The Art of Living

The Art of
Living

BY
Robert Grant

New York
Charles Scribner’s Sons
MDCCCXCIX

Copyright, 1895 and 1899, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Contents

Income.

I.

Rogers, the book-keeper for the past twenty-two years of my friend Patterson, the banker, told me the other day that he had reared a family of two boys and three girls on his annual salary of two thousand two hundred dollars; that he had put one of the boys through college, one through the School of Mines, brought up one of the girls to be a librarian, given one a coming-out party and a trousseau, and that the remaining daughter, a home body, was likely to be the domestic sunshine of his own and his wife’s old age. All this on two thousand two hundred dollars a year.

Rogers told me with perfect modesty, with just a tremor of self-satisfaction in his tone, as though, all things considered, he felt that he had managed creditably, yet not in the least suggesting that he regarded his performance as out of the common run of happy household annals. He is a neat-looking, respectable, quiet, conservative little man, rising fifty, who, while in the bank, invariably wears a nankeen jacket all the year round, a narrow black necktie in winter, and a narrow yellow and red pongee wash tie in summer, and whose watch is no less invariably right to a second. As I often drop in to see Patterson, his employer, I depend upon it to keep mine straight, and it was while I was setting my chronometer the other day that he made me the foregoing confidence.

Frankly, I felt as though I had been struck with a club. It happened to be the first of the month. Every visit of the postman had brought me a fresh batch of bills, each one of which was a little larger than I had expected. I was correspondingly depressed and remorseful, and had been asking myself from time to time during the day why it need cost so much to live. Yet here was a man who was able to give his daughter a coming-out party and a trousseau on two thousand two hundred dollars a year. I opened my mouth twice to ask him how in the name of thrift he had managed to do it, but somehow the discrepancy between his expenditures and mine seemed such a gulf that I was tongue-tied. “I suppose,” he added modestly, “that I have been very fortunate in my little family. It must indeed be sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless child.” Gratitude too! Gratitude and Shakespeare on two thousand two hundred dollars a year. I went my way without a word.

There are various ways of treating remorse. Some take a Turkish bath or a pill. Others, while the day lasts, trample it under foot, and shut it out at night with the bed-clothes. Neither course has ever seemed to me exactly satisfactory or manly. Consequently I am apt to entertain my self-reproach and reason with it, and when one begins to wonder why it costs so much to live, he finds himself grappling with the entire problem of civilization, and presently his hydra has a hundred heads. The first of the month is apt to be a sorry day for my wife as well as for me, and I hastened on my return home to tell her, with just a shadow of reproach in my tone, what Mr. Rogers had confided to me. Indeed I saw fit to ask, “Why can’t we do the same?”

“We could,” said Barbara.

“Then why don’t we?”

“Because you wouldn’t.”

I had been reflecting in the brief interval between my wife’s first and second replies that, in the happy event of our imitating Rogers’s example from this time forth and forever more, I should be able to lay up over five thousand dollars a year, and that five thousand dollars a year saved for ten years would be fifty thousand dollars—a very neat little financial nest egg. But Barbara’s second reply upset my calculation utterly, and threw the responsibility of failure on me into the bargain.

“Mr. Rogers is the salt of the earth, a highly respectable man and, if I am not mistaken, the deacon of a church,” I remarked not altogether relevantly. “Why should we spend four times as many thousand dollars a year as he?”

“I wonder,” answered my wife, “if you really do appreciate how your friend Mr. Rogers lives. I am quite aware that you are talking now for effect—talking through your hat as the children say—because it’s the first of the month and you’re annoyed that the bills are worse than ever, and I understand that you don’t for one moment seriously entertain the hope that our establishment can be conducted on the same basis as his. But I should just like to explain to you for once how people who have only twenty-two hundred dollars a year and are the salt of the earth do live, if only to convince you that the sooner we stop comparing ourselves with them the better. I say ‘we’ because in my moments of depression over the household expenses I catch myself doing the same thing. Our butcher’s bill for this month is huge, and when you came in I was in the throes of despair over a letter in the newspaper from a woman who contends that a good housekeeper in modest circumstances can provide an excellent dinner for her family of six persons, including soup, fish, an entrée, meat, pudding, dessert, and coffee, for fifty-three cents. And she gives the dinner, which at first sight takes one’s breath away. But after you prune it of celery, parsley, salted peanuts, raisins, red cabbage, salad, and cheese, all there is left is bean-soup, cod sounds, fried liver, hot gingerbread, and apples.”

“I should dine down town, if you set such repasts before me,” I answered.

“Yes,” said Barbara. “And there is a very good point of departure for illustrating the domestic economies of the Rogers family. Mr. Rogers does dine down town. Not to avoid the fried liver and cod sounds, for probably he is partial to them, but because it is cheaper. When you take what you call your luncheon, and which is apt to include as much as he eats in the entire course of the day, Mr. Rogers dines; dines at a restaurant where he can get a modest meal for from fifteen to twenty-five cents. Sometimes it is pea-soup and a piece of squash-pie. The next day perhaps a mutton-stew and a slice of watermelon, or boiled beef and an éclair. Mrs. Rogers and the children have a pick-up dinner at home, which lasts them very well until night, when they and Rogers sit down to browned-hash mutton and a head of lettuce, or honey-comb tripe and corn-cake, and apple-sauce to wind up with.”

“That isn’t so very bad.”

“Why, they have a splendid time. They can abuse their social acquaintance and discuss family secrets without fear of being overheard by the servants because they don’t keep any servants to speak of. Probably they keep one girl. Or perhaps Mr. Rogers had a spinster sister who helped with the work for her board. Or it may be Mrs. Rogers kept one while the children were little; but after the daughters were old enough to do it themselves, they preferred not to keep anybody. They live extremely happily, but the children have to double up, for in their small house it is necessary to sleep two in a room if not a bed. The girls make most of their dresses, and the boys never dream of buying anything but ready-made clothing. By living in the suburbs they let one establishment serve for all seasons, unless it be for the two weeks when Rogers gets his vacation. Then, if nobody has been ill during the year, the family purse may stand the drain of a stay at the humblest watering-place in their vicinity, or a visit to the farm-house of some relative in the country. An engagement with the dentist is a serious disaster, and the plumber is kept at a respectable distance. The children go to the public schools, and the only club or organization to which Mr. Rogers belongs is a benefit association, which pays him so much a week if he is ill, and would present his family with a few hundred dollars if he were to die. The son who went through college must have got a scholarship or taken pupils. The girl who married undoubtedly made the greater portion of her trousseau with her own needle; and as to the coming-out party, some of the effects of splendor and all the delights of social intercourse can be produced by laying a white drugget on the parlor carpet, the judicious use of half a dozen lemons and a mould of ice-cream with angel-cake, and by imposing on the good nature of a friend who can play the piano for dancing. There, my dear, if you are willing to live like that, we should be able to get along on from twenty-two to twenty-five hundred dollars quite nicely.”

My wife was perfectly correct in her declaration that I did not seriously entertain the hope of being able to imitate Mr. Rogers, worthy citizen and upright man as I believe him to be. I certainly was in some measure talking through my hat. This was not the first time I had brought home a Rogers to confront her. She is used to them and aware that they are chiefly bogies. I, as she knows, and indeed both of us, are never in quite a normal condition on the first day of the month, and are liable, sometimes the one of us and sometimes the other, to indulge in vagaries and resolutions which by the tenth, when the bills are paid, seem almost uncalled for or impracticable. One thing is certain, that if a man earns only twenty-two hundred dollars a year, and is an honest man withal, he has to live on it, even though he dines when others take luncheon, and is forced to avoid the dentist and the plumber. But a much more serious problem confronts the man who earns four times as much as Rogers, more serious because it involves an alternative. Rogers could not very well live on less if he tried, without feeling the stress of poverty. He has lived at hard pan, so to speak. But I could. Could if I would, as my wife has demonstrated. I am perfectly right, as she would agree, in being unwilling to try the experiment; and yet the consciousness that we spend a very large sum of money every year, as compared with Rogers and others like him, remains with us even after the bills are paid and we have exchanged remorse for contemplation.

