The more common cost of decent living in our Eastern cities is: 

Rent...............................$1000 to $1500
Meals.............................. 1200  "  1400
Clothing...........................  500  "   700
Incidentals........................  300  "   600
Savings, nil.
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Total..............................$3000 to $4000

This goes far toward justifying the saying that a young man cannot afford to marry on less than $3000 a year.

With these figures in mind, what can our $2000 family with two children do?  The rent that they can pay will not cover service or heat.  There must be a maid to fill the lamps, see to the furnace, help with the cooking, and the wife must stay by the house pretty closely and probably decline most invitations.  For the five persons, ten dollars a week for raw-food materials and five for its preparation is the lowest limit likely to be cheerfully submitted to.

Rent, heat, light, etc..................... $400
Food.......................................  800
Clothing hardly less than..................  400
Children’s education, even with free
schools, and their illnesses will use up.  100
Car-fares, church, etc.....................  100
Wages and sundries.........................  200
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Total..................................... $2000

In the bank nothing.

But what shelter can this refined, intelligent family find to-day for $400?  Certainly nothing with modern conveniences.  The lack of these is made up by women’s work—­hard, rough work.  And that is the crux of the servant problem to-day.  It is the reason why more families do not go into the country to live.  The work required in an old house to bring living up to modern standards is too appalling to be undertaken lightly.

In England the Sunlight Park and other plans, in America the Dayton and Cincinnati schemes, are samples of what is being done for the $500 to $800 family, but where are the examples (outside the Morris houses) for the salaried class for whom we are pleading?  The great army of would-be home-makers are forced into a nomadic life by the exigencies resulting from the great combines—­a shifting of offices, a closing of factories, a breaking up of hundreds of homes.  I believe this to be the chief factor in the decline of the American home—­a hundred-fold more potent than the college education of women.

The unthinking comment on this rise in the cost of shelter is usually condemnation of greedy landlords and soulless capitalists; but is that the whole story?

In the present order of things it seems to be inevitable that the gain of one class in the community is loss to another.  Probably the law has always existed, and only the very rapid and sudden changes bring it into prominence, because of the swift readjustment needed, an operation which torpid human nature resents when consciously pressed.