No better use of money or effort can be made at the present time than in similar endeavors to meet the needs of the time.  The study of conditions will prove an education in itself and a stimulus to invention.

When the social conscience is once awakened the bride with $2000 a year will not be expected to begin where her mother left off.

The young people will be provided with just as comfortable and just as sanitary homes, but they will not be expected to entertain lavishly in order to show the wedding presents before they are broken.  They will be visited, even if they live in an unfashionable quarter on a side street.  Is it not more honest?

If society would put its stamp on the manner of life adapted to the welfare of the young people, it would not be unfashionable to live within one’s income.

The tyranny of things is very real and most distressing in connection with this problem of shelter and all that it involves.

There is only needed a social awakening to result in an adjustment of men’s views as to what is good and right.  New social habits adapted to the age we live in will be accepted by the next generation as good form.

CHAPTER III.

  Legacies from the nineteenth century not adapted to changed
  conditions cause physical deterioration and domestic friction.

  “A large part of the evils of which we complain socially to-day
  are due to the kind of houses we live in and the exactions they
  make upon us.”—­H.G.  Wells.

Four classes of houses have come down to us: 

(1) The family homestead in the country set low on the ground with damp walls and dark cellar, one of a cluster of rambling buildings; with a well, the only water supply, in close proximity to various sources of pollution.  These houses are for the most part now abandoned to the foreigner, who uses them for the primitive purposes of shelter without the ennobling intellectual life they once harbored.  Now and then a grandson rescues the old place, brings water from a spring or brook, digs a drain, lets light into the cellar, and builds on a kitchen and dining-room.

The expense is often greater than to build anew, but the effect is usually very good when the changes are made under sanitary supervision.

(2) The village or suburban house set in its own grounds, too near the street usually, but with garden and fruit-trees in the rear, and possibly a stable for horse and cow.  This was the compromise made by the generation just from the free life of the farm-house, who, consciously or unconsciously, clung to the green of grass and trees, and the blue of the sky.  So long as habit or love of caring for the things lasted all went well.  The father found his recreation in planting the garden before breakfast, as in his boyhood.  The mother cared for flower and vegetable-garden, as she recalled her mother’s life; she picked her own beans and corn, even if she did not cook the dinner.