seventies there were still motherly women who had come to town to make a home for the children no longer content out of it.  They were willing and capable of mothering a few other children and lonely teachers and clerks, so the boarding-house began as a real family home for the homeless.  There were not enough of these women to go around, and soon boarding-houses began to be run for profit only.  Home privileges were fewer and fewer, the common parlor was rented, the one-family kitchen was made to do duty for twenty persons.  The house became pervaded with burned fat and tobacco-smoke—­a most villainous combination, gossip flourished, and the limit of discomfort was reached.  What wonder that a good Samaritan built the first flat where the wearied nerves could find peace in the thicker walls, and could escape the eternal “fry” by going out to meals!  It is a perfectly natural evolution from the impossible conditions which the eighties and nineties developed.

The early attempts, built on the old lines after the old ideas, before the new life was accepted, are not satisfactory and, being built of brick or stone, they are even more difficult to get rid of than the preceding.  So each type goes down in the scale of decent living.  A given roof is made to cover more people crowding closer and closer, causing home in the sense of privacy and comfort to recede farther and farther away, until the lover of his kind stands aghast at the magnitude of the problem before society when it awakens to the task confronting it.  Fortunately these rows of houses are disappearing under the demand of business.  The invasion of the residential district is a real blessing, in that it pulls down these houses which in twenty years have outlived their usefulness and can serve a good purpose no longer.

Let us hope that either the demands of business or the common sense of society will also sweep away the fifth class:  (5) City flats put up by the conscienceless money-maker with only that idea of giving the public what the public wants (because it knows no better) which gives the newspaper its pernicious influences.  At first it was supposed the flat-dwellers would keep house, and arrangements of a sort were made.  This compressed the work of the house into such small quarters that the maid was given a room down in the basement along with the furnace, or in the top story adjoining ten or more other rooms—­a dormitory arrangement without supervision and without the quiet needed for rest.  The difficulty of securing good service under these conditions, together with the thousand and one annoyances of living at too close quarters, noisy children and pianos, grumpy janitors, smelly garbage, have led to the latest phase:  non-housekeeping flats with daily care of a sort supplied by the janitor if desired, a kitchenette where eggs and coffee for breakfast and dishes for invalids may be prepared, and restaurants galore for other meals.  Thus the women of the family are set free to roam the streets in search of bargains and to join others like unto themselves for matinees and promenades.