The moralist, who properly is always with us, would here insinuate, perhaps, that Rogers is happier than I. But I take issue with him promptly and deny the impeachment. Rogers may be happier than his employer Patterson, because Patterson, though the possessor of a steam-yacht, has a son who has just been through the Keeley cure and a daughter who is living apart from her husband. But there are no such flies in my pot of ointment. I deny the superior happiness of Rogers in entire consciousness of the moral beauty of his home. I recognize him to be an industrious, self-sacrificing, kind-hearted, sagacious husband and father, and I admit that the pen-picture which the moralist could draw of him sitting by the evening lamp in his well-worn dressing gown, with his well-darned feet adorned by carpet-slippers of filial manufacture supported by the table or a chair, would be justly entitled to kindle emotions of respect and admiration. But why, after all, should Rogers, ensconced in the family sitting-room with the cat on the hearth, a canary twittering in a cage and scattering seed in one corner, a sewing-machine in the other, and surrounded by all the comforts of home, consisting prominently of a peach-blow vase, a Japanese sun umbrella and engravings of George Washington and Horace Greeley, be regarded as happier than I in my modern drawing-room in evening dress? What is there moral in the simplicity of his frayed and somewhat ugly establishment except the spirit of contentment and the gentle feelings which sanctify it? Assuming that these are not lacking in my home, and I believe they are not, I see no reason for accepting the conclusion of the moralist. There is a beauty of living which the man with a small income is not apt to compass under present social conditions, the Declaration of Independence to the contrary notwithstanding. The doctrine so widely and vehemently promulgated in America that a Spartan inelegance of life is the duty of a leading citizen, seems to be dying from inanition; and the descendants of favorite sons who once triumphed by preaching and practising it are now outvying those whom they were taught to stigmatize as the effete civilizations of Europe, in their devotion to creature comforts.

It seems to me true that in our day and generation the desire to live wisely here has eclipsed the desire to live safely hereafter. Moreover, to enjoy the earth and the fulness thereof, if it be legitimately within one’s reach, has come to be recognized all the world over, with a special point of view for each nationality, as a cardinal principle of living wisely. We have been the last to recognize it here for the reason that a contrary theory of life was for several generations regarded as one of the bulwarks of our Constitution. Never was the sympathy for the poor man greater than it is at present. Never was there warmer interest in his condition. The social atmosphere is rife with theories and schemes for his emancipation, and the best brains of civilization are at work in his behalf. But no one wishes to be like him. Canting churchmen still gain some credence by the assertion that indigence here will prove a saving grace in the world to come; but the American people, quick, when it recognizes that it has been fooled, to discard even a once sacred conviction, smiles to-day at the assumption that the owner of a log cabin is more inherently virtuous than the owner of a steam-yacht. Indeed the present signal vice of democracy seems to be the fury to grow rich, in the mad struggle to accomplish which character and happiness are too often sacrificed. But it may be safely said that, granting an equal amount of virtue to Rogers and to me, and that each pays his bills promptly, I am a more enviable individual in the public eye.

In fact the pressing problem which confronts the civilized world to-day is the choice of what to have, for so many things have become necessaries of existence which were either done without or undiscovered in the days of our grandmothers, that only the really opulent can have everything. We sometimes hear it said that this or that person has too much for his own good. The saying is familiar, and doubtless it is true that luxury unappreciated and abused will cause degeneration; but the complaint seems to me to be a Sunday-school consoler for those who have too little rather than a sound argument against great possessions. Granting that this or that person referred to had the moral fibre of Rogers or of me, and were altogether an unexceptionable character, how could he have too much for his own good? Is the best any too good for any one of us?

The sad part of it is, however, that even those of us who have four times, or thereabouts, the income of Rogers, are obliged to pick and choose and cannot have everything. Then is the opportunity for wisdom to step in and make her abode with us, if she only will. The perplexity, the distress, and too often the downfall of those who would fain live wisely, are largely the direct results of foolish or unintelligent selection on their part. And conversely, is not the secret of happy modern living, the art of knowing what to have when one cannot have everything there is?

I coupled just now, in allusion to Rogers and myself, virtue and punctuality in the payment of bills, as though they were not altogether homogeneous. I did so designedly, not because I question that prompt payment is in the abstract a leading virtue, nor because I doubt that it has been absolutely imperative for Rogers, and one of the secrets of his happiness; but because I am not entirely sure whether, after ten years of prompt payment on the first of every month on my part, I have not been made the sorry victim of my own righteousness, self-righteousness I might say, for I have plumed myself on it when comparing myself with the ungodly. Although virtuous action looks for no reward, the man who pays his bills as soon as they are presented has the right to expect that he will not be obliged to pay anything extra for his honesty. He may not hope for a discount, but he does hope and believe—at least for a time—that beefsteak paid for within thirty days of purchase will not be taxed with the delinquencies of those who pay tardily or not at all. Slowly but sadly I and my wife have come to the conclusion that the butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers of this great Republic who provide for the tolerably well-to-do make up their losses by assessing virtue. It is a melancholy conclusion for one who has been taught to believe that punctual payment is the first great cardinal principle of wise living, and it leaves one in rather a wobbly state of mind, not as regards the rank of the virtue in question, but as regards the desirability of strictly living up to it in practice. I have heard stated with authority that the leading butchers, grocers, stable-keepers, drygoods dealers, dress-makers, florists, and plumbers of our great cities divide the customers on their books into sheep and goats, so to speak; and the more prompt and willing a sheep, the deeper do they plunge the knife. Let one establish a reputation for prompt payment and make a purchase on the twenty-fifth of the month, he will receive on the first of the following a bill, on the twentieth, if this be not paid, a bill for “account rendered,” on the first of the next month a bill for “account rendered, please remit,” and on the tenth a visit from a collector. On the other hand I have known people who seem to live on the fat of the land, and to keep the tradesfolk in obsequious awe of them by force of letting their bills run indefinitely.

Abroad, as many of us know, the status of the matter is very different. There interest is figured in advance, and those who pay promptly get a handsome discount on the face of their bills. While this custom may seem to encourage debt, it is at least a mutual arrangement, and seems to have proved satisfactory, to judge from the fact that the fashionable tailors and dress-makers of London and Paris are apt to demur or shrug their shoulders at immediate payment, and to be rather embarrassingly grateful if their accounts are settled by the end of a year. No one would wish to change the national inclination of upright people on this side of the water to pay on the spot, but the master and mistress of an establishment may well consider whether the fashionable tradesmen ought to oblige them to bear the entire penalty of being sheep instead of goats. With this qualification, which is set forth rather as a caveat than a doctrine, the prompt payment of one’s bills seems to be strictly co-ordinate with virtue, and may be properly described as the corner-stone of wise modern living.

There are so many things which one has to have nowadays in order to be comfortable that it seems almost improvident to inquire how much one ought to save before facing the question of what one can possibly do without. Here the people who are said to have too much for their own good have an advantage over the rest of us. The future of their children is secure. If they dread death it is not because they fear to leave their wives and children unprovided for. Many of them go on saving, just the same, and talk poor if a railroad lowers a dividend, or there is not a ready market for their real estate at an exalted profit. Are there more irritating men or women in the world than the over-conservative persons of large means who are perpetually harping on saving, and worrying lest they may not be able to put by for a rainy day, as they call it, twenty-five per cent. or more of their annual income? The capitalist, careworn by solicitude of this sort, is the one fool in creation who is not entitled to some morsel of pity.

How much ought the rest of us to save? I know a man—now you do not know him, and there is no use in racking your brains to discover who he is, which seems to be a principal motive for reading books nowadays, as though we writers had a cabinet photograph in our mind’s eye whenever we took a pen in hand. I know a man who divides his income into parts. “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” you will remember we read in the classics. Well, my friend, whom we will call Julius Cæsar for convenience and mystification, divides his income, on the first of January, into a certain number of parts or portions. He and his wife have a very absorbing and earnest pow-wow over it annually. They take the matter very seriously, and burn the midnight oil in the sober endeavor to map and figure out in advance a wise and unselfish exhibit. So much and no more for rent, so much for servants, so much for household supplies, so much for clothes, so much for amusements, so much for charity, so much to meet unlooked-for contingencies, and so much for investment. By the time the exhibit is finished it is mathematically and ethically irreproachable, and, what is more, Julius Cæsar and his wife live up to it so faithfully that they are sure to have some eight or ten dollars to the good on the morning of December thirty-first, which they commonly expend in a pair of canvas-back ducks and a bottle of champagne, for which they pay cash, in reward for their own virtue and to enable them at the stroke of midnight to submit to their own consciences a trial balance accurate to a cent.

