The acceptance by young women without a study of cause and effect of whatever presents itself makes them bad housekeepers, in the sense of ignorant ones unable to cope with present conditions, because lack of experience is not supplemented by a spirit of investigation and a resolution to work out the problem.  They seem to think that housekeeping is to go on in the same old way no matter whatever else may change, whereas it is most sensitive to the general direction of progress if they but knew it.  The wage-earner is more fully aware of the currents of the irresistible river modern life has become (the slow-moving car of Juggernaut is no longer an adequate symbol) than is the money spender.

Indeed is any part of the house, as we now most frequently find it, adapted to the uses of the twentieth century?

The careless capitalist who makes possible the “cockroach landlord,” he who sublets and crowds and skimps the tenants for his own gain, is greatly to blame for the distressing conditions of the lower income limit of the wage-earner, but I fear he is not altogether blameless for the sort of house the $1500 man has to look for in the city.  Decent living with light and air within half an hour of work is growing so rare that society must take a hand in the matter.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PLACE OF THE HOUSE IN THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

  “We have entered upon the period of conscious evolution, have
  begun the adaptation of the environment to the organism.”—­Sir
  Oliver Lodge.

The hopeless pessimism of the past, that saw in the unmerciful progress of organic evolution no escape for the human animal from the grip of fate, is about to give way to the enthusiasm of conscious directing and controlling power.

This is the beneficent result of the age of the machine.  Man has discovered that he can not only change his environment, but that by this change he can modify himself.  The hope of the future lies in the moulding of man’s surroundings to his needs.  In physiological terms, “the adaptation of structure to function.”

The day is long past when shelter implied chiefly a tight roof and a dry floor.  The housing of the twentieth-century family means location, central and fashionable.  It means in cost far more than what the roof covers and the floor supports.  It means plumbing and interior finish; it also means a finish on the outside, smoothly shaven lawns and immaculate sidewalks.

Sigh as we may for the colonial house, we confess that the standards of the time did not include the comfort of hot baths, polished floors, plate-glass windows, elevators, ice-closets, and lawn-mowers.  These are necessary adjuncts to what is held as merely decent living; how can the $2000 man have them, not why will he not?

What then is the house and the life in it to become for the great majority of families and individuals with an income of $3000 a year and necessarily nomadic habits.  I say necessarily, because these families are at the mercy of business and social conditions quite beyond their control and impossible to foretell.