The increased sanitary requirements have doubled the cost of a given enclosed space, the finish and fittings now found in the best houses have doubled this again, so that it is quite within bounds to say that a house which might have been put up to meet the needs of the day in 1850 for, say, $5000 will now cost $20,000.

Much of the increase is for real comfort and advance in decent living, and so far it is to be commended.  Such part of the increase as is for ostentation, for show and sham, is to be frowned upon, for this high cost of shelter is to-day the greatest menace to the social welfare of the community.  When the average young man finds it impossible to support a family, when the professional man finds it necessary to supplement his chosen work by pot-boiling, by public lectures and any outside work which will bring in money, what wonder that scholarship is not thriving in America?  Pitiful tales of such stifling of effort have come to my ears, and have in large part led me to make a plea for a scientific study of the living conditions of this class, and for a readjustment of ideals to the absolute facts of the situation.

We may give sympathy to those Italians who pay only $2 a month for the shelter of the whole family, but we must give help to the harder case of a family with refined tastes and high ideals who can pay only $200 a year.

In the real country, at a distance from the railroad, air, water, and soil are cheap.  Here a house may be put up with its own windmill or gas-engine to pump water, with its own drainage system, giving all the sanitary comforts of the city house, for about $5000.  The same inside comforts in one quarter the space, minus the isolation and garden, may be had in a suburban block for one half that sum.  This is probably the least expensive shelter to-day for the family whose duties require one or more members of it to be in the city daily, for, as the centre of the city is approached, land rent increases, so that dwelling space must be again curtailed one half or rent doubled.  The majority take half a house or go into the city and put up with one quarter the space.

The curtailment of space in which families live is going on at an alarming rate, although not yet seriously taken into account by the sociologist for the group we are studying.

[Illustration:  Figs. 8 and 9.—­House for “Mrs. L.,” Anywhere in temperate America, to cost $5000, if it must not more (remainder cut off).]

[Illustration:  Figs. 10 and 11.—­House for “Mrs. L.,” Anywhere in temperate America, to cost only $3000, if possible. (Josselyn & Taylor Co., Cedar Rapids, Iowa).]

This crowding is causing the refinements of life to be disregarded, is depriving the children of their rights, and doing them almost more harm than comes to the tenement dwellers, for they have the parks to play in and are not kept within doors.