DOMESTIC REFORM.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the nest-building propensity of the social insects the biologist can
recognize the first germ of the instinctive desire for the
establishment of a permanent home. Certain birds, like the
weaver-thrush of the tropics, imitate the community life of the ant and
bee, but in all higher animals the homestead instinct is associated
with the desire for domestic privacy. The eagle will suffer no other
bird to approach the rock that shelters his eyrie; the hawk, the heron,
and the kingfisher rear their brood at the greatest possible distance
from the nesting-place of their next relatives. Each pair of squirrels
try to get a tree all to themselves; and even the social prairie-dog
shares its home with strangers (owls and serpents) rather than with
another family of its own tribe. The “homestead instinct” of our
primitive forefathers formed the first, and perhaps the most potent,
stimulus to the acquisition of personal property. There is a period in
life when the desire for the possession of a private domicile asserts
itself with the power almost of a vital passion; and success in the
realization of that desire solves in many respects the chief problems
of individual existence. The love of domestic peace, the delight in the
improvement of a private homestead, are the best guarantees of staid
habits. There was a time when the neglect of husbandry was considered a
conclusive proof of profligate habits; and the office of a Roman censor
comprised the duty of reproving careless housekeepers. The poorest
citizen of the Roman commonwealth had a little patrimonium of his own,
a dwelling-house, an orchard, and a small lot of land, which he did his
best to improve, and where his children learned their first lesson of
personal rights in defense of their private playgrounds.
The ruins of Pompeii show that the civilization of the Mediterranean
coast-lands had anticipated the conclusion of our sanitarian reformers,
who recommend the advantage of cottage-suburbs as a remedy for the
horrors of tenement life. Between the acropolis and the seaside villas
the town forms an aggregation of small dwelling-houses, mostly
one-story, but each with a private yard (probably a little garden) or a
wide portico, with bath-room and private gymnasiums. And though the
ancients were well acquainted with the manufacture of glass, their
dwelling-houses were lighted by mere lattice-windows, excluding rain
and the glare of the sun, but freely admitting every breeze, and thus
solving the problem of ventilation in the simplest and most effective
manner. The dwellings of our Saxon forefathers, too, resembled the
log-cabins of the Kentucky backwoods, and admitted fresh air so freely
that the large family-hearth could dispense with a chimney, and vented
its smoke through the open eaves of the roof. In the palaces of the
Roman patricians there were special winter-rooms, with a smoke-flue
resembling a narrow alcove; but even there, ventilation was insured by
numerous lattice doors, communicating with as many balconies or terrace
roofs.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The evolution of all hereditary instincts has been explained by the
“survival of the fittest,” and the instinct of homestead-love has
doubtlessly been developed in the same way. The results of its
predominance prevailed against the results of its absence. Defensive
love of a private “hearth and home” is the basis of patriotism, so
unmistakably, indeed, that the fathers of the Roman republic for
centuries refused to employ foreign mercenaries, who had no personal
interest in the defense of the soil. As a modern humorist has cleverly
expressed it: “Few men have been patriotic enough to shoulder a musket
in defense of a boarding-house.” And the golden age of civic virtues is
almost limited to the time when every free citizen of Greece and Rome
was a landowner.
Nor would it be easy to overrate the subjective advantages of
home-life. Health, happiness, and longevity have no more insidious foe
than the canker-worm of vexation; and for the unavoidable
disappointments of social life there is no more effective specific than
the peace of a prosperous private homestead, soothing the mind with
evidences of success in the growth of a promising orchard, in the
increase and improvement of domestic animals, in the happiness of merry
children and contented dependents. Xenophon, after proving the
excitements of an adventurous life by land and sea, found a truer
happiness in the solitude of his Arcadian hunting-lodge. Felix Sylla,
Fortune’s most constant favorite, abandoned the throne of a mighty
empire to enjoy the frugal fare of a small hill-farm. Voltaire, worn
out by the trials of a fifty years’ life-and-death struggle against the
rancor of bigots, recovered his health and his peace of mind amidst the
pear-tree plantations of Villa Ferney.
In the resources of medicine and scientific surgery the ancients were
far behind even the half-civilized nations of modern times, but their
children could enjoy their holidays on their own playground, their
sleepers could breathe pure air, their worn-out laborers could retire
to the peace of a private home; and they enjoyed a degree of health and
vigor which our most progressive nations can hope to re-attain only
after centuries of sanitary reform.
C.—PERVERSION.
The germ of the ignoble patience which submits to the miseries of
modern tenement-life, and learns to prefer the fetor of a crowded
slum-alley to the free air of the woods and fields, can be traced to
the voluntary prison-life of the first Christian monasteries. With all
the gregariousness of the African race, the very slaves of our American
plantations preferred to avoid quarrels and constraint by building a
separate cabin for the use of each family; but the ethics of the
Galilean church recognized no privilege of personal rights; the
sympathies of family-life were crushed out by the enforcement of
celibacy; every symptom of self-assertion was denounced as a revolt
against the duty of passive subordination; the very instincts of
individuality were systematically suppressed to make each convert a
whining, emasculated, self-despising, and world-renouncing “member of
the church of Christ.” The mortification of the body being the chief
object of monastic seclusion, the hygienic architecture of convent
buildings was considered a matter of such absolute unimportance that
many of the cells (dormitories) had no windows at all, but merely a
door communicating with an ill-ventilated gallery, after the plan of
our old-style prisons. Eight feet by ten, and eight high, were the
usual dimensions of those man-pens; and that utter indifference to the
physical health of the inmates was but rarely seconded by a view to the
advantages of private meditation is proved by the circumstance that the
convent-slaves of the eastern church (in the Byzantine empire, for
instance) were not often permitted to enjoy the privacy of their
wretched dens; their dormitories were packed like the bunks of a
Portuguese slave-ship, and the word Syncellus (cell-mate) is used as a
cognomen of numerous ecclesiastics. The abbot, and in less ascetic
centuries perhaps the learned clerks (legend-writers, etc.), were the
only members of a monastic community who could ever rely on the privacy
of a single hour. For the admitted purpose of mortifying their love of
physical comforts, the weary sleepers, worn-out with penance and
hunger, were summoned to prayer in the middle of the night, or sent out
on begging expeditions in the roughest weather. Every vestige of
furniture or clothing apt to mitigate the dreariness of discomfort was
banished from their cells; they suffered all the hardships without
enjoying the peace and security of a hermit’s home; novices (on
probation), and even the pupils of the convent-schools, were submitted
to a similar discipline, and thus monasticism became the
training-school of modern tenement-life.
