cheese, all

there is left is bean-soup, cod sounds, fried liver, hot gingerbread,

and apples.”

“I should dine down town, if you set such repasts before me,” I

answered.

“Yes,” said Barbara. “And there is a very good point of departure for

illustrating the domestic economies of the Rogers family. Mr. Rogers

does dine down town. Not to avoid the fried liver and cod sounds, for

probably he is partial to them, but because it is cheaper. When you

take what you call your luncheon, and which is apt to include as much

as he eats in the entire course of the day, Mr. Rogers dines; dines

at a restaurant where he can get a modest meal for from fifteen to

twenty-five cents. Sometimes it is pea-soup and a piece of squash-pie.

The next day perhaps a mutton-stew and a slice of watermelon, or boiled

beef and an éclair. Mrs. Rogers and the children have a pick-up dinner

at home, which lasts them very well until night, when they and Rogers

sit down to browned-hash mutton and a head of lettuce, or honey-comb

tripe and corn-cake, and apple-sauce to wind up with.”

“That isn’t so very bad.”

“Why, they have a splendid time. They can abuse their social

acquaintance and discuss family secrets without fear of being overheard

by the servants because they don’t keep any servants to speak of.

Probably they keep one girl. Or perhaps Mr. Rogers had a spinster

sister who helped with the work for her board. Or it may be Mrs. Rogers

kept one while the children were little; but after the daughters were

old enough to do it themselves, they preferred not to keep anybody.

They live extremely happily, but the children have to double up, for

in their small house it is necessary to sleep two in a room if not a

bed. The girls make most of their dresses, and the boys never dream

of buying anything but ready-made clothing. By living in the suburbs

they let one establishment serve for all seasons, unless it be for

the two weeks when Rogers gets his vacation. Then, if nobody has been

ill during the year, the family purse may stand the drain of a stay

at the humblest watering-place in their vicinity, or a visit to the

farm-house of some relative in the country. An engagement with the

dentist is a serious disaster, and the plumber is kept at a respectable

distance. The children go to the public schools, and the only club or

organization to which Mr. Rogers belongs is a benefit association,

which pays him so much a week if he is ill, and would present his

family with a few hundred dollars if he were to die. The son who went

through college must have got a scholarship or taken pupils. The girl

who married undoubtedly made the greater portion of her trousseau with

her own needle; and as to the coming-out party, some of the effects of

splendor and all the delights of social intercourse can be produced

by laying a white drugget on the parlor carpet, the judicious use of

half a dozen lemons and a mould of ice-cream with angel-cake, and by

imposing on the good nature of a friend who can play the piano for

dancing. There, my dear, if you are willing to live like that, we

should be able to get along on from twenty-two to twenty-five hundred

dollars quite nicely.”

My wife was perfectly correct in her declaration that I did not

seriously entertain the hope of being able to imitate Mr. Rogers,

worthy citizen and upright man as I believe him to be. I certainly was

in some measure talking through my hat. This was not the first time

I had brought home a Rogers to confront her. She is used to them and

aware that they are chiefly bogies. I, as she knows, and indeed both

of us, are never in quite a normal condition on the first day of the

month, and are liable, sometimes the one of us and sometimes the other,

to indulge in vagaries and resolutions which by the tenth, when the

bills are paid, seem almost uncalled for or impracticable. One thing

is certain, that if a man earns only twenty-two hundred dollars a

year, and is an honest man withal, he has to live on it, even though

he dines when others take luncheon, and is forced to avoid the dentist

and the plumber. But a much more serious problem confronts the man who

earns four times as much as Rogers, more serious because it involves

an alternative. Rogers could not very well live on less if he tried,

without feeling the stress of poverty. He has lived at hard pan, so to

speak. But I could. Could if I would, as my wife has demonstrated. I

am perfectly right, as she would agree, in being unwilling to try the

experiment; and yet the consciousness that we spend a very large sum of

money every year, as compared with Rogers and others like him, remains

with us even after the bills are paid and we have exchanged remorse for

contemplation.

The moralist, who properly is always with us, would here insinuate,

perhaps, that Rogers is happier than I. But I take issue with him

promptly and deny the impeachment. Rogers may be happier than his

employer Patterson, because Patterson, though the possessor of a

steam-yacht, has a son who has just been through the Keeley cure and a

daughter who is living apart from her husband. But there are no such

flies in my pot of ointment. I deny the superior happiness of Rogers

in entire consciousness of the moral beauty of his home. I recognize

him to be an industrious, self-sacrificing, kind-hearted, sagacious

husband and father, and I admit that the pen-picture which the moralist

could draw of him sitting by the evening lamp in his well-worn

dressing gown, with his well-darned feet adorned by carpet-slippers of

filial manufacture supported by the table or a chair, would be justly

entitled to kindle emotions of respect and admiration. But why, after

all, should Rogers, ensconced in the family sitting-room with the

cat on the hearth, a canary twittering in a cage and scattering seed

in one corner, a sewing-machine in the other, and surrounded by all

the comforts of home, consisting prominently of a peach-blow vase, a

Japanese sun umbrella and engravings of George Washington and Horace

Greeley, be regarded as happier than I in my modern drawing-room in

evening dress? What is there moral in the simplicity of his frayed

and somewhat ugly establishment except the spirit of contentment and

the gentle feelings which sanctify it? Assuming that these are not

lacking in my home, and I believe they are not, I see no reason for

accepting the conclusion of the moralist. There is a beauty of living

which the man with a small income is not apt to compass under present

social conditions, the Declaration of Independence to the contrary

notwithstanding. The doctrine so widely and vehemently promulgated in

America that a Spartan inelegance of life is the duty of a leading

citizen, seems to be dying from inanition; and the descendants of

favorite sons who once triumphed by preaching and practising it are

now outvying those whom they were taught to stigmatize as the effete

civilizations of Europe, in their devotion to creature comforts.

It seems to me true that in our day and generation the desire to live

wisely here has eclipsed the desire to live safely hereafter. Moreover,

to enjoy the earth and the fulness thereof, if it be legitimately

within one’s reach, has come to be recognized all the world over, with

a special point of view for each nationality, as a cardinal principle

of living wisely. We have been the last to recognize it here for the

reason that a contrary theory of life was for several generations

regarded as one of the bulwarks of our Constitution. Never was the

sympathy for the poor man greater than it is at present. Never was

there warmer interest in his condition. The social atmosphere is rife

with theories and schemes for his emancipation, and the best brains of

civilization are at work in his behalf. But no one wishes to be like

him. Canting churchmen still gain some credence by the assertion that

indigence here will prove a saving grace in the world to come; but the

American people, quick, when it recognizes that it has been fooled, to

discard even a once sacred conviction, smiles to-day at the assumption

that the owner of a log cabin is more inherently virtuous than the

owner of a steam-yacht. Indeed the present signal vice of democracy

seems to be the fury to grow rich, in the mad struggle to accomplish

which character and happiness are too often sacrificed. But it may be

safely said that, granting an equal amount of virtue to Rogers and

to me, and that each pays his bills promptly, I am a more enviable

individual in the public eye.

In fact the pressing problem which confronts the civilized world

to-day is the choice of what to have, for so many things have become

necessaries of existence which were either done without or undiscovered

in the days of our grandmothers, that only the really opulent can have

everything. We sometimes hear it said that this or that person has too

much for his own good. The saying is familiar, and doubtless it is true

that luxury unappreciated and abused will cause degeneration; but the

complaint seems to me to be a Sunday-school consoler for those who have

too little rather than a sound argument against great possessions.

Granting that this or that person referred to had the moral fibre of

Rogers or of me, and were altogether an unexceptionable character, how

could he have too much for his own good? Is the best any too good for

any one of us?

The sad part of it is, however, that even those of us who have four

times, or thereabouts, the income of Rogers, are obliged to pick

and choose and cannot have everything. Then is the opportunity for

wisdom to step in and make her abode with us, if she only will. The

perplexity, the distress, and too often the downfall of those who

would fain live wisely, are largely the direct results of foolish or

unintelligent selection on their part. And conversely, is not the

secret of happy modern living, the art of knowing what to have when one

cannot have everything there is?

