doubt if it is less terrible in its native land.  It is anti-social because it works always against the preservation of the family unit, and because it is unfair to children, and because it prevents the full flowering of an individuality. (Nobody can be himself in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he would instantly be thrown out.) It is immoral because it fosters bribery and because it is pretentious itself and encourages pretense in its victims.  It is unfavorable to the growth of taste because its decorations and furniture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic standard of the vulgarest people in it, and have not even the merit of being the expression of any individuality at all.  It is enervating because it favors the creation of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself.  It is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it seems, and because often it forces its victims to eat in a dining-room whose walls are a distressing panorama of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine is and must be at best mediocre, since meals at once sound and showy cannot be prepared wholesale.

Some apartment-houses are better than others; many are possibly marvels of organization and value for money.  But none can wholly escape the indictment.  The institution itself, though it may well be a natural and inevitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad.  An experienced dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent house which I had visited and sampled:  “We pay six hundred dollars for two poor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week for board, whether we eat or not.  The food is very bad.  It is all kept hot for about an hour, on steam, so that every dish tastes of laundry.  Everything is an extra.  Telephone—­lights—­tips—­especially tips.  I tip everybody.  I even tip the chef.  I tip the chef so that, when I am utterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere chop or a steak, he will choose me an eatable chop or steak.  And that’s how things go on!”

My true and candid friend, the experienced dweller in apartment-houses, was, I have good reason to believe, an honorable man.  And it is therefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence of apartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social immorality of his act in tipping the chef.  Clearly it was an act calculated to undermine the chef’s virtue.  If all the other experienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing no good effect at all.  But if only a few of them did it, then it was an act which resulted in the remainder of the victims being deprived of their full, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks.  My friend’s proper course was obviously to have kicked up a row, and to have kicked up a row in a fashion so clever that the management would not put him into the street.  He ought to have organized a committee of protest, he ought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public opinion,