Now it should be stated that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar are not very busy people in other respects, and that their annual income, which is fifteen thousand dollars, and chiefly rent from improved real estate in the hands of a trustee, flows on as regularly and surely as a river. Wherefore it might perhaps be argued, if one were disposed to be sardonic, that this arithmetical system of life under the circumstances savors of a fad, and that Julius and his wife take themselves and their occupation a trifle too seriously, especially as they have both been known to inform, solemnly and augustly, more than one acquaintance who was struggling for a living, that it is every one’s duty to lay up at least one-tenth of his income and give at least another tenth in charity. And yet, when one has ceased to smile at the antics of this pair, the consciousness remains that they are right in their practice of foresight and arithmetical apportioning, and that one who would live wisely should, if possible, decide in advance how much he intends to give to the poor or put into the bank. Otherwise he is morally, or rather immorally, certain to spend everything, and to suffer disagreeable qualms instead of enjoying canvas-back ducks and a bottle of champagne on December thirty-first.

As to what that much or little to be given and to be saved shall be, there is more room for discussion. Julius Cæsar and his wife have declared in favor of a tenth for each, which in their case means fifteen hundred dollars given, and fifteen hundred dollars saved, which leaves them a net income of twelve thousand dollars to spend, and they have no children. I am inclined to think that if every man with ten thousand dollars a year and a family were to give away three hundred dollars, and prudently invest seven hundred dollars, charity would not suffer so long as at present, and would be no less kind. Unquestionably those of us who come out on December thirty-first just even, or eight or nine dollars behind instead of ahead, and would have been able to spend a thousand or two more, are the ones who find charity and saving so difficult. Our friends who are said to have too much for their own good help to found a hospital or send a deserving youth through college without winking. It costs them merely the trouble of signing a check. But it behooves those who have only four instead of forty times as much as Rogers, if they wish to do their share in relieving the needs of others, to do so promptly and systematically before the fine edge of the good resolutions formed on the first of January is dulled by the pressure of a steadily depleted bank account, and a steadily increasing array of bills. Charity, indeed, is more difficult for us to practise than saving, for the simplest method of saving, life insurance, is enforced by the “stand and deliver” argument of an annual premium. Only he, who before the first crocus thrusts its gentle head above the winter’s snow has sent his check to the needy, and who can conscientiously hang upon his office door “Fully insured; life insurance agents need not apply,” is in a position to face with a calm mind the fall of the leaf and the December days when conscience, quickened by the dying year, inquires what we have done for our neighbor, and how the wife and the little ones would fare if we should be cut down in the strength of our manhood.

And yet, too, important as saving is, there are so many things which we must have for the sake of this same wife and the little ones that we cannot afford to save too much. Are we to toil and moil all our days, go without fresh butter and never take six weeks in Europe or Japan because we wish to make sure that our sons and daughters will be amply provided for, as the obituary notices put it? Some men with daughters only have a craze of saving so that this one earthly life becomes a rasping, worrying ordeal, which is only too apt to find an end in the coolness of a premature grave. My friend Perkins—here is another chance, identity seekers, to wonder who Perkins really is—the father of four girls, is a thin, nervous lawyer, who ought to take a proper vacation every summer; but he rarely does, and the reason seems to be that he is saddled by the idea that to bring a girl up in luxury and leave her with anything less than five thousand dollars a year is a piece of paternal brutality. It seems to me that a father ought in the first place to remember that some girls marry. I reminded Perkins of this one day. “Some don’t,” he answered mournfully. “Marriage does not run in the female Perkins line. The chances are that two of my four will never marry. They might be able to get along, if they lived together and were careful, on seven thousand dollars a year, and I must leave them that somehow.” “Hoot toot,” said I, “that seems to me nonsense. Don’t let the spectre of decayed gentlewomen hound you into dyspepsia or Bright’s disease, but give yourself a chance and trust to your girls to look out for themselves. There are so many things for women to do now besides marry or pot jam, that a fond father ought to let his nervous system recuperate now and then.”

“I suppose you mean that they might become teachers or physicians or hospital nurses or typewriters,” said Perkins. “Declined with thanks.”

“Don’t you think,” I inquired with a little irritation, “that they would be happier so than in doing nothing on a fixed income, in simply being mildly cultivated and philanthropic on dividends, in moving to the sea-side in summer and back again in the autumn, and in dying at the last of some fashionable ailment?”

“No, I don’t,” said Perkins. “Do you?”

Were I to repeat my answer to this inquiry I should be inviting a discussion on woman, which is not in place at this stage of our reflections. Let me say, though, that I am still of the opinion that Perkins ought to give his nervous system a chance and not worry so much about his daughters.

Income.

II.

Seeing that there are so many things to have and that we cannot have everything, what are we to choose? I have sometimes, while trudging along in the sleighing season, noticed that many men, whose income I believe to be much smaller than mine, were able to ride behind fast trotters in fur overcoats. The reason upon reflection was obvious to me. Men of a certain class regard a diamond pin, a fur overcoat, and a fast horse as the first necessaries of existence after a bed, a hair-brush and one maid-of-all-work. In other words, they are willing to live in an inexpensive locality, with no regard to plumbing, society, or art, to have their food dropped upon the table, and to let their wives and daughters live with shopping as the one bright spot in the month’s horizon, if only they, the husbands and fathers, can satisfy the three-headed ruling ambition in question. The men to whom I am referring have not the moral or æsthetic tone of Rogers and myself, and belong to quite a distinct class of society from either of us. But among the friends of both of us there are people who act on precisely the same principle. A fine sense of selection ought to govern the expenditure of income, and the wise man will refrain from buying a steam-yacht for himself or a diamond crescent for his wife before he has secured a home with modern conveniences, an efficient staff of servants, a carefully chosen family physician, a summer home, or an ample margin wherewith to hire one, the best educational advantages for his children which the community will afford, and choice social surroundings. In order to have these comfortably and completely, and still not to be within sailing distance, so to speak, of a steam-yacht, one needs to have nowadays—certainly in large cities—an income of from seven thousand to eleven thousand dollars, according to where one lives.

I make this assertion in the face of the fact that our legislators all over the country annually decree that from four to five thousand dollars a year is a fat salary in reward for public service, and that an official with a family who is given twenty-five hundred or three thousand is to be envied. Envied by whom, pray? By the ploughman, the horse-car conductor, and the corner grocery man, may be, but not by the average business or professional man who is doing well. To be sure, five thousand dollars in a country town is affluence, if the beneficiary is content to stay there; but in a city the family man with only that income, provided he is ambitious, can only just live, and might fairly be described as the cousin german to a mendicant. And yet there are some worthy citizens still, who doubtless would be aghast at these statements, and would wish to know how one is to spend five thousand dollars a year without extravagance. We certainly did start in this country on a very different basis, and the doctrine of plain living was written between the lines of the Constitution. We were practically to do our own work, to be content with pie and doughnuts as the staple articles of nutrition, to abide in one locality all the year round, and to eschew color, ornament, and refined recreation. All this as an improvement over the civilization of Europe and a rebuke to it. Whatever the ethical value of this theory of existence in moulding the national character may have been, it has lost its hold to-day, and we as a nation have fallen into line with the once sneered-at older civilizations, though we honestly believe that we are giving and going to give a peculiar redeeming brand to the adopted, venerable customs which will purge them of dross and bale.

Take the servant question, for instance. We are perpetually discussing how we are to do away with the social reproach which keeps native American women out of domestic service; yet at the same time in actual practice the demand for servants grows more and more urgent and wide-spread, and they are consigned still more hopelessly, though kindly, to the kitchen and servants’ hall in imitation of English upper-class life. In the days when our Emerson sought to practise the social equality for which he yearned, by requiring his maids to sit at his own dinner-table, a domestic establishment was a modest affair of a cook and a second girl. Now, the people who are said to have too much for their own good, keep butlers, ladies’ maids, governesses, who like Mahomet’s coffin hover between the parlor and the kitchen, superfine laundresses, pages in buttons, and other housekeeping accessories, and domestic life grows bravely more and more complex. To be sure, too, I am quite aware that, as society is at present constituted, only a comparatively small number out of our millions of free-born American citizens have or are able to earn the seven to eleven thousand dollars a year requisite for thorough comfort, and that the most interesting and serious problem which confronts human society to-day is the annihilation or lessening of the terrible existing inequalities in estate and welfare.

