The decreasing of the space one can call one’s own within urban limits has so steadily increased, and the need for freer air has become so fully recognized, that the case of the single householder in the suburbs and even in the country is bound to press harder and harder.  The group system elsewhere referred to, with central heating plant and workers of all grades at telephone-call, will make possible at a reasonable rent within easy reach of the city the single household of one, two, or three, as the case may be, and if without children of their own, to such shelter may come some of those homeless little ones we have with us always, to share in the sun and wind and garden.  In the real country, with acres instead of feet of land, much of the same kind of elaborate simplicity will be found.  Certainly the same kind of fire-proof house of only one story with more light, “roofs of steel and glass on the louver principle,” will obviate so frequent a change of air as a shut-in house requires, and give more equable temperature.

In the city?  Since physicians will surely be more insistent on light, as well as fresh air, roof-gardens and balconies and glazed walls, so to speak, will be arranged by the architect so as not to offend the eye and yet to accomplish the results.  He will cease from trying to put the new ideas of the twentieth century into the old houses of the eighteenth or fifteenth even, and that beauty, which is fitness, will come forth from the tangle of ugliness everywhere.  If, as the economist tells us, “cost measures lack of adjustment,” then the perfectly adjusted house will not be costly in reality, it will be adapted to the production and protection of effective human beings.

The cellar has for some years been changing to a storage for trunks instead of vegetables.  The old-fashioned housewife exclaims at the lack of storage in the house of to-day, and we are eliminating it still more.  A twentieth-century axiom is, “Throw or give away everything you have not immediate or prospective use for.”  It is as true of household furniture as of books; only the very best is of any value second-hand.  Our young people may have heirlooms, but they will buy very little in the way of sideboards or first editions.  The moral of modern tendencies is, buy only what you are sure you will need or what you care for so intensely that you will keep it come what may.  Housing of possible treasures is far too costly.

At the foundation of the ethical side of ownership is the primitive impulse of possession, that ownership which led to wife-capture, to feudal castles, to accumulation of things, and to-day is expressed by the man who prefers to have his steak cooked in his own kitchen even if it is burned.

It is notorious that most of us put up with discomfort if it is caused by our own.  A family of eight will use one bath-room without murmur if the house is theirs, but will complain loudly if the landlord will not add two without increasing the rent.