I coupled just now, in allusion to Rogers and myself, virtue and

punctuality in the payment of bills, as though they were not altogether

homogeneous. I did so designedly, not because I question that prompt

payment is in the abstract a leading virtue, nor because I doubt

that it has been absolutely imperative for Rogers, and one of the

secrets of his happiness; but because I am not entirely sure whether,

after ten years of prompt payment on the first of every month on my

part, I have not been made the sorry victim of my own righteousness,

self-righteousness I might say, for I have plumed myself on it when

comparing myself with the ungodly. Although virtuous action looks for

no reward, the man who pays his bills as soon as they are presented has

the right to expect that he will not be obliged to pay anything extra

for his honesty. He may not hope for a discount, but he does hope and

believe--at least for a time--that beefsteak paid for within thirty

days of purchase will not be taxed with the delinquencies of those who

pay tardily or not at all. Slowly but sadly I and my wife have come to

the conclusion that the butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers of

this great Republic who provide for the tolerably well-to-do make up

their losses by assessing virtue. It is a melancholy conclusion for one

who has been taught to believe that punctual payment is the first great

cardinal principle of wise living, and it leaves one in rather a wobbly

state of mind, not as regards the rank of the virtue in question, but

as regards the desirability of strictly living up to it in practice. I

have heard stated with authority that the leading butchers, grocers,

stable-keepers, drygoods dealers, dress-makers, florists, and plumbers

of our great cities divide the customers on their books into sheep

and goats, so to speak; and the more prompt and willing a sheep, the

deeper do they plunge the knife. Let one establish a reputation for

prompt payment and make a purchase on the twenty-fifth of the month, he

will receive on the first of the following a bill, on the twentieth,

if this be not paid, a bill for “account rendered,” on the first of

the next month a bill for “account rendered, please remit,” and on the

tenth a visit from a collector. On the other hand I have known people

who seem to live on the fat of the land, and to keep the tradesfolk in

obsequious awe of them by force of letting their bills run indefinitely.

Abroad, as many of us know, the status of the matter is very different.

There interest is figured in advance, and those who pay promptly get

a handsome discount on the face of their bills. While this custom

may seem to encourage debt, it is at least a mutual arrangement, and

seems to have proved satisfactory, to judge from the fact that the

fashionable tailors and dress-makers of London and Paris are apt to

demur or shrug their shoulders at immediate payment, and to be rather

embarrassingly grateful if their accounts are settled by the end of a

year. No one would wish to change the national inclination of upright

people on this side of the water to pay on the spot, but the master and

mistress of an establishment may well consider whether the fashionable

tradesmen ought to oblige them to bear the entire penalty of being

sheep instead of goats. With this qualification, which is set forth

rather as a caveat than a doctrine, the prompt payment of one’s bills

seems to be strictly co-ordinate with virtue, and may be properly

described as the corner-stone of wise modern living.

There are so many things which one has to have nowadays in order to

be comfortable that it seems almost improvident to inquire how much

one ought to save before facing the question of what one can possibly

do without. Here the people who are said to have too much for their

own good have an advantage over the rest of us. The future of their

children is secure. If they dread death it is not because they fear

to leave their wives and children unprovided for. Many of them go on

saving, just the same, and talk poor if a railroad lowers a dividend,

or there is not a ready market for their real estate at an exalted

profit. Are there more irritating men or women in the world than the

over-conservative persons of large means who are perpetually harping on

saving, and worrying lest they may not be able to put by for a rainy

day, as they call it, twenty-five per cent. or more of their annual

income? The capitalist, careworn by solicitude of this sort, is the one

fool in creation who is not entitled to some morsel of pity.

How much ought the rest of us to save? I know a man--now you do not

know him, and there is no use in racking your brains to discover who he

is, which seems to be a principal motive for reading books nowadays,

as though we writers had a cabinet photograph in our mind’s eye

whenever we took a pen in hand. I know a man who divides his income

into parts. “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” you will remember

we read in the classics. Well, my friend, whom we will call Julius

Cæsar for convenience and mystification, divides his income, on the

first of January, into a certain number of parts or portions. He and

his wife have a very absorbing and earnest pow-wow over it annually.

They take the matter very seriously, and burn the midnight oil in the

sober endeavor to map and figure out in advance a wise and unselfish

exhibit. So much and no more for rent, so much for servants, so much

for household supplies, so much for clothes, so much for amusements,

so much for charity, so much to meet unlooked-for contingencies, and

so much for investment. By the time the exhibit is finished it is

mathematically and ethically irreproachable, and, what is more, Julius

Cæsar and his wife live up to it so faithfully that they are sure to

have some eight or ten dollars to the good on the morning of December

thirty-first, which they commonly expend in a pair of canvas-back ducks

and a bottle of champagne, for which they pay cash, in reward for their

own virtue and to enable them at the stroke of midnight to submit to

their own consciences a trial balance accurate to a cent.

Now it should be stated that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar are not very

busy people in other respects, and that their annual income, which

is fifteen thousand dollars, and chiefly rent from improved real

estate in the hands of a trustee, flows on as regularly and surely as

a river. Wherefore it might perhaps be argued, if one were disposed

to be sardonic, that this arithmetical system of life under the

circumstances savors of a fad, and that Julius and his wife take

themselves and their occupation a trifle too seriously, especially as

they have both been known to inform, solemnly and augustly, more than

one acquaintance who was struggling for a living, that it is every

one’s duty to lay up at least one-tenth of his income and give at least

another tenth in charity. And yet, when one has ceased to smile at the

antics of this pair, the consciousness remains that they are right in

their practice of foresight and arithmetical apportioning, and that

one who would live wisely should, if possible, decide in advance how

much he intends to give to the poor or put into the bank. Otherwise he

is morally, or rather immorally, certain to spend everything, and to

suffer disagreeable qualms instead of enjoying canvas-back ducks and a

bottle of champagne on December thirty-first.

As to what that much or little to be given and to be saved shall be,

there is more room for discussion. Julius Cæsar and his wife have

declared in favor of a tenth for each, which in their case means

fifteen hundred dollars given, and fifteen hundred dollars saved,

which leaves them a net income of twelve thousand dollars to spend,

and they have no children. I am inclined to think that if every man

with ten thousand dollars a year and a family were to give away three

hundred dollars, and prudently invest seven hundred dollars, charity

would not suffer so long as at present, and would be no less kind.

Unquestionably those of us who come out on December thirty-first just

even, or eight or nine dollars behind instead of ahead, and would

have been able to spend a thousand or two more, are the ones who find

charity and saving so difficult. Our friends who are said to have too

much for their own good help to found a hospital or send a deserving

youth through college without winking. It costs them merely the trouble

of signing a check. But it behooves those who have only four instead

of forty times as much as Rogers, if they wish to do their share in

relieving the needs of others, to do so promptly and systematically

before the fine edge of the good resolutions formed on the first of

January is dulled by the pressure of a steadily depleted bank account,

and a steadily increasing array of bills. Charity, indeed, is more

difficult for us to practise than saving, for the simplest method of

saving, life insurance, is enforced by the “stand and deliver” argument

of an annual premium. Only he, who before the first crocus thrusts its

gentle head above the winter’s snow has sent his check to the needy,

and who can conscientiously hang upon his office door “Fully insured;

life insurance agents need not apply,” is in a position to face with a

calm mind the fall of the leaf and the December days when conscience,

quickened by the dying year, inquires what we have done for our

neighbor, and how the wife and the little ones would fare if we should

be cut down in the strength of our manhood.

And yet, too, important as saving is, there are so many things which

we must have for the sake of this same wife and the little ones that

we cannot afford to save too much. Are we to toil and moil all our

days, go without fresh butter and never take six weeks in Europe or

Japan because we wish to make sure that our sons and daughters will

be amply provided for, as the obituary notices put it? Some men with

daughters only have a craze of saving so that this one earthly life

becomes a rasping, worrying ordeal, which is only too apt to find an

end in the coolness of a premature grave. My friend Perkins--here is

another chance, identity seekers, to wonder who Perkins really is--the

father of four girls, is a thin, nervous lawyer, who ought to take a

proper vacation every summer; but he rarely does, and the reason seems

to be that he is saddled by the idea that to bring a girl up in luxury

and leave her with anything less than five thousand dollars a year is

a piece of paternal brutality. It seems to me that a father ought in

the first place to remember that some girls marry. I reminded Perkins

of this one day. “Some don’t,” he answered mournfully. “Marriage does

not run in the female Perkins line. The chances are that two of my

four will never marry. They might be able to get along, if they lived

together and were careful, on seven thousand dollars a year, and I

must leave them that somehow.” “Hoot toot,” said I, “that seems to me

nonsense. Don’t let the spectre of decayed gentlewomen hound you into

dyspepsia or Bright’s disease, but give yourself a chance and trust to

your girls to look out for themselves. There are so many things for

women to do now besides marry or pot jam, that a fond father ought to

let his nervous system recuperate now and then.”

“I suppose you mean that they might become teachers or physicians or

hospital nurses or typewriters,” said Perkins. “Declined with thanks.”

“Don’t you think,” I inquired with a little irritation, “that they

would be happier so than in doing nothing on a fixed income, in simply

being mildly cultivated and philanthropic on dividends, in moving to

the sea-side in summer and back again in the autumn, and in dying at

the last of some fashionable ailment?”

“No, I don’t,” said Perkins. “Do you?”

Were I to repeat my answer to this inquiry I should be inviting a

discussion on woman, which is not in place at this stage of our

reflections. Let me say, though, that I am still of the opinion that

Perkins ought to give his nervous system a chance and not worry so much

about his daughters.

_Income._

II.

Seeing that there are so many things to have and that we cannot have

everything, what are we to choose? I have sometimes, while trudging

along in the sleighing season, noticed that many men, whose income I

believe to be much smaller than mine, were able to ride behind fast

trotters in fur overcoats. The reason upon reflection was obvious to

me. Men of a certain class regard a diamond pin, a fur overcoat, and

a fast horse as the first necessaries of existence after a bed, a

hair-brush and one maid-of-all-work. In other words, they are willing

to live in an inexpensive locality, with no regard to plumbing,

society, or art, to have their food dropped upon the table, and to

let their wives and daughters live with shopping as the one bright

spot in the month’s horizon, if only they, the husbands and fathers,

can satisfy the three-headed ruling ambition in question. The men to

whom I am referring have not the moral or æsthetic tone of Rogers and

myself, and belong to quite a distinct class of society from either of

us. But among the friends of both of us there are people who act on

precisely the same principle. A fine sense of selection ought to govern

the expenditure of income, and the wise man will refrain from buying

a steam-yacht for himself or a diamond crescent for his wife before

he has secured a home with modern conveniences, an efficient staff of

servants, a carefully chosen family physician, a summer home, or an

ample margin wherewith to hire one, the best educational advantages

for his children which the community will afford, and choice social

surroundings. In order to have these comfortably and completely, and

still not to be within sailing distance, so to speak, of a steam-yacht,

one needs to have nowadays--certainly in large cities--an income of

from seven thousand to eleven thousand dollars, according to where one

lives.

I make this assertion in the face of the fact that our legislators

all over the country annually decree that from four to five thousand

dollars a year is a fat salary in reward for public service, and that

an official with a family who is given twenty-five hundred or three

thousand is to be envied. Envied by whom, pray? By the ploughman, the

horse-car conductor, and the corner grocery man, may be, but not by

the average business or professional man who is doing well. To be

sure, five thousand dollars in a country town _is_ affluence, if the

beneficiary is content to stay there; but in a city the family man

with only that income, provided he is ambitious, can only just live,

and might fairly be described as the cousin german to a mendicant.

And yet there are some worthy citizens still, who doubtless would be

aghast at these statements, and would wish to know how one is to spend

five thousand dollars a year without extravagance. We certainly did

start in this country on a very different basis, and the doctrine of

plain living was written between the lines of the Constitution. We were

practically to do our own work, to be content with pie and doughnuts

as the staple articles of nutrition, to abide in one locality all the

year round, and to eschew color, ornament, and refined recreation. All

this as an improvement over the civilization of Europe and a rebuke to

it. Whatever the ethical value of this theory of existence in moulding

the national character may have been, it has lost its hold to-day, and

we as a nation have fallen into line with the once sneered-at older

civilizations, though we honestly believe that we are giving and going

to give a peculiar redeeming brand to the adopted, venerable customs

which will purge them of dross and bale.

Take the servant question, for instance. We are perpetually discussing

how we are to do away with the social reproach which keeps native

American women out of domestic service; yet at the same time in

actual practice the demand for servants grows more and more urgent

and wide-spread, and they are consigned still more hopelessly, though

kindly, to the kitchen and servants’ hall in imitation of English

upper-class life. In the days when our Emerson sought to practise the

social equality for which he yearned, by requiring his maids to sit at

his own dinner-table, a domestic establishment was a modest affair of a

cook and a second girl. Now, the people who are said to have too much

for their own good, keep butlers, ladies’ maids, governesses, who like

Mahomet’s coffin hover between the parlor and the kitchen, superfine

laundresses, pages in buttons, and other housekeeping accessories, and

domestic life grows bravely more and more complex. To be sure, too,

I am quite aware that, as society is at present constituted, only a

comparatively small number out of our millions of free-born American

citizens have or are able to earn the seven to eleven thousand dollars

a year requisite for thorough comfort, and that the most interesting

and serious problem which confronts human society to-day is the

annihilation or lessening of the terrible existing inequalities in

estate and welfare.

This problem, absorbing as it is, can scarcely be solved in our time.

But, whatever the solution, whether by socialism, government control,

or brotherly love, is it not safe to assume that when every one shares

alike, society is not going to be satisfied with humble, paltry, or

ugly conditions as the universal weal? If the new dispensation does

not provide a style and manner of living at least equal in comfort,

luxury, and refinement to that which exists among the well-to-do

to-day, it will be a failure. Humanity will never consent to be shut

off from the best in order to be exempt from the worst. The millennium

must supply not merely bread and butter, a house, a pig, a cow, and

a sewing-machine for every one, but attractive homes, gardens, and

galleries, literature and music, and all the range of æsthetic social

adjuncts which tend to promote healthy bodies, delightful manners,

fine sensibilities, and noble purposes, or it will be no millennium.

Therefore one who would live wisely and has the present means, though

he may deplore existing misery and seek to relieve it, does not give

away to others all his substance but spends it chiefly on himself and

his family until he has satisfied certain needs. By way of a house

he feels that he requires not merely a frail, unornamental shelter,

but a carefully constructed, well ventilated, cosily and artistically

furnished dwelling, where his family will neither be scrimped for space

nor exposed to discomforts, and where he can entertain his friends

tastefully if not with elegance. All this costs money and involves

large and recurrent outlays for heating, lighting, upholstery, sanitary

appliances, silver, china, and glass. It is not sufficient for him that

his children should be sure of their own father; he is solicitous,

besides, that they should grow up as free as possible from physical

blemishes, and mentally and spiritually sound and attractive. To

promote this he must needs consult or engage from time to time skilled

specialists, dentists, oculists, dancing and drawing masters, private

tutors, and music-teachers. To enable these same sons and daughters

to make the most of themselves, he must, during their early manhood

and womanhood, enable them to pursue professional or other studies, to

travel, and to mingle in cultivated and well-bred society. He must live

in a choice neighborhood that he may surround himself and his family

with refining influences, and accordingly he must pay from twelve

hundred to twenty-five hundred or three thousand dollars a year for

rent, according to the size and desirability of the premises. Unless he

would have his wife and daughters merely household factors and drudges,

he must keep from three to five or six servants, whose wages vary from

four to six or seven dollars a week, and feed them.

Nor can the athletic, æsthetic, or merely pleasurable needs of a

growing or adolescent household be ignored. He must meet the steady

and relentless drain from each of these sources, or be conscious that

his flesh and blood have not the same advantages and opportunities

which are enjoyed by their contemporaries. He must own a pew, a library

share, a fancy dress costume, and a cemetery lot, and he must always

have loose change on hand for the hotel waiter and the colored railway

porter. The family man in a large city who meets these several demands

to his entire satisfaction will have little of ten thousand dollars

left for the purchase of a trotter, a fur overcoat, and a diamond pin.

The growing consciousness of the value of these complex demands of our

modern civilization, when intelligently gratified, acts at the present

day as a cogent incentive to make money, not for the mere sake of

accumulation, but to spend. Gross accumulation with scant expenditure

has always been sanctioned here; but to grow rich and yet be lavish has

only within a comparatively recent period among us seemed reconcilable

with religious or national principles. Even yet he who many times a

millionaire still walks unkempt, or merely plain and honest, has not

entirely lost the halo of hero worship. But, though the old man is

permitted to do as he prefers, better things are demanded of his sons

and daughters. Nor can the argument that some of the greatest men in

our history have been nurtured and brought up in cabins and away from

refining influences be soundly used against the advisability of making

the most of income, even though we now and then ask ourselves whether

modern living is producing statesmen of equally firm mould. But we

thrill no longer at mention of a log cabin or rail splitting, and the

very name of hard cider suggests rather unpleasantly the corner grocery

store and the pie-permeated, hair-cloth suited New England parlor.

Merely because other nations have long been aware that it was wise and

not immoral to try to live comfortably and beautifully our change of

faith is no less absorbing to us. We confidently expect to win fresh

laurels by our originality, intelligence, and unselfishness in this new

old field. Already have we made such strides that our establishments

on this side of the water make up in genuine comfort what they lack

in ancient manorial picturesqueness and ghost-haunted grace. Each one

of us who is in earnest is asking how he is to make the most of what

he has or earns, so as to attain that charm of refined living which

is civilization’s best flower--living which if merely material and

unanimated by intelligence and noble aims is without charm, but which

is made vastly more difficult of realization in case we are without

means or refuse to spend them adequately.

The _Dwelling_.

I.

Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar, who, as you may remember, divide their

income into parts with mathematical precision, were not as well off

in this world’s goods at the time of their marriage as they are now.

Neither Mr. Cæsar’s father nor Mrs. Cæsar’s grandmother was then

dead, and consequently the newly wedded pair, though set up by their

respective families with a comfortable income, felt that it was

incumbent upon them to practise strict economy. Then it was that Julius

conceived what seemed to them both the happy idea of buying a house

dirt cheap in a neighborhood which was not yet improved, and improving

the neighborhood, instead of paying an exorbitant price for a residence

in a street which was already all it should be.

“Why,” said Julius, “shouldn’t we buy one of those new houses in Sunset

Terrace? They look very attractive, and if we can only induce two

or three congenial couples to join forces with us we shall have the

nucleus of a delightful colony.”

“Besides, everything will be nice and new,” said Mrs. Julius, or Dolly

Cæsar, as her friends know her. “No cockroaches, no mice, no moths, no

family skeletons to torment us. Julius, you are a genius. We can just

as well set the fashion as follow meekly in fashion’s wake.”

So said, so done. Julius Cæsar bent his intellect upon the matter and

soon found three congenial couples who were willing to join forces with

him. Before another twelve months had passed, four baby-wagons--one of

them double-seated--were to be seen on four sunny grass-plots in front

of four attractive, artistic-looking villas on Sunset Terrace. Where

lately sterility, mortar, and weeds had held carnival, there was now an

air of tasteful gentility. Thanks to the example of Dolly Cæsar, who

had an eye and an instinct for such matters, the four brass door-plates

shone like the sun, the paint was spick and span, the four gravel

paths were in apple-pie order, the four grass-plots were emerald from

timely use of a revolving lawn sprinkler, and the four nurse-maids, who

watched like dragons over the four baby-wagons, were neat-looking and

comely. No wonder that by the end of the second year there was not a

vacant house in the street, and that everybody who wished to live in

a fashionable locality was eager for a chance to enter Sunset Terrace.

No wonder, too, that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar were able, by the end

of the fourth year, to emerge from Sunset Terrace with a profit on the

sale of their villa which made it rent free for the entire period, and

left them with a neat little surplus to boot, and to settle down with

calm minds on really fashionable Belport Avenue, in the stately mansion

devised to them by Mrs. Cæsar’s grandmother.

Now, it must be borne in mind that a Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar

can sometimes do that which a Mr. and Mrs. George J. Spriggs find

difficulty in accomplishing. Spriggs, at the time of his marriage to

Miss Florence Green, the daughter of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General

Homer W. Green, conceived the happy idea of setting up his household

gods in Locust Road, which lies about as far from Belport Avenue in

one direction as Sunset Terrace in the other. Both are semi-suburban.

It also occurred to him at the outset to join forces with three or

four congenial couples, but at the last moment the engagement of one

of the couples in question was broken, and the other three decided to

live somewhere else. To have changed his mind then would have involved

the sacrifice of one hundred dollars paid to bind the bargain to the

landowner. So it seemed best to them on the whole to move in, as they

had to live somewhere.

“It’s just a little bit dreary, isn’t it?” said Florence Spriggs,

pathetically, as she looked out of her bow window at the newly finished

street which was not finished, and at the grass-plot where there was no

grass. “But I sha’n’t be a bit lonely with you, George.”

“I wonder if the color of this house has been changed,” said Spriggs,

presently, as he glanced up at the façade and from that to the other

houses in the block, each of which was vacant. He and Florence had gone

out after dinner to take a stroll and survey the neighborhood which

they hoped to improve.

“Of course it hasn’t! How could it be?” said Florence.

“Somehow it looks a more staring shade of yellow than it did the first

time we saw it. And I don’t fancy altogether the filigree work on the

door, or that Egyptian renaissance scroll set into the eastern wall, do

you, dearest? However, we’re in now and can’t get out, for the title

has passed. I wonder who will buy the other houses?”

They were soon to know. They were alone all winter, but in the

early spring a family moved in on either side of them. The houses

in Locust Road, like those in Sunset Terrace, were of the villa

order, with grass-plots, which were almost lawns, appurtenant. Though

less pleasing than those which had taken the more discerning eye of

Mrs. Julius Cæsar, they were nevertheless comparatively inoffensive

and sufficiently tasteful. Neighbor number one proved to be of an

enterprising and imaginative turn. He changed the color of his villa

from staring yellow to startling crushed strawberry, supplemented his

Egyptian renaissance scroll and filigree with inlaid jewel and frost

work, stationed a cast-iron stag in one corner of the grass-plot and a

cast-iron Diana with a bow in another, and then rested on his laurels.

Neighbor number two was shiftless and untidy. His grass-plot did not

thrive, and the autumn leaves choked his gravel path. His windows were

never washed, his blinds hung askew, and his one maid-of-all-work

preferred the lawn to the laundry as a drying-room. His wife sunned

herself in a wrapper, and he himself in his shirt sleeves. A big

mongrel dog drooled perpetually on the piazza or tracked it with his

muddy feet, and even the baby-wagon wore the appearance of dilapidation

and halted because of a broken spring.

The Spriggses tried to be lenient and even genial with both these

neighbors, but somehow the attempt was not successful. Neighbor number

one became huffy because Spriggs took no notice of his advice that

he embellish his grass-plot with a stone mastiff or an umbrella and

cherub fountain, and neighbor number two took offence because Spriggs

complained that the ventilator on his chimney kept Mrs. Spriggs awake

by squeaking. Mrs. Spriggs did her best to set them both a good example

by having everything as tasteful on the one hand and as tidy on the

other as it should be. In the hope of improving them she even dropped

suggestive hints as to how people ought to live, but the hints were not

taken. What was worse none of the other houses were taken. As Spriggs

pathetically expressed it, the iron stag on the one side and the weekly

wash on the other kept purchasers at bay. He tried to buoy himself up

by believing that a glut in the real estate market was the cause why

the remaining villas in Locust Road hung fire, but this consolation was

taken away from him the following spring when an active buying movement

all along the line still left them without other neighbors. The

unoccupied villas had begun to wear an air of dilapidation, in spite

of their Egyptian renaissance scrolls and the presence of a cast-iron

Diana.

To crown the situation the baby of neighbor number two caught

diphtheria from being left in its halting wagon by the maid-of-all-work

too near the cesspool on the lawn, and was kissed by the Spriggs baby

before the fact was discovered. If there is one thing more irritating

to the maternal mind than another, it is to have dear baby catch

something from the child of people whom you reprobate. One feels that

the original horrors of the disease are sure to be enhanced through

such a medium. When the only child of the Julius Cæsars died of the

same disease, contracted from a germ inhaled on Belport Avenue, the

parents felt that only destiny was to blame. On the other hand, though

the Spriggs baby recovered, Mrs. Spriggs never quite forgave herself

for what had happened. Before the next autumn Spriggs parted with

his estate on Locust Road for so much less than he had paid for it

that he felt obliged to accept the hospitality of his wife’s father,

ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Green, during the succeeding winter.

The moral of this double-jointed tale is twofold; firstly that the

young householder cannot always count upon improving the neighborhood

in which he sets up his goods and chattels after marriage, and

secondly, that, in case the neighborhood fails to improve, a tenancy

for a year or two is a less serious burden than absolute ownership.

It is extremely pleasant, to be sure, to be able to declare that one

has paid for one’s house, and I am aware that the consciousness of

unencumbered ownership in the roof over one’s head affords one of

the most affecting and effective opportunities for oratory which the

free-born citizen can desire. The hand of many a husband and father

has been stayed from the wine-cup or the gaming-table by the pathetic

thought that he owned his house. As a rule, too, it is cheaper to pay

the interest on a mortgage than to pay rent, and if one is perfectly

sure of being able to improve the neighborhood, or at least save it

from degeneration, it certainly seems desirable to be the landlord of

one’s house, even though it be mortgaged so cleverly that the equity

of redemption is merely a name. But in this age of semi-suburban

development, when Roads and Terraces and Parks and Gates and other

Anglo-European substitutes for streets serve as “springes to catch

woodcocks,” a young couple on real estate ownership bent should have

the discerning eye of a Mrs. Julius Cæsar in order not to fall a prey

to the specious land and lot speculator. If you happen to hit on a

Sunset Terrace, everything is rose color, but to find one’s self an

owner in fee on a Locust Road, next door to crushed strawberry and a

cast-iron stag, will palsy the hopes of the hopeful.

What attractive, roomy, tasteful affairs many of these semi-suburban

villas, which are built nowadays on the new Roads, Terraces, Parks,

Gates, and even Streets, are to be sure. There are plenty of homely

ones too, but it is a simple matter to avoid the Egyptian renaissance

scroll, and the inlaid jewel work and stained-glass bull’s eyes if

one only will. They seem to be affording to many a happy solution of

the ever new and ever old problem, which presents itself to every man

who is about to take a wife, whether it is preferable to live in the

city or the country. These new suburbs, or rather outlying wards of

our large cities, which have been carved out of what, not many years

ago, was real country where cows browsed and woods flourished, must be

very alluring to people who would fain live out of town and still be in

it. When, by stepping on an electric car or taking the train, you can,

within a quarter of an hour, be on your own piazza inhaling fresh air

and privileged to feast your eyes on a half acre or less of greensward

belonging to yourself, there would seem to be strong inducements for

refusing to settle down in a stuffy, smoky, dusty, wire-pestered city

street, however fashionable. Rapid transit has made or is making the

environs of our cities so accessible that the time-honored problem

presents itself under different conditions than formerly. There is no

such thing now as the real country for anybody who is not prepared

to spend an hour in the train. Even then one is liable to encounter

asphalt walks and a Soldier’s monument in the course of a sylvan

stroll. But the intervening territory is ample and alluring.

For one-half the rent demanded for a town house of meagre dimensions in

the middle of a block, with no outlook whatever, new, spacious, airy,

ornamental homes with a plot of land and a pleasing view attached,

are to be had for the seeking within easy living distance from nearly

every large city. When I begin to rhapsodize, as I sometimes do, I am

apt to ask myself why it is that anybody continues to live in town. It

was only the other day that I happened, while driving with my wife in

the suburbs, to call her attention, enthusiastically, to the new house

which Perkins has secured for himself. You may remember that Perkins is

the thin, nervous lawyer with four daughters, who is solicitous as to

what will become of them when he is dead. We drove by just as he came

up the avenue from the station, which is only a three minutes’ walk

from the house. He looked tired--he always does--but there was already

a fresh jauntiness in his tread as though he sniffed ozone. He looked

up at the new house complacently, as well he might, for it is large

enough even for four daughters, and has all the engaging impressiveness

of a not too quaintly proportioned and not too abnormally stained

modern villa, a highly evolved composite of an old colonial mansion, a

Queen Anne cottage, and a French château. Before he reached the front

door, two of his daughters ran out to embrace him and relieve him of

his bag and bundles, and a half-hour later, as we drove back, he was

playing lawn tennis with three of his girls, in a white blazer with

pink stripes and knickerbockers, which gave his thin and eminently

respectable figure a rather rakish air.

“Barbara,” I said to my wife, “why isn’t Perkins doing the sensible

thing? That’s a charming house, double the size he could get for the

same money in town--and the rent is eight hundred or a thousand dollars

instead of fifteen hundred or two thousand. He needs fewer servants

out here, for the parlor-maid isn’t kept on tenterhooks to answer the

door-bell, and there is fresh air to come back to at night, and the

means for outdoor exercise on his own or his neighbor’s lawn, which

for a nervous, thin-chested, sedentary man like Perkins is better than

cod-liver oil. Think what robust specimens those daughters should be

with such opportunities for tennis, golf, skating, and bicycling.

“On Sundays and holidays, if the spirit moves him and his wife and the

girls to start off on an exploring expedition, they are not obliged to

take a train or pound over dusty pavements before they begin; the wild

flowers and autumn foliage and chestnut-burs are all to be had in the

woods and glens within a mile or two of their own home. Or if he needs

to be undisturbed, no noise, no interruption, but nine hours’ sleep

and an atmosphere suited to rest and contemplation on his piazza or

by his cheerful, tasteful fireside. Why isn’t this preferable to the

artificial, restless life of the city?”

“And yet,” said Barbara, “I have heard you state that only a rich man

can afford to live in the country.”

Women certainly delight to store up remarks made in quite another

connection, and use them as random arguments against us.

“My dear Barbara,” said I, “this is not the country. Of course in the

real country, one needs so many things to be comfortable nowadays--a

large house, stables, horses, and what not--it has always seemed to me

that a poor man with social or cultivated instincts had better stay in

town. But have not Perkins and these other semi-suburbanites hit the

happy medium? They have railroads or electric cars at their doors, and

yet they can get real barn-yard smells.”

“I doubt if they can,” said Barbara. “That is, unless they start a

barn-yard for the purpose, and that would bring the health authorities

down upon them at once. If this _were_ the country, I could entirely

thrill at the description you have just given of your friend Mr.

Perkins. The real country is divine; but this is oleomargarine country.

On the other hand, however, I quite agree with you that if Mr. Perkins

is delicate, this is a far healthier place for him than the city, in

spite of the journey in the train twice a day. The houses--his house

in particular--are lovely, and I dare say we all ought to do the same.

He can certainly come in contact with nature--such nature as there is

left within walking distance--easier than city people. But to console

me for not having one of these new, roomy villas, and to prevent you

from doing anything rash, I may as well state a few objections to your

paradise. As to expense, of course there is a saving in rent, and it

is true that the parlor-maid does not have to answer the door-bell

so often, and accordingly can do other things instead. Consequently,

too, Mrs. Perkins and the four girls may get into the habit of going

about untidy and in their old clothes. A dowdy girl with rosy cheeks

and a fine constitution is a pitiable object in this age of feminine

progress. Mr. Perkins will have to look out for this, and he may

require cod-liver oil after all.

“Then there is the question of schools. In many of these semi-suburban

paradises there are no desirable schools, especially for girls, which

necessitates perpetual coming and going on trains and cars, and will

make education a wearisome thing, especially for Mrs. Perkins. She

will find, too, that her servants are not so partial to wild flowers

and chestnut-burs and fresh air as her husband and daughters. Only the

inexperienced will apply, and they will come to her reluctantly, and as

soon as she has accustomed them to her ways and made them skilful, they

will tell her they are not happy, and need the society of their friends

in town.

“Those are a few of the drawbacks to the semi-suburban villa; but

the crucial and most serious objection is, that unless one is very

watchful, and often in spite of watchfulness, the semi-suburbanite

shuts himself off from the best social interests and advantages. He

begins by imagining that there will be no difference; that he will

see just as much of his friends and go just as frequently to balls

and dinner-parties, the concert and the theatre, the educational or

philanthropic meeting. But just that requisite and impending twenty

minutes in the train or electric car at the fag end of the day is

liable to make a hermit of him to all intents and purposes by the

end of the second year. Of course, if one is rich and has one’s own

carriage, the process of growing rusty is more gradual, though none

the less sure. On that very account most people with a large income

come to town for a few months in winter at any rate. There are so

many things in life to do, that even friends with the best and most

loving intentions call once on those who retire to suburban villas

and let that do for all time. To be sure, some people revel in being

hermits and think social entertainments and excitements a mere waste

of time and energy. I am merely suggesting that for those who wish to

keep in close touch with the active human interests of the day, the

semi-suburban villa is somewhat of a snare. The Perkinses will have to

exercise eternal vigilance, or they will find themselves seven evenings

out of seven nodding by their fireside after an ample meal, with all

their social instincts relaxed.”

Undeniably Barbara offered the best solution of this question in her

remark, that those who can afford it spend the spring and autumn in

the country and come to town for the winter months. Certainly, if I

were one of the persons who are said to have too much for their own

good, I should do something of the kind. I might not buy a suburban

villa; indeed, I would rather go to the real country, where there are

lowing kine, and rich cream and genuine barn-yard smells, instead of

electric cars and soldiers’ monuments. There would I remain until it

was time to kill the Thanksgiving turkey, and then I would hie me to

town in order to refresh my mental faculties with city sights and

sounds during the winter-spring solstice, when the lowing kine are

all in the barn, and even one who owns a suburban villa has to fight

his way from his front door through snow-drifts, and listen to the

whistling wind instead of the robin red-breast or tinkling brook.

Patterson, the banker, is surely to be envied in his enjoyment of two

establishments, notwithstanding that the double ownership suggests

again the effete civilizations of Europe, and was once considered

undemocratic. Patterson, though his son has been through the Keeley

cure, and his daughter lives apart from her husband, has a charming

place thirty-five miles from town, where he has many acres and many

horses, cows, and sheep, an expanse of woods, a running stream,

delicious vegetables and fruit; golf links, and a fine country house

with all the modern improvements, including a cosy, spacious library.

Then he has another house--almost a palace--in town which he opens in

the late autumn and occupies until the middle of May, for Patterson, in

spite of some foibles, is no tax dodger.

Yes, to have two houses and live half of the year in town and the

other half in the country, with six to eight weeks at the sea-side

or mountains, so as to give the children salt air and bathing,

or a thorough change, is what most of us would choose in case we

were blessed with too much for our own good. But, unfortunately or

fortunately, most of us with even comfortable incomes cannot have

two houses, and consequently must choose between town and country or

semi-country, especially as the six or eight weeks at the sea-side or

mountains is apt to seem imperative when midsummer comes. According,

therefore, as we select to live in one or the other, it behooves us to

practise eternal vigilance, so that we may not lose our love of nature

and wreck our nerves in the worldly bustle of city life, or become

inert, rusty, and narrow among the lowing kine or in semi-suburban

seclusion. In order to live wisely, we who dwell in the cities

should in our spare hours seek fresh air, sunlight, and intercourse

with nature, and we whose homes are out of town should in our turn

rehabilitate our social instincts and rub up our manners.

Regarding the real country, there is one other consideration of which I

am constantly reminded by a little water-color hanging in my library,

painted by me a few years ago while I was staying with my friend

Henley. It represents a modest but pretty house and a charming rustic

landscape. I call it Henley’s Folly. Henley, who possessed ardent

social instincts, had always lived in town; but he suddenly took it

into his head to move thirty miles into the country. He told me that he

did so primarily for the benefit of his wife and children, but added

that it would be the best thing in the world for him, that it would

domesticate him still more completely, and give him time to read and

cultivate himself. When I went to stay with him six months later, he

was jubilant regarding the delights of the country, and declared that

he had become a genuine farmer. He pished at the suggestion that the

daily journey to and from town was exhausting, and informed me that his

one idea was to get away from the bricks and mortar as early in the

afternoon as possible. Just two years later I heard with surprise, one

day, that the Henleys had sold their farm and were coming back to town.

The reason--confided to me by one of the family--was that his wife

was so much alone that she could not endure the solitude any longer.

“You see,” said my informant, “the nearest house of their friends

was four miles off, and as Henley stayed in town until the last gun

fired, the days he returned home at all, and as he had or invented a

reason for staying in town all night at least once a week, poor Mrs.

Henley realized that the lot of a farmer’s wife was not all roses and

sunshine.” From this I opine that if one with ardent social instincts

would live wisely he should not become a gentleman farmer merely for

the sake of his wife and children.

The _Dwelling_.

II.

Whether we live in the city or the country, it must be apparent to

all of us that a great wave of architectural activity in respect to

dwelling-houses has been spreading over our land during the past twenty

years. The American architect has been getting in his work and showing

what he could do, with the result that the long, monotonous row of

brick or freestone custom-made city houses, and the stereotyped white

country farm-house with green blinds and an ell or lean-to attached,

have given place to a vivid and heterogeneous display of individual

effort. Much of this is fine and some deadly, for the display includes

not merely the generally tasteful and artistic conceptions of our

trained native architects, who have studied in Paris, but the raw

notions of all the builders of custom-made houses who, recognizing

the public desire for striking and original effects, are bent upon

surpassing one another.

Therefore, while we have many examples, both urban and suburban, of

beautiful and impressive house architecture, the new sections of our

cities and suburbs fairly bristle with a multiplicity of individual

experiments in which the salient features of every known type of

architecture are blended fearlessly together. The native architect

who has neither been to Paris nor been able to devote much time to

study has not been limited in the expression of his genius by artistic

codes or conventions. Consequently he has felt no hesitation in using

extinguisher towers, mediæval walls, battlement effects, Queen Anne

cottage lines, Old Colonial proportions, and Eastern imagery in the

same design, and any one of them at any critical juncture when his work

has seemed to him not sufficiently striking for his own or the owner’s

taste.

Satisfactory as all this is as evidence of a progressive spirit, and

admitting that many of even these lawless manifestations of talent are

not without merit, it is nevertheless aggressively true that the smug

complacency of the proprietor of the suburban villa, which is hedged

about by a stone rampart of variegated rough stone on an ordinary

building lot, has no justification whatever. Nor has the master of

the castellated, gloomy, half-Moorish, half-mediæval mansion, which

disfigures the fashionable quarter of many of our cities, occasion to

congratulate himself on having paid for a thing of beauty. The number

of our well-trained architects, though constantly increasing, is still

small, especially as compared with the number of people of means who

are eager to occupy a thing of beauty; then, too, even the trained

architect is apt to try experiments for the sake of testing his genius,

on a dog, so to speak--some confiding plutocrat with a love of splendor

who has left everything to him.

The result is that grotesque and eye-distressing monsters of masonry

stand side by side on many of our chief avenues with the most graceful

and finished specimens of native architectural inspiration. As there is

no law which prevents one from building or buying an ugly house, and

as the architect, whose experiment on a dog tortures the public eye,

suffers no penalty for his crime, our national house architecture may

be said to be working out its own salvation at the public expense. It

is the duty of a patriotic citizen to believe that in this, as in other

matters of national welfare, the beautiful gradually will prevail; and

assuredly the many very attractive private residences which one sees

both in the city and the country should tend to make us hopeful.

Why is it that the rich man who would live wisely feels the necessity

for so large a house in the city? Almost the first thing that one who

has accumulated or inherited great possessions does nowadays is to

leave the house where very likely he has been comfortable and move

into a mammoth establishment suggesting rather a palace or an emporium

than a house. Why is this? Some one answers that it is for the sake

of abundant light and extra space. Surely in a handsome house of

twenty-five or thirty feet front there should be light and space enough

for the average family, however fastidious or exacting. In the country,

where one needs many spare rooms for the accommodation of guests, there

are some advantages in the possession of an abnormally large house. But

how is the comfort of the city man enhanced by one, that is, if the

attendant discomforts are weighed in the same scale? It has sometimes

seemed to me that the wealthy or successful man invests in a prodigious

mansion as a sort of testimonial; as though he felt it incumbent on

him to erect a conventional monument to his own grandeur or success,

in order to let the public entertain no doubt about it. But so many

otherwise sensible men have deliberately built huge city houses that

this can scarcely be the controlling motive in all cases. Perhaps, if

asked, they would throw the responsibility on their wives. But it is

even more difficult to understand why a sensible woman should wish one

of the vast houses which our rising architects are naturally eager to

receive orders to construct. A handsome house where she can entertain

attractively, yes: an exquisitely furnished, sunny, corner house by all

means; a house where each child may have a room apart and where there

are plenty of spare rooms, if you like; but why a mammoth cave? She is

the person who will suffer the discomforts to be weighed in the same

scale, for the care will fall on her.

We have in this country neither trained servants nor the housekeeper

system. The wife and mother who is the mistress of a huge establishment

wishes it to be no less a home than her former residence, and her

husband would be the first to demur were she to cast upon others the

burdens of immediate supervision. A moderate-sized modern house is the

cause of care enough, as we all know, and wherefore should any woman

seek to multiply her domestic worries by duplicating or trebling the

number of her servants? To become the manager of a hotel or to cater

for an ocean steamship is perhaps a tempting ambition for one in search

of fortune, but why should a woman, who can choose what she will have,

elect to be the slave of a modern palace with extinguisher towers?

Merely to be able to invite all her social acquaintance to her house

once a year without crowding them? It would be simpler to hire one of

the many halls now adapted for the purpose.

The difficulty of obtaining efficient servants, and the worries

consequent upon their inefficiency, is probably the chief cause of

the rapid growth of the apartment-house among us. The contemporary

architect has selected this class of building for some of his deadliest

conceits. Great piles of fantastically disposed stone and iron tower

up stories upon stories high, and frown upon us at the street-corners

like so many Brobdingnagians. Most of them are very ugly; nevertheless

they contain the homes of many citizens, and the continuous appearance

of new and larger specimens attests their increasing popularity.

Twenty years ago there was scarcely an apartment-house to be seen in

our cities. There was a certain number of hotels where families could

and did live all the year round, but the ten-story monster, with a

janitor, an elevator, steam heat, electric light, and all the alleged

comforts of home, was practically unknown. We have always professed to

be such a home-loving people, and the so-called domestic hearth has

always been such a touchstone of sentiment among us that the exchange

of the family roof for the community of a flat by so many well-to-do

persons certainly seems to suggest either that living cheek by jowl

with a number of other households is not so distasteful as it seems to

the uninitiated, or else that modern housekeeping is so irksome that

women are tempted to swallow sentiment and escape from their trammels

to the comparatively easy conditions of an apartment. It does seem

as though one’s identity would be sacrificed or dimmed by becoming a

tenant in common, and as though the family circle could never be quite

the same thing to one who was conscious that his was only a part of one

tremendous whole. And yet, more and more people seem to be anxious to

share a janitor and front door, and, though the more fastidious insist

on their own cuisine, there are not a few content to entrust even

their gastronomic welfare to a kitchen in common.

It must be admitted, even by those of us who rejoice in our homes,

that there is much to be said in favor of the apartment-house as a

solver of practical difficulties, and that our imaginations are largely

responsible for our antipathy. When once inside a private apartment

of the most desirable and highly evolved kind one cannot but admit

that there is no real lack of privacy, and that the assertion that the

owner has no domestic hearth is in the main incorrect. To be sure the

domain belonging to each suite is comparatively circumscribed; there is

no opportunity for roaming from garret to cellar; no private laundry;

no private backyard; and no private front-door steps; but to all

practical intents one is no less free from intrusion or inspection than

in a private house, and it may also be said that reporters and other

persevering visitors are kept at a more respectful distance by virtue

of the janitor in common on the ground floor. The sentiment in favor of

limited individual possession is difficult to eradicate from sensitive

souls, and rightly, perhaps, many of us refuse to be convinced;

but it remains true that the woman who has become the mistress of

a commodious and well-managed apartment must have many agreeable

quarters of an hour in congratulating herself that perplexities

concerning chores, heating, lighting, flights of stairs, leaks, and a

host of minor domestic matters no longer threaten her peace of mind,

and--greatest boon of all--that she now can manage with two or three

servants instead of five or six.

In this newly developed fondness for flats we are again guilty of

imitating one of the effete civilizations--France this time--where

it has long been the custom for families to content themselves with

a story or two instead of a house; though we can claim the size and

style of architecture of the modern apartment pile as our special

brand upon the adopted institution. The introduction of the custom

here seems to me to be the result of exhaustion of the female nervous

system. The American housewife, weary of the struggle to obtain

efficient servants, having oscillated from all Catholics to all

Protestants, from all Irish to all Swedes and back again, having

experimented with negroes and Chinamen, and returned to pure white,

having tried native help and been insulted, and reverted to the

Celtic race, she--the long-suffering--has sought the apartment-house

as a haven of rest. She--the long-suffering--has assuredly been in a

false position since the Declaration of Independence declared that

all men are created equal, for she has been forced to cherish and

preserve a domestic institution which popular sentiment has refused to

recognize as consistent with the principles of Democracy. Our National

creed, whether presented in the primer or from the platform, has ever

repudiated the idea of service when accompanied by an abatement of

personal independence or confession of social inferiority. Therefore

the native American woman has persistently refused, in the face of high

wages and of exquisite moral suasion, to enter domestic service, and

has preferred the shop or factory to a comfortable home where she would

have to crook the knee and say “Yes, ma’am.”

At the same time the native American woman, ever since “help” in the

sense of social acquaintances willing to accommodate for hire and

dine with the family has ceased to adorn her kitchen and parlor, has

been steadily forced by the demands of complex modern living to have

servants of her own. And where was she to obtain them? Excepting the

negro, only among the emigrants of foreign countries, at first among

the Irish, and presently among the English and Swedes, all of whom,

unharassed by scruples as to a consequent loss of self-respect, have

been prompt to recognize that this field of employment lay open to

them and was undisputed. They have come, and they still come in herds

to our shores, raw and undisciplined, the overflow from their own

countries; and as fast as they arrive they are feverishly snapped up

by the American housewife, who finds the need of servants more and

more imperative; for some one must do the elaborate cooking, some one

must do the fine washing, some one must polish the silver, rub the

brasses, care for the lamps, and dust the bric-à-brac in her handsomest

establishment. And no one but the emigrant, or the son and daughter of

the emigrant, is willing to.

The consequence is that, though the native American woman is as

resolute as ever in her own refusal to be a cook or waitress in a

private family, domestic service exists as an institution no less

completely than it exists in Europe, and practically under the same

conditions, save that servants here receive considerably higher wages

than abroad because the demand is greater than the supply. There is

a perpetual wail in all our cities and suburbs that the supply of

competent cooks, and skilled laundresses and maids is so limited, and

well-trained servants can demand practically their own prices. The

conditions of service, however, are the same. That is, the servant

in the household of the free-born is still the servant; and still

the servant in the household where the mistress, who has prospered,

would originally have gone into service had she not been free-born.

For there is no one more prompt than the American housewife to keep a

servant when she can afford one, and the more she is obliged to keep

the prouder is she, though her nervous system may give way under the

strain. By this I do not mean that the servants here are ill-treated.

On the contrary, the consideration shown them is greater, and the

quarters provided for them are far more comfortable on this side of the

water than abroad. Indeed, servants fare nowhere in the world so well

as in the establishments of the well-to-do people of our large cities.

Their bedrooms are suitable and often tasteful, they are attended by

the family physician if ill, they are not overworked, and very slight

checks are put on their liberty. But they are undeniably servants. The

free-born American mistress does not regard her servants as social

equals. She expects them to stand up if they are sitting down when she

enters the room. She expects them to address her sons and daughters as

Mr. Samuel and Miss Fanny, and to be called in turn Maggie or Albertine

(or Thompson or Jones, _à l’anglaise_) without a prefix. She does her

best, in short, to preserve all the forms and all the deference on

the one hand, and the haughtiness or condescension on the other which

govern the relations between servant and mistress abroad.

From the fact that we need so many more servants than formerly, to care

properly for our establishments, the servant here is becoming more

and more of a machine. That is, she is in nearly the same category

with the electric light and the furnace. We expect him or her to be

as unobtrusive as possible, to perform work without a hitch, and not

to draw upon our sympathies unnecessarily. The mistress of one or

two girls is sure to grow friendly and concerned as to their outside

welfare, but when she has a staff of five or six, she is thankful if

she is not obliged to know anything about them. The letter which

appeared in a New York newspaper some years ago, from an American girl,

in which she declared that she had left service because her master and

his sons handed her their dripping umbrellas with the same air as they

would have handed them to a graven image, was thoroughly in point. The

reason the native American girl will not become a servant, in spite of

the arguments of the rational and godly, is that service is the sole

employment in this country in which she can be told with impunity that

she is the social inferior of any one else. It is the telling which she

cannot put up with. It is one thing to be conscious that the person you

are constantly associated with is better educated, better mannered, and

more attractive than yourself, and it is another to be told at every

opportunity that this is so. In the shop, in the factory, and in other

walks of life, whatever her real superiors may think of her, they must

treat her as a social equal. Even that shrill-voiced, banged, bangled,

impertinent, slangy, vulgar product of our mammoth retail drygoods

system, who seems to believe herself a pattern of ladylike behavior, is

aware in her heart that she does not know how to behave, and yearns to

resemble the well-bred woman whom she daily insults. But the happiness

of her life, and its main-spring, too, lies in the consciousness

that she is free to become the first lady in the land, and that she

herself is to be her sole critic and detractor. Why is she not right

in refusing to sacrifice her independence? Why should she sell her

birthright for a mess of pottage?

An anomalous condition of affairs is presented by this contrast

between the free-born American woman as a mistress and as a revolter

against domestic service, and it seems to me that one of two things

must come to pass. Necessarily we shall continue to have cooks,

waiting-maids, and laundresses; at least our food must be prepared,

our drawing-rooms dusted, and our linen ironed by some one. But either

we shall have to accept and acknowledge the existence among us of a

class, recruited from foreign emigrants and their descendants, which

is tarred with the brush of social proscription in direct violation of

democratic principles, or we must change the conditions of domestic

service--change them so that condescension and servility vanish, and

the contract of service becomes like the other contracts of employment

between man and man, and man and woman.

It is fruitless now to inquire what the free-born American woman

would have done without the foreign emigrant to cook and wash for

her. The question is whether, now that she has her, she is going to

keep her, and keep her in the same comfortable and well-paid but

palpable thraldom as at present. If so, she will be merely imitating

the housewives of the effete civilizations; she will be doing simply

what every English, French, and German woman does and has done ever

since class distinctions began. But in that case, surely, we shall be

no longer able to proclaim our immunity from caste, and our Fourth of

July orators will find some difficulty in showing that other nations

are more effete in this respect than ourselves. Twenty-five years more

of development in our houses, hotels, and restaurants, if conducted

on present lines, will produce an enormous ducking and scraping,

fee-seeking, livery-wearing servant class, which will go far to

establish the claim put forth by some of our critics, that equality

on this side of the water means only political equality, and that our

class distinctions, though not so obvious, are no less genuine than

elsewhere. In this event the only logical note of explanation to send

to the Powers will be that social equality was never contemplated by

the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and that, though it is

true that any man may become President of the United States, there are

as great inequalities in morals, intellect, and manners among sons of

liberty as among the subjects of the Czar. To this the Powers will be

justified in uttering a disappointed and slightly ironical “Oh!” But

perhaps the foreign emigrant will have something to say on the subject.

Perhaps the horde from across the seas, now lured by high wages, will

decrease in numbers, or it may be that their descendants here will

learn through contact with the free-born revolter against domestic

service to revolt too.

What would the free-born American mistress do then? With the free-born

revolter still obdurate, and the foreign emigrant ceasing to emigrate

or recalcitrant, she would be in an unpleasant fix in her elaborate

establishment conducted on effete principles. In this practical

dilemma, rather than in an awakened moral sense, seems to lie our

best hope of regeneration, for it cannot be denied that the free-born

American mistress is doing all she can at present to perpetuate the

foreign idea of domestic service, and it seems probable that so long

as the foreign emigrant is willing to be bribed the true principles

of democracy will be violated. Already the difficulty of obtaining

servants is inducing home-loving families to seek the apartment-house.

A more distinct dearth would speedily change the relations between

mistress and servant into that of contractor and contractee, as in

other employments in this country. It may be that the descendants of

the emigrant will be unable to resist the lure offered them, and that

the free-born mistress will triumph. If so, we shall become no better

and possibly no worse than the effete civilizations we promised to make

blush by the worth of our institutions.

_House-Furnishing_ and the _Commissariat_.

I.

After a man and his wife have made up their minds whether to live in

a town house or suburban villa, they are obliged to consider next

what they will have in the way of furniture, and presently what they

will have for dinner. The consciousness that a house has nothing in

it but the barest fixtures--the gasometer, the water-tanks, and the

electric wires--and that it is for you and your wife to decide exactly

what shall go into it in the way of wall-papers, carpets, upholstery,

and objects of virtu, is inspiring, even though your purse be not

plethoric and your knowledge of æsthetics limited. The thought at once

presents itself that here is the chance of your lifetime to demonstrate

how beautiful and cosy a home may be, and you set eagerly to work to

surpass your predecessors of equal means. It is a worthy ambition to

endeavor to make the matrimonial nest or the home of maturer years

attractive, and if we were to peer back far enough into the past of

even this country, to the time when our great great-grandmothers

set up housekeeping with our great great-grandfathers, we should

find that furnishing was considered a seriously delightful matter,

though not perhaps the almost sacred trust we regard it to-day. I mean

our great great-grandparents who used to live in those charming old

colonial houses, and who owned the mahogany desks with brass handles

and claw feet, the tall clocks, the ravishing andirons, and all the

other old-fashioned furniture which is now so precious and difficult

to find. Distance may lend such enchantment to a spinning-wheel, a

warming-pan, or a spinnet, that one is liable to become hysterical in

praise of them, and a calm, æsthetic mind, outside the limits of an

antique furniture dealer’s store, would be justified in stigmatizing

many of the now cherished effects of our great great-grandparents as

truck; but, on the other hand, who will dispute that they possessed

very many lovely things? They had an eye for graceful shapes in their

sideboards and tables; somehow the curves they imparted to the backs of

their chairs cannot be duplicated now so as to look the same; and the

patterns of the satins, flowered chintzes, and other stuffs which they

used for covers and curtains, exercise a witchery upon us, even as we

see them now frayed and faded, which cannot proceed wholly from the

imagination.

They had no modern comforts, poor things; no furnaces, no ice-chests,

no set bath-tubs, no running water, no sanitary improvements, no gas

or electric light; and their picturesque kitchen hearths, with great

caldrons and cranes and leather blowers, must have been exceedingly

inconvenient to cook in; but even their most incommodious appliances

were not without artistic charm.

After them came the deluge--the era of horse-hair, the Sahara of

democratic unloveliness, when in every house, in every country town,

the set best room, which was never used by the family, stood like a

mortuary chapel solely for the reception of guests. In the cities,

in the households of the then enlightened, rep--generally green--was

frequently substituted for the sable horse-hair. Then came the days

when a dining-room or drawing-room was furnished in one pervasive

hue--a suit of sables, a brick red, a dark green, or a deep maroon.

Everything matched; the chairs and tables, desks and book-cases were

bought in sets at one fell swoop by the householder of the period who

desired to produce artistic effects. For forty years or so this was the

prevailing fashion, and the limit of purely indigenous expression.

To it presently succeeded the æsthetic phase, borrowed from England.

Then, instead of selecting everything to match, a young or old couple

bought so as just not to match, but to harmonize. All sorts of queer

and subtle shades and tints in wall-papers and fabrics appeared,

principally dallyings with and improvisings upon green, brown, and

yellow; frescos and dados were the rage; and a wave of interest in the

scope and mission of eccentric color spread over the land. Valuable

as this movement was as an educational factor, there was nothing

American in it; or in other words, we were again simply imitative.

The very fact, however, that we were ready to imitate, betokened that

horse-hair and rep had ceased to satisfy national aspiration, and that

we were willing to accept suggestions from without, inasmuch as no

native prophet had arisen. But though the impetus came from abroad,

the awakening was genuine. Since then the desire to furnish tastefully

has been steadily waxing among the more well-to-do portion of the

population. As in the case of architecture, the increasing interest

has called into existence a professional class, which, though still

small and less generally employed than their house-designing brethren,

is beginning to play an important part in the education of the public

taste in internal house decoration and equipment. The idea that any man

or woman may be more fitted than his or her neighbor to choose a carpet

or a wall-paper has been grudgingly admitted, and still irritates the

average house-owner who is ready to furnish. But the masters, and more

conspicuously the mistresses, of the competing superb establishments

in our cities, have learned, from the sad experience of some of their

predecessors, to swallow their individual trust in their own powers of

selection, and to put themselves unreservedly into the clutches of a

professional house decorator.

Furnishing a mammoth establishment from top to bottom with somebody

else’s money, and plenty of it, must be a delightful occupation. There

can be no carking consciousness of price to act as a drag on genius,

and it would seem as though the house decorator who was not interfered

with under these circumstances had a rare chance to show what is

what. When he fails, which is by no means out of the question, he can

ordinarily shift the responsibility on to his employer, for an employer

can rarely resist the temptation of insisting on some one touch to

prove his or her own capacity, and of course it is a simple matter

for the man of art to demonstrate that this one touch has spoiled

everything. The temptation to try to be as original and captivating in

results as possible must be almost irresistible, especially when one’s

elbow is constantly jogged by furniture and other dealers, who are only

too eager to reproduce a Directory drawing-room or any other old-time

splendor. But there is no denying that, whatever his limitations, the

house decorator is becoming the best of educators on this side of the

water, for though we cannot afford or have too much confidence in our

own taste to employ him, our wives watch him like cats and are taking

in his ideas through the pores, if not directly.

There are, it is true, almost as many diverse styles of internal

ornamentation as of external architecture in our modern residences,

for everyone who has, or thinks he has, an aptitude for furnishing is

trying his professional or ’prentice hand, sometimes with startling

results; yet the diversities seem less significant than in the case of

external architecture, or perhaps it may be said that the sum total

of effect is much nearer to finality or perfection. If as a nation we

are deriving the inspiration for the furniture and upholsteries of

our drawing-rooms and libraries from the best French and Dutch models

of a century or more ago, we certainly can boast that the comfortable

features which distinguish our apartments from their prototypes are a

native growth. If as a people we cannot yet point to great original

artistic triumphs, may we not claim the spacious and dignified

contemporary refrigerator, the convenient laundry, the frequently

occurring and palatial bath-room, the health-conducing ventilator-pipe

and sanitary fixtures, and the various electrical and other pipes,

tubes, and appliances which have become a part of every well-ordered

house, as a national cult? To be genuinely comfortable in every-day

life seems to have become the aim all the world over of the individual

seeking to live wisely, and the rest of the world is in our debt for

the many valuable mechanical aids to comfort in the home which have

been invented on this side of the water.

This quest for comfort is being constantly borne in mind also in the

æsthetic sense. We fit our drawing-rooms now to live in as well as to

look at. We expect to sit on our sofas and in our easy chairs; hence

we try to make them attractive to the back as well as to the eye.

Though our wives may still occasionally pull down the window-shades

to exclude a too dangerous sun, they no longer compel us to view our

best rooms from the threshold as a cold, flawless, forbidden land.

The extreme æsthetic tendencies which were rampant twenty years

ago have been toned down by this inclination, among even our most

elaborate house-furnishers, to produce the effect that rooms are

intended for every-day use by rational beings. The ultra-queer colors

have disappeared, and the carpets and wall-papers no longer suggest

perpetual biliousness or chronic nightmare.

I think, too, the idea that a drawing-room can be made bewitchingly

cosey by crowding it with all one’s beautiful and ugly earthly

possessions has been demonstrated to be a delusion. In these days of

many wedding presents, it is difficult for young people to resist

the temptation of showing all they have received. I remember that

Mrs. George J. Spriggs--she was the daughter, you will remember, of

ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Homer W. Green--had seven lamps in her

parlor in Locust Road, three of them with umbrageous Japanese shades.

Her husband explained to me that there had been a run on lamps and

pepper-pots in their individual case.