This problem, absorbing as it is, can scarcely be solved in our time. But, whatever the solution, whether by socialism, government control, or brotherly love, is it not safe to assume that when every one shares alike, society is not going to be satisfied with humble, paltry, or ugly conditions as the universal weal? If the new dispensation does not provide a style and manner of living at least equal in comfort, luxury, and refinement to that which exists among the well-to-do to-day, it will be a failure. Humanity will never consent to be shut off from the best in order to be exempt from the worst. The millennium must supply not merely bread and butter, a house, a pig, a cow, and a sewing-machine for every one, but attractive homes, gardens, and galleries, literature and music, and all the range of æsthetic social adjuncts which tend to promote healthy bodies, delightful manners, fine sensibilities, and noble purposes, or it will be no millennium.

Therefore one who would live wisely and has the present means, though he may deplore existing misery and seek to relieve it, does not give away to others all his substance but spends it chiefly on himself and his family until he has satisfied certain needs. By way of a house he feels that he requires not merely a frail, unornamental shelter, but a carefully constructed, well ventilated, cosily and artistically furnished dwelling, where his family will neither be scrimped for space nor exposed to discomforts, and where he can entertain his friends tastefully if not with elegance. All this costs money and involves large and recurrent outlays for heating, lighting, upholstery, sanitary appliances, silver, china, and glass. It is not sufficient for him that his children should be sure of their own father; he is solicitous, besides, that they should grow up as free as possible from physical blemishes, and mentally and spiritually sound and attractive. To promote this he must needs consult or engage from time to time skilled specialists, dentists, oculists, dancing and drawing masters, private tutors, and music-teachers. To enable these same sons and daughters to make the most of themselves, he must, during their early manhood and womanhood, enable them to pursue professional or other studies, to travel, and to mingle in cultivated and well-bred society. He must live in a choice neighborhood that he may surround himself and his family with refining influences, and accordingly he must pay from twelve hundred to twenty-five hundred or three thousand dollars a year for rent, according to the size and desirability of the premises. Unless he would have his wife and daughters merely household factors and drudges, he must keep from three to five or six servants, whose wages vary from four to six or seven dollars a week, and feed them.

Nor can the athletic, æsthetic, or merely pleasurable needs of a growing or adolescent household be ignored. He must meet the steady and relentless drain from each of these sources, or be conscious that his flesh and blood have not the same advantages and opportunities which are enjoyed by their contemporaries. He must own a pew, a library share, a fancy dress costume, and a cemetery lot, and he must always have loose change on hand for the hotel waiter and the colored railway porter. The family man in a large city who meets these several demands to his entire satisfaction will have little of ten thousand dollars left for the purchase of a trotter, a fur overcoat, and a diamond pin.

The growing consciousness of the value of these complex demands of our modern civilization, when intelligently gratified, acts at the present day as a cogent incentive to make money, not for the mere sake of accumulation, but to spend. Gross accumulation with scant expenditure has always been sanctioned here; but to grow rich and yet be lavish has only within a comparatively recent period among us seemed reconcilable with religious or national principles. Even yet he who many times a millionaire still walks unkempt, or merely plain and honest, has not entirely lost the halo of hero worship. But, though the old man is permitted to do as he prefers, better things are demanded of his sons and daughters. Nor can the argument that some of the greatest men in our history have been nurtured and brought up in cabins and away from refining influences be soundly used against the advisability of making the most of income, even though we now and then ask ourselves whether modern living is producing statesmen of equally firm mould. But we thrill no longer at mention of a log cabin or rail splitting, and the very name of hard cider suggests rather unpleasantly the corner grocery store and the pie-permeated, hair-cloth suited New England parlor.

Merely because other nations have long been aware that it was wise and not immoral to try to live comfortably and beautifully our change of faith is no less absorbing to us. We confidently expect to win fresh laurels by our originality, intelligence, and unselfishness in this new old field. Already have we made such strides that our establishments on this side of the water make up in genuine comfort what they lack in ancient manorial picturesqueness and ghost-haunted grace. Each one of us who is in earnest is asking how he is to make the most of what he has or earns, so as to attain that charm of refined living which is civilization’s best flower—living which if merely material and unanimated by intelligence and noble aims is without charm, but which is made vastly more difficult of realization in case we are without means or refuse to spend them adequately.

The Dwelling.

I.

Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar, who, as you may remember, divide their income into parts with mathematical precision, were not as well off in this world’s goods at the time of their marriage as they are now. Neither Mr. Cæsar’s father nor Mrs. Cæsar’s grandmother was then dead, and consequently the newly wedded pair, though set up by their respective families with a comfortable income, felt that it was incumbent upon them to practise strict economy. Then it was that Julius conceived what seemed to them both the happy idea of buying a house dirt cheap in a neighborhood which was not yet improved, and improving the neighborhood, instead of paying an exorbitant price for a residence in a street which was already all it should be.

“Why,” said Julius, “shouldn’t we buy one of those new houses in Sunset Terrace? They look very attractive, and if we can only induce two or three congenial couples to join forces with us we shall have the nucleus of a delightful colony.”

“Besides, everything will be nice and new,” said Mrs. Julius, or Dolly Cæsar, as her friends know her. “No cockroaches, no mice, no moths, no family skeletons to torment us. Julius, you are a genius. We can just as well set the fashion as follow meekly in fashion’s wake.”

So said, so done. Julius Cæsar bent his intellect upon the matter and soon found three congenial couples who were willing to join forces with him. Before another twelve months had passed, four baby-wagons—one of them double-seated—were to be seen on four sunny grass-plots in front of four attractive, artistic-looking villas on Sunset Terrace. Where lately sterility, mortar, and weeds had held carnival, there was now an air of tasteful gentility. Thanks to the example of Dolly Cæsar, who had an eye and an instinct for such matters, the four brass door-plates shone like the sun, the paint was spick and span, the four gravel paths were in apple-pie order, the four grass-plots were emerald from timely use of a revolving lawn sprinkler, and the four nurse-maids, who watched like dragons over the four baby-wagons, were neat-looking and comely. No wonder that by the end of the second year there was not a vacant house in the street, and that everybody who wished to live in a fashionable locality was eager for a chance to enter Sunset Terrace. No wonder, too, that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar were able, by the end of the fourth year, to emerge from Sunset Terrace with a profit on the sale of their villa which made it rent free for the entire period, and left them with a neat little surplus to boot, and to settle down with calm minds on really fashionable Belport Avenue, in the stately mansion devised to them by Mrs. Cæsar’s grandmother.

Now, it must be borne in mind that a Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar can sometimes do that which a Mr. and Mrs. George J. Spriggs find difficulty in accomplishing. Spriggs, at the time of his marriage to Miss Florence Green, the daughter of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Homer W. Green, conceived the happy idea of setting up his household gods in Locust Road, which lies about as far from Belport Avenue in one direction as Sunset Terrace in the other. Both are semi-suburban. It also occurred to him at the outset to join forces with three or four congenial couples, but at the last moment the engagement of one of the couples in question was broken, and the other three decided to live somewhere else. To have changed his mind then would have involved the sacrifice of one hundred dollars paid to bind the bargain to the landowner. So it seemed best to them on the whole to move in, as they had to live somewhere.

“It’s just a little bit dreary, isn’t it?” said Florence Spriggs, pathetically, as she looked out of her bow window at the newly finished street which was not finished, and at the grass-plot where there was no grass. “But I sha’n’t be a bit lonely with you, George.”

“I wonder if the color of this house has been changed,” said Spriggs, presently, as he glanced up at the façade and from that to the other houses in the block, each of which was vacant. He and Florence had gone out after dinner to take a stroll and survey the neighborhood which they hoped to improve.

“Of course it hasn’t! How could it be?” said Florence.

“Somehow it looks a more staring shade of yellow than it did the first time we saw it. And I don’t fancy altogether the filigree work on the door, or that Egyptian renaissance scroll set into the eastern wall, do you, dearest? However, we’re in now and can’t get out, for the title has passed. I wonder who will buy the other houses?”