During the latter half of the Middle Ages, feudalism found an
additional motive for suppressing the love of domestic independence.
The church usurers and aristocrats monopolized real estate, and made it
more and more difficult, even for the most industrious of their
dependants, to acquire a share of landed property. Every feudal lord
secured his control over his serfs by crowding them together in a small
village (literally an abode of villains, i.e., of vile pariahs), where
his slave-drivers could at any time rally them for an extra job of
socage duty. The incessant raids of mail-clad highway-robbers—robber
knights and marauding partisans—obliged all peace-loving freemen to
congregate for mutual protection and rear their children in the stone
prisons of an over-crowded burgh. The suppression of all natural
sciences, including the science of health, aggravated the evil by a
persistent neglect of such partial remedies as disinfectants and
artificial ventilation. The home of a medieval artisan combined all the
disadvantages of a jail and a pest-house.
The revolt against feudalism has at last broken the stone-fetters of
our larger cities; city walls have been turned into promenades, and
convents into store-houses or lunatic asylums; but the spirit of
monasticism still survives; indifference to the blessings of health and
domestic independence seems to have acquired the strength of a second
nature, and thousands of our modern factory slaves actually prefer
their slum-prisons to the freedom of a cheaper suburban home.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Nature rarely fails to avenge the violation of her laws, but it might
be doubted if the perversion of any other natural instinct has entailed
more numerous or direr penalties than our habitual outrages against the
instinct of home-life. The monstrosities of our tenement system, by a
moderate estimate, cost on the average every year the lives of
1,500,000 children under ten years of age (in Europe and North
America), and of 1,200,000 consumptives, besides thousands of victims
to epidemic disorders, aggravated, if not engendered, by the influence
of vitiated air. Habitual intemperance, too, has undoubtedly been
increased by the dearth of home-comforts. Our factory-laborers, our
mechanics, and thousands of students and young clerks, spend their
evenings in riot, because the man-trap of the lowest grog-shop is,
after all, less unattractive than the dungeon of a stifling tenement
home. In many of our larger cities similar causes have led to a
constant increase of a manner of existence which a modern reformer
calls the “celibacy of vice.” But the decreasing demand for independent
homes is not the only cause of the decreased supply, and the heartless
selfishness of our wealthy land-gluttons has provoked a form of
nihilism which threatens to shake, if not to subvert, the very
foundations of social life.
E.—REFORM.
That latter danger seems, at last, to have awakened our political
economists to the necessity of redressing a many-sided abuse, and the
failure of earlier reform projects has at least helped to emphasize the
demand for more adequate remedies. The traffic in human life in the
floating hells of the African slave-traders hardly called for more
stringent repressive measures than the inhumanity of our tenement
speculators who fatten on the profits of a system propagating the
infallible seeds of pulmonary consumption, and sacrificing the lives of
more children than the superstition of the dark ages ever doomed to the
altars of Moloch. Even in a country where the jealousy of personal
rights would hardly countenance legislative interference with the
construction of private dwelling-houses, the license of tenement-owners
ought to be circumscribed by the conditions of Dr. Paul Boettger’s
rule, providing for appropriation of a certain number of cubic feet of
breathing space, and square feet of window, front, and garden (or
play-ground) room for each tenant or family of tenants. The abuse of
sub-renting could be limited by similar provisions, and the adoption of
the separate cottage plan should be promoted by the reduction of
municipal passenger tariffs and suburban taxes.
The plan of equalizing the burden of taxation and the opportunities of
land tenure by a general confiscation and redistribution of real estate
might recommend itself as a last resort, though hardly in preference to
the project of Fedor Bakunin, the “Russian Mirabeau,” who proposed to
found new communities under a charter, reserving the tenth part of all
building lots for communal purposes, and lease the tenant-right to the
highest bidder. The value of those reserve lots would increase with the
growth of the town, and by renewing their lease from ten to ten years,
the rent could be made to cover the budget of all direct municipal
expenses, and leave a fair surplus for charitable and educational
purposes. In comparison with the confiscation plan, that project could
claim all the advantages which make prevention preferable to a drastic
cure.
As a check to the evils of land monopoly the least objectionable plan
would seem to be Professor De Graaf’s proposition of a graded system of
real estate taxation, increasing the rate of tallage with each multiple
of a fair homestead lot, and thus taxing a land-shark for the privilege
of acquisition, as well as for the actual possession, of an immoderate
estate.
The art of making home-life pleasant will yet prove the most effective
specific in the list of temperance remedies, and will aid the apostles
of Secularism in that work of redemption which the gospel of
renunciation has failed to achieve.