They were soon to know. They were alone all winter, but in the early spring a family moved in on either side of them. The houses in Locust Road, like those in Sunset Terrace, were of the villa order, with grass-plots, which were almost lawns, appurtenant. Though less pleasing than those which had taken the more discerning eye of Mrs. Julius Cæsar, they were nevertheless comparatively inoffensive and sufficiently tasteful. Neighbor number one proved to be of an enterprising and imaginative turn. He changed the color of his villa from staring yellow to startling crushed strawberry, supplemented his Egyptian renaissance scroll and filigree with inlaid jewel and frost work, stationed a cast-iron stag in one corner of the grass-plot and a cast-iron Diana with a bow in another, and then rested on his laurels. Neighbor number two was shiftless and untidy. His grass-plot did not thrive, and the autumn leaves choked his gravel path. His windows were never washed, his blinds hung askew, and his one maid-of-all-work preferred the lawn to the laundry as a drying-room. His wife sunned herself in a wrapper, and he himself in his shirt sleeves. A big mongrel dog drooled perpetually on the piazza or tracked it with his muddy feet, and even the baby-wagon wore the appearance of dilapidation and halted because of a broken spring.

The Spriggses tried to be lenient and even genial with both these neighbors, but somehow the attempt was not successful. Neighbor number one became huffy because Spriggs took no notice of his advice that he embellish his grass-plot with a stone mastiff or an umbrella and cherub fountain, and neighbor number two took offence because Spriggs complained that the ventilator on his chimney kept Mrs. Spriggs awake by squeaking. Mrs. Spriggs did her best to set them both a good example by having everything as tasteful on the one hand and as tidy on the other as it should be. In the hope of improving them she even dropped suggestive hints as to how people ought to live, but the hints were not taken. What was worse none of the other houses were taken. As Spriggs pathetically expressed it, the iron stag on the one side and the weekly wash on the other kept purchasers at bay. He tried to buoy himself up by believing that a glut in the real estate market was the cause why the remaining villas in Locust Road hung fire, but this consolation was taken away from him the following spring when an active buying movement all along the line still left them without other neighbors. The unoccupied villas had begun to wear an air of dilapidation, in spite of their Egyptian renaissance scrolls and the presence of a cast-iron Diana.

To crown the situation the baby of neighbor number two caught diphtheria from being left in its halting wagon by the maid-of-all-work too near the cesspool on the lawn, and was kissed by the Spriggs baby before the fact was discovered. If there is one thing more irritating to the maternal mind than another, it is to have dear baby catch something from the child of people whom you reprobate. One feels that the original horrors of the disease are sure to be enhanced through such a medium. When the only child of the Julius Cæsars died of the same disease, contracted from a germ inhaled on Belport Avenue, the parents felt that only destiny was to blame. On the other hand, though the Spriggs baby recovered, Mrs. Spriggs never quite forgave herself for what had happened. Before the next autumn Spriggs parted with his estate on Locust Road for so much less than he had paid for it that he felt obliged to accept the hospitality of his wife’s father, ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Green, during the succeeding winter.

The moral of this double-jointed tale is twofold; firstly that the young householder cannot always count upon improving the neighborhood in which he sets up his goods and chattels after marriage, and secondly, that, in case the neighborhood fails to improve, a tenancy for a year or two is a less serious burden than absolute ownership. It is extremely pleasant, to be sure, to be able to declare that one has paid for one’s house, and I am aware that the consciousness of unencumbered ownership in the roof over one’s head affords one of the most affecting and effective opportunities for oratory which the free-born citizen can desire. The hand of many a husband and father has been stayed from the wine-cup or the gaming-table by the pathetic thought that he owned his house. As a rule, too, it is cheaper to pay the interest on a mortgage than to pay rent, and if one is perfectly sure of being able to improve the neighborhood, or at least save it from degeneration, it certainly seems desirable to be the landlord of one’s house, even though it be mortgaged so cleverly that the equity of redemption is merely a name. But in this age of semi-suburban development, when Roads and Terraces and Parks and Gates and other Anglo-European substitutes for streets serve as “springes to catch woodcocks,” a young couple on real estate ownership bent should have the discerning eye of a Mrs. Julius Cæsar in order not to fall a prey to the specious land and lot speculator. If you happen to hit on a Sunset Terrace, everything is rose color, but to find one’s self an owner in fee on a Locust Road, next door to crushed strawberry and a cast-iron stag, will palsy the hopes of the hopeful.

What attractive, roomy, tasteful affairs many of these semi-suburban villas, which are built nowadays on the new Roads, Terraces, Parks, Gates, and even Streets, are to be sure. There are plenty of homely ones too, but it is a simple matter to avoid the Egyptian renaissance scroll, and the inlaid jewel work and stained-glass bull’s eyes if one only will. They seem to be affording to many a happy solution of the ever new and ever old problem, which presents itself to every man who is about to take a wife, whether it is preferable to live in the city or the country. These new suburbs, or rather outlying wards of our large cities, which have been carved out of what, not many years ago, was real country where cows browsed and woods flourished, must be very alluring to people who would fain live out of town and still be in it. When, by stepping on an electric car or taking the train, you can, within a quarter of an hour, be on your own piazza inhaling fresh air and privileged to feast your eyes on a half acre or less of greensward belonging to yourself, there would seem to be strong inducements for refusing to settle down in a stuffy, smoky, dusty, wire-pestered city street, however fashionable. Rapid transit has made or is making the environs of our cities so accessible that the time-honored problem presents itself under different conditions than formerly. There is no such thing now as the real country for anybody who is not prepared to spend an hour in the train. Even then one is liable to encounter asphalt walks and a Soldier’s monument in the course of a sylvan stroll. But the intervening territory is ample and alluring.

For one-half the rent demanded for a town house of meagre dimensions in the middle of a block, with no outlook whatever, new, spacious, airy, ornamental homes with a plot of land and a pleasing view attached, are to be had for the seeking within easy living distance from nearly every large city. When I begin to rhapsodize, as I sometimes do, I am apt to ask myself why it is that anybody continues to live in town. It was only the other day that I happened, while driving with my wife in the suburbs, to call her attention, enthusiastically, to the new house which Perkins has secured for himself. You may remember that Perkins is the thin, nervous lawyer with four daughters, who is solicitous as to what will become of them when he is dead. We drove by just as he came up the avenue from the station, which is only a three minutes’ walk from the house. He looked tired—he always does—but there was already a fresh jauntiness in his tread as though he sniffed ozone. He looked up at the new house complacently, as well he might, for it is large enough even for four daughters, and has all the engaging impressiveness of a not too quaintly proportioned and not too abnormally stained modern villa, a highly evolved composite of an old colonial mansion, a Queen Anne cottage, and a French château. Before he reached the front door, two of his daughters ran out to embrace him and relieve him of his bag and bundles, and a half-hour later, as we drove back, he was playing lawn tennis with three of his girls, in a white blazer with pink stripes and knickerbockers, which gave his thin and eminently respectable figure a rather rakish air.

“Barbara,” I said to my wife, “why isn’t Perkins doing the sensible thing? That’s a charming house, double the size he could get for the same money in town—and the rent is eight hundred or a thousand dollars instead of fifteen hundred or two thousand. He needs fewer servants out here, for the parlor-maid isn’t kept on tenterhooks to answer the door-bell, and there is fresh air to come back to at night, and the means for outdoor exercise on his own or his neighbor’s lawn, which for a nervous, thin-chested, sedentary man like Perkins is better than cod-liver oil. Think what robust specimens those daughters should be with such opportunities for tennis, golf, skating, and bicycling.

“On Sundays and holidays, if the spirit moves him and his wife and the girls to start off on an exploring expedition, they are not obliged to take a train or pound over dusty pavements before they begin; the wild flowers and autumn foliage and chestnut-burs are all to be had in the woods and glens within a mile or two of their own home. Or if he needs to be undisturbed, no noise, no interruption, but nine hours’ sleep and an atmosphere suited to rest and contemplation on his piazza or by his cheerful, tasteful fireside. Why isn’t this preferable to the artificial, restless life of the city?”

“And yet,” said Barbara, “I have heard you state that only a rich man can afford to live in the country.”

Women certainly delight to store up remarks made in quite another connection, and use them as random arguments against us.

“My dear Barbara,” said I, “this is not the country. Of course in the real country, one needs so many things to be comfortable nowadays—a large house, stables, horses, and what not—it has always seemed to me that a poor man with social or cultivated instincts had better stay in town. But have not Perkins and these other semi-suburbanites hit the happy medium? They have railroads or electric cars at their doors, and yet they can get real barn-yard smells.”

“I doubt if they can,” said Barbara. “That is, unless they start a barn-yard for the purpose, and that would bring the health authorities down upon them at once. If this were the country, I could entirely thrill at the description you have just given of your friend Mr. Perkins. The real country is divine; but this is oleomargarine country. On the other hand, however, I quite agree with you that if Mr. Perkins is delicate, this is a far healthier place for him than the city, in spite of the journey in the train twice a day. The houses—his house in particular—are lovely, and I dare say we all ought to do the same. He can certainly come in contact with nature—such nature as there is left within walking distance—easier than city people. But to console me for not having one of these new, roomy villas, and to prevent you from doing anything rash, I may as well state a few objections to your paradise. As to expense, of course there is a saving in rent, and it is true that the parlor-maid does not have to answer the door-bell so often, and accordingly can do other things instead. Consequently, too, Mrs. Perkins and the four girls may get into the habit of going about untidy and in their old clothes. A dowdy girl with rosy cheeks and a fine constitution is a pitiable object in this age of feminine progress. Mr. Perkins will have to look out for this, and he may require cod-liver oil after all.

“Then there is the question of schools. In many of these semi-suburban paradises there are no desirable schools, especially for girls, which necessitates perpetual coming and going on trains and cars, and will make education a wearisome thing, especially for Mrs. Perkins. She will find, too, that her servants are not so partial to wild flowers and chestnut-burs and fresh air as her husband and daughters. Only the inexperienced will apply, and they will come to her reluctantly, and as soon as she has accustomed them to her ways and made them skilful, they will tell her they are not happy, and need the society of their friends in town.

“Those are a few of the drawbacks to the semi-suburban villa; but the crucial and most serious objection is, that unless one is very watchful, and often in spite of watchfulness, the semi-suburbanite shuts himself off from the best social interests and advantages. He begins by imagining that there will be no difference; that he will see just as much of his friends and go just as frequently to balls and dinner-parties, the concert and the theatre, the educational or philanthropic meeting. But just that requisite and impending twenty minutes in the train or electric car at the fag end of the day is liable to make a hermit of him to all intents and purposes by the end of the second year. Of course, if one is rich and has one’s own carriage, the process of growing rusty is more gradual, though none the less sure. On that very account most people with a large income come to town for a few months in winter at any rate. There are so many things in life to do, that even friends with the best and most loving intentions call once on those who retire to suburban villas and let that do for all time. To be sure, some people revel in being hermits and think social entertainments and excitements a mere waste of time and energy. I am merely suggesting that for those who wish to keep in close touch with the active human interests of the day, the semi-suburban villa is somewhat of a snare. The Perkinses will have to exercise eternal vigilance, or they will find themselves seven evenings out of seven nodding by their fireside after an ample meal, with all their social instincts relaxed.”

Undeniably Barbara offered the best solution of this question in her remark, that those who can afford it spend the spring and autumn in the country and come to town for the winter months. Certainly, if I were one of the persons who are said to have too much for their own good, I should do something of the kind. I might not buy a suburban villa; indeed, I would rather go to the real country, where there are lowing kine, and rich cream and genuine barn-yard smells, instead of electric cars and soldiers’ monuments. There would I remain until it was time to kill the Thanksgiving turkey, and then I would hie me to town in order to refresh my mental faculties with city sights and sounds during the winter-spring solstice, when the lowing kine are all in the barn, and even one who owns a suburban villa has to fight his way from his front door through snow-drifts, and listen to the whistling wind instead of the robin red-breast or tinkling brook.

Patterson, the banker, is surely to be envied in his enjoyment of two establishments, notwithstanding that the double ownership suggests again the effete civilizations of Europe, and was once considered undemocratic. Patterson, though his son has been through the Keeley cure, and his daughter lives apart from her husband, has a charming place thirty-five miles from town, where he has many acres and many horses, cows, and sheep, an expanse of woods, a running stream, delicious vegetables and fruit; golf links, and a fine country house with all the modern improvements, including a cosy, spacious library. Then he has another house—almost a palace—in town which he opens in the late autumn and occupies until the middle of May, for Patterson, in spite of some foibles, is no tax dodger.

Yes, to have two houses and live half of the year in town and the other half in the country, with six to eight weeks at the sea-side or mountains, so as to give the children salt air and bathing, or a thorough change, is what most of us would choose in case we were blessed with too much for our own good. But, unfortunately or fortunately, most of us with even comfortable incomes cannot have two houses, and consequently must choose between town and country or semi-country, especially as the six or eight weeks at the sea-side or mountains is apt to seem imperative when midsummer comes. According, therefore, as we select to live in one or the other, it behooves us to practise eternal vigilance, so that we may not lose our love of nature and wreck our nerves in the worldly bustle of city life, or become inert, rusty, and narrow among the lowing kine or in semi-suburban seclusion. In order to live wisely, we who dwell in the cities should in our spare hours seek fresh air, sunlight, and intercourse with nature, and we whose homes are out of town should in our turn rehabilitate our social instincts and rub up our manners.

Regarding the real country, there is one other consideration of which I am constantly reminded by a little water-color hanging in my library, painted by me a few years ago while I was staying with my friend Henley. It represents a modest but pretty house and a charming rustic landscape. I call it Henley’s Folly. Henley, who possessed ardent social instincts, had always lived in town; but he suddenly took it into his head to move thirty miles into the country. He told me that he did so primarily for the benefit of his wife and children, but added that it would be the best thing in the world for him, that it would domesticate him still more completely, and give him time to read and cultivate himself. When I went to stay with him six months later, he was jubilant regarding the delights of the country, and declared that he had become a genuine farmer. He pished at the suggestion that the daily journey to and from town was exhausting, and informed me that his one idea was to get away from the bricks and mortar as early in the afternoon as possible. Just two years later I heard with surprise, one day, that the Henleys had sold their farm and were coming back to town. The reason—confided to me by one of the family—was that his wife was so much alone that she could not endure the solitude any longer. “You see,” said my informant, “the nearest house of their friends was four miles off, and as Henley stayed in town until the last gun fired, the days he returned home at all, and as he had or invented a reason for staying in town all night at least once a week, poor Mrs. Henley realized that the lot of a farmer’s wife was not all roses and sunshine.” From this I opine that if one with ardent social instincts would live wisely he should not become a gentleman farmer merely for the sake of his wife and children.

The Dwelling.

II.

Whether we live in the city or the country, it must be apparent to all of us that a great wave of architectural activity in respect to dwelling-houses has been spreading over our land during the past twenty years. The American architect has been getting in his work and showing what he could do, with the result that the long, monotonous row of brick or freestone custom-made city houses, and the stereotyped white country farm-house with green blinds and an ell or lean-to attached, have given place to a vivid and heterogeneous display of individual effort. Much of this is fine and some deadly, for the display includes not merely the generally tasteful and artistic conceptions of our trained native architects, who have studied in Paris, but the raw notions of all the builders of custom-made houses who, recognizing the public desire for striking and original effects, are bent upon surpassing one another.

Therefore, while we have many examples, both urban and suburban, of beautiful and impressive house architecture, the new sections of our cities and suburbs fairly bristle with a multiplicity of individual experiments in which the salient features of every known type of architecture are blended fearlessly together. The native architect who has neither been to Paris nor been able to devote much time to study has not been limited in the expression of his genius by artistic codes or conventions. Consequently he has felt no hesitation in using extinguisher towers, mediæval walls, battlement effects, Queen Anne cottage lines, Old Colonial proportions, and Eastern imagery in the same design, and any one of them at any critical juncture when his work has seemed to him not sufficiently striking for his own or the owner’s taste.

Satisfactory as all this is as evidence of a progressive spirit, and admitting that many of even these lawless manifestations of talent are not without merit, it is nevertheless aggressively true that the smug complacency of the proprietor of the suburban villa, which is hedged about by a stone rampart of variegated rough stone on an ordinary building lot, has no justification whatever. Nor has the master of the castellated, gloomy, half-Moorish, half-mediæval mansion, which disfigures the fashionable quarter of many of our cities, occasion to congratulate himself on having paid for a thing of beauty. The number of our well-trained architects, though constantly increasing, is still small, especially as compared with the number of people of means who are eager to occupy a thing of beauty; then, too, even the trained architect is apt to try experiments for the sake of testing his genius, on a dog, so to speak—some confiding plutocrat with a love of splendor who has left everything to him.

The result is that grotesque and eye-distressing monsters of masonry stand side by side on many of our chief avenues with the most graceful and finished specimens of native architectural inspiration. As there is no law which prevents one from building or buying an ugly house, and as the architect, whose experiment on a dog tortures the public eye, suffers no penalty for his crime, our national house architecture may be said to be working out its own salvation at the public expense. It is the duty of a patriotic citizen to believe that in this, as in other matters of national welfare, the beautiful gradually will prevail; and assuredly the many very attractive private residences which one sees both in the city and the country should tend to make us hopeful.

Why is it that the rich man who would live wisely feels the necessity for so large a house in the city? Almost the first thing that one who has accumulated or inherited great possessions does nowadays is to leave the house where very likely he has been comfortable and move into a mammoth establishment suggesting rather a palace or an emporium than a house. Why is this? Some one answers that it is for the sake of abundant light and extra space. Surely in a handsome house of twenty-five or thirty feet front there should be light and space enough for the average family, however fastidious or exacting. In the country, where one needs many spare rooms for the accommodation of guests, there are some advantages in the possession of an abnormally large house. But how is the comfort of the city man enhanced by one, that is, if the attendant discomforts are weighed in the same scale? It has sometimes seemed to me that the wealthy or successful man invests in a prodigious mansion as a sort of testimonial; as though he felt it incumbent on him to erect a conventional monument to his own grandeur or success, in order to let the public entertain no doubt about it. But so many otherwise sensible men have deliberately built huge city houses that this can scarcely be the controlling motive in all cases. Perhaps, if asked, they would throw the responsibility on their wives. But it is even more difficult to understand why a sensible woman should wish one of the vast houses which our rising architects are naturally eager to receive orders to construct. A handsome house where she can entertain attractively, yes: an exquisitely furnished, sunny, corner house by all means; a house where each child may have a room apart and where there are plenty of spare rooms, if you like; but why a mammoth cave? She is the person who will suffer the discomforts to be weighed in the same scale, for the care will fall on her.

We have in this country neither trained servants nor the housekeeper system. The wife and mother who is the mistress of a huge establishment wishes it to be no less a home than her former residence, and her husband would be the first to demur were she to cast upon others the burdens of immediate supervision. A moderate-sized modern house is the cause of care enough, as we all know, and wherefore should any woman seek to multiply her domestic worries by duplicating or trebling the number of her servants? To become the manager of a hotel or to cater for an ocean steamship is perhaps a tempting ambition for one in search of fortune, but why should a woman, who can choose what she will have, elect to be the slave of a modern palace with extinguisher towers? Merely to be able to invite all her social acquaintance to her house once a year without crowding them? It would be simpler to hire one of the many halls now adapted for the purpose.

The difficulty of obtaining efficient servants, and the worries consequent upon their inefficiency, is probably the chief cause of the rapid growth of the apartment-house among us. The contemporary architect has selected this class of building for some of his deadliest conceits. Great piles of fantastically disposed stone and iron tower up stories upon stories high, and frown upon us at the street-corners like so many Brobdingnagians. Most of them are very ugly; nevertheless they contain the homes of many citizens, and the continuous appearance of new and larger specimens attests their increasing popularity. Twenty years ago there was scarcely an apartment-house to be seen in our cities. There was a certain number of hotels where families could and did live all the year round, but the ten-story monster, with a janitor, an elevator, steam heat, electric light, and all the alleged comforts of home, was practically unknown. We have always professed to be such a home-loving people, and the so-called domestic hearth has always been such a touchstone of sentiment among us that the exchange of the family roof for the community of a flat by so many well-to-do persons certainly seems to suggest either that living cheek by jowl with a number of other households is not so distasteful as it seems to the uninitiated, or else that modern housekeeping is so irksome that women are tempted to swallow sentiment and escape from their trammels to the comparatively easy conditions of an apartment. It does seem as though one’s identity would be sacrificed or dimmed by becoming a tenant in common, and as though the family circle could never be quite the same thing to one who was conscious that his was only a part of one tremendous whole. And yet, more and more people seem to be anxious to share a janitor and front door, and, though the more fastidious insist on their own cuisine, there are not a few content to entrust even their gastronomic welfare to a kitchen in common.

It must be admitted, even by those of us who rejoice in our homes, that there is much to be said in favor of the apartment-house as a solver of practical difficulties, and that our imaginations are largely responsible for our antipathy. When once inside a private apartment of the most desirable and highly evolved kind one cannot but admit that there is no real lack of privacy, and that the assertion that the owner has no domestic hearth is in the main incorrect. To be sure the domain belonging to each suite is comparatively circumscribed; there is no opportunity for roaming from garret to cellar; no private laundry; no private backyard; and no private front-door steps; but to all practical intents one is no less free from intrusion or inspection than in a private house, and it may also be said that reporters and other persevering visitors are kept at a more respectful distance by virtue of the janitor in common on the ground floor. The sentiment in favor of limited individual possession is difficult to eradicate from sensitive souls, and rightly, perhaps, many of us refuse to be convinced; but it remains true that the woman who has become the mistress of a commodious and well-managed apartment must have many agreeable quarters of an hour in congratulating herself that perplexities concerning chores, heating, lighting, flights of stairs, leaks, and a host of minor domestic matters no longer threaten her peace of mind, and—greatest boon of all—that she now can manage with two or three servants instead of five or six.

In this newly developed fondness for flats we are again guilty of imitating one of the effete civilizations—France this time—where it has long been the custom for families to content themselves with a story or two instead of a house; though we can claim the size and style of architecture of the modern apartment pile as our special brand upon the adopted institution. The introduction of the custom here seems to me to be the result of exhaustion of the female nervous system. The American housewife, weary of the struggle to obtain efficient servants, having oscillated from all Catholics to all Protestants, from all Irish to all Swedes and back again, having experimented with negroes and Chinamen, and returned to pure white, having tried native help and been insulted, and reverted to the Celtic race, she—the long-suffering—has sought the apartment-house as a haven of rest. She—the long-suffering—has assuredly been in a false position since the Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, for she has been forced to cherish and preserve a domestic institution which popular sentiment has refused to recognize as consistent with the principles of Democracy. Our National creed, whether presented in the primer or from the platform, has ever repudiated the idea of service when accompanied by an abatement of personal independence or confession of social inferiority. Therefore the native American woman has persistently refused, in the face of high wages and of exquisite moral suasion, to enter domestic service, and has preferred the shop or factory to a comfortable home where she would have to crook the knee and say “Yes, ma’am.”

At the same time the native American woman, ever since “help” in the sense of social acquaintances willing to accommodate for hire and dine with the family has ceased to adorn her kitchen and parlor, has been steadily forced by the demands of complex modern living to have servants of her own. And where was she to obtain them? Excepting the negro, only among the emigrants of foreign countries, at first among the Irish, and presently among the English and Swedes, all of whom, unharassed by scruples as to a consequent loss of self-respect, have been prompt to recognize that this field of employment lay open to them and was undisputed. They have come, and they still come in herds to our shores, raw and undisciplined, the overflow from their own countries; and as fast as they arrive they are feverishly snapped up by the American housewife, who finds the need of servants more and more imperative; for some one must do the elaborate cooking, some one must do the fine washing, some one must polish the silver, rub the brasses, care for the lamps, and dust the bric-à-brac in her handsomest establishment. And no one but the emigrant, or the son and daughter of the emigrant, is willing to.

The consequence is that, though the native American woman is as resolute as ever in her own refusal to be a cook or waitress in a private family, domestic service exists as an institution no less completely than it exists in Europe, and practically under the same conditions, save that servants here receive considerably higher wages than abroad because the demand is greater than the supply. There is a perpetual wail in all our cities and suburbs that the supply of competent cooks, and skilled laundresses and maids is so limited, and well-trained servants can demand practically their own prices. The conditions of service, however, are the same. That is, the servant in the household of the free-born is still the servant; and still the servant in the household where the mistress, who has prospered, would originally have gone into service had she not been free-born. For there is no one more prompt than the American housewife to keep a servant when she can afford one, and the more she is obliged to keep the prouder is she, though her nervous system may give way under the strain. By this I do not mean that the servants here are ill-treated. On the contrary, the consideration shown them is greater, and the quarters provided for them are far more comfortable on this side of the water than abroad. Indeed, servants fare nowhere in the world so well as in the establishments of the well-to-do people of our large cities. Their bedrooms are suitable and often tasteful, they are attended by the family physician if ill, they are not overworked, and very slight checks are put on their liberty. But they are undeniably servants. The free-born American mistress does not regard her servants as social equals. She expects them to stand up if they are sitting down when she enters the room. She expects them to address her sons and daughters as Mr. Samuel and Miss Fanny, and to be called in turn Maggie or Albertine (or Thompson or Jones, à l’anglaise) without a prefix. She does her best, in short, to preserve all the forms and all the deference on the one hand, and the haughtiness or condescension on the other which govern the relations between servant and mistress abroad.

From the fact that we need so many more servants than formerly, to care properly for our establishments, the servant here is becoming more and more of a machine. That is, she is in nearly the same category with the electric light and the furnace. We expect him or her to be as unobtrusive as possible, to perform work without a hitch, and not to draw upon our sympathies unnecessarily. The mistress of one or two girls is sure to grow friendly and concerned as to their outside welfare, but when she has a staff of five or six, she is thankful if she is not obliged to know anything about them. The letter which appeared in a New York newspaper some years ago, from an American girl, in which she declared that she had left service because her master and his sons handed her their dripping umbrellas with the same air as they would have handed them to a graven image, was thoroughly in point. The reason the native American girl will not become a servant, in spite of the arguments of the rational and godly, is that service is the sole employment in this country in which she can be told with impunity that she is the social inferior of any one else. It is the telling which she cannot put up with. It is one thing to be conscious that the person you are constantly associated with is better educated, better mannered, and more attractive than yourself, and it is another to be told at every opportunity that this is so. In the shop, in the factory, and in other walks of life, whatever her real superiors may think of her, they must treat her as a social equal. Even that shrill-voiced, banged, bangled, impertinent, slangy, vulgar product of our mammoth retail drygoods system, who seems to believe herself a pattern of ladylike behavior, is aware in her heart that she does not know how to behave, and yearns to resemble the well-bred woman whom she daily insults. But the happiness of her life, and its main-spring, too, lies in the consciousness that she is free to become the first lady in the land, and that she herself is to be her sole critic and detractor. Why is she not right in refusing to sacrifice her independence? Why should she sell her birthright for a mess of pottage?

An anomalous condition of affairs is presented by this contrast between the free-born American woman as a mistress and as a revolter against domestic service, and it seems to me that one of two things must come to pass. Necessarily we shall continue to have cooks, waiting-maids, and laundresses; at least our food must be prepared, our drawing-rooms dusted, and our linen ironed by some one. But either we shall have to accept and acknowledge the existence among us of a class, recruited from foreign emigrants and their descendants, which is tarred with the brush of social proscription in direct violation of democratic principles, or we must change the conditions of domestic service—change them so that condescension and servility vanish, and the contract of service becomes like the other contracts of employment between man and man, and man and woman.

It is fruitless now to inquire what the free-born American woman would have done without the foreign emigrant to cook and wash for her. The question is whether, now that she has her, she is going to keep her, and keep her in the same comfortable and well-paid but palpable thraldom as at present. If so, she will be merely imitating the housewives of the effete civilizations; she will be doing simply what every English, French, and German woman does and has done ever since class distinctions began. But in that case, surely, we shall be no longer able to proclaim our immunity from caste, and our Fourth of July orators will find some difficulty in showing that other nations are more effete in this respect than ourselves. Twenty-five years more of development in our houses, hotels, and restaurants, if conducted on present lines, will produce an enormous ducking and scraping, fee-seeking, livery-wearing servant class, which will go far to establish the claim put forth by some of our critics, that equality on this side of the water means only political equality, and that our class distinctions, though not so obvious, are no less genuine than elsewhere. In this event the only logical note of explanation to send to the Powers will be that social equality was never contemplated by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and that, though it is true that any man may become President of the United States, there are as great inequalities in morals, intellect, and manners among sons of liberty as among the subjects of the Czar. To this the Powers will be justified in uttering a disappointed and slightly ironical “Oh!” But perhaps the foreign emigrant will have something to say on the subject. Perhaps the horde from across the seas, now lured by high wages, will decrease in numbers, or it may be that their descendants here will learn through contact with the free-born revolter against domestic service to revolt too.

What would the free-born American mistress do then? With the free-born revolter still obdurate, and the foreign emigrant ceasing to emigrate or recalcitrant, she would be in an unpleasant fix in her elaborate establishment conducted on effete principles. In this practical dilemma, rather than in an awakened moral sense, seems to lie our best hope of regeneration, for it cannot be denied that the free-born American mistress is doing all she can at present to perpetuate the foreign idea of domestic service, and it seems probable that so long as the foreign emigrant is willing to be bribed the true principles of democracy will be violated. Already the difficulty of obtaining servants is inducing home-loving families to seek the apartment-house. A more distinct dearth would speedily change the relations between mistress and servant into that of contractor and contractee, as in other employments in this country. It may be that the descendants of the emigrant will be unable to resist the lure offered them, and that the free-born mistress will triumph. If so, we shall become no better and possibly no worse than the effete civilizations we promised to make blush by the worth of our institutions.

House-Furnishing and the Commissariat.

I.

After a man and his wife have made up their minds whether to live in a town house or suburban villa, they are obliged to consider next what they will have in the way of furniture, and presently what they will have for dinner. The consciousness that a house has nothing in it but the barest fixtures—the gasometer, the water-tanks, and the electric wires—and that it is for you and your wife to decide exactly what shall go into it in the way of wall-papers, carpets, upholstery, and objects of virtu, is inspiring, even though your purse be not plethoric and your knowledge of æsthetics limited. The thought at once presents itself that here is the chance of your lifetime to demonstrate how beautiful and cosy a home may be, and you set eagerly to work to surpass your predecessors of equal means. It is a worthy ambition to endeavor to make the matrimonial nest or the home of maturer years attractive, and if we were to peer back far enough into the past of even this country, to the time when our great great-grandmothers set up housekeeping with our great great-grandfathers, we should find that furnishing was considered a seriously delightful matter, though not perhaps the almost sacred trust we regard it to-day. I mean our great great-grandparents who used to live in those charming old colonial houses, and who owned the mahogany desks with brass handles and claw feet, the tall clocks, the ravishing andirons, and all the other old-fashioned furniture which is now so precious and difficult to find. Distance may lend such enchantment to a spinning-wheel, a warming-pan, or a spinnet, that one is liable to become hysterical in praise of them, and a calm, æsthetic mind, outside the limits of an antique furniture dealer’s store, would be justified in stigmatizing many of the now cherished effects of our great great-grandparents as truck; but, on the other hand, who will dispute that they possessed very many lovely things? They had an eye for graceful shapes in their sideboards and tables; somehow the curves they imparted to the backs of their chairs cannot be duplicated now so as to look the same; and the patterns of the satins, flowered chintzes, and other stuffs which they used for covers and curtains, exercise a witchery upon us, even as we see them now frayed and faded, which cannot proceed wholly from the imagination.

They had no modern comforts, poor things; no furnaces, no ice-chests, no set bath-tubs, no running water, no sanitary improvements, no gas or electric light; and their picturesque kitchen hearths, with great caldrons and cranes and leather blowers, must have been exceedingly inconvenient to cook in; but even their most incommodious appliances were not without artistic charm.

After them came the deluge—the era of horse-hair, the Sahara of democratic unloveliness, when in every house, in every country town, the set best room, which was never used by the family, stood like a mortuary chapel solely for the reception of guests. In the cities, in the households of the then enlightened, rep—generally green—was frequently substituted for the sable horse-hair. Then came the days when a dining-room or drawing-room was furnished in one pervasive hue—a suit of sables, a brick red, a dark green, or a deep maroon. Everything matched; the chairs and tables, desks and book-cases were bought in sets at one fell swoop by the householder of the period who desired to produce artistic effects. For forty years or so this was the prevailing fashion, and the limit of purely indigenous expression.

To it presently succeeded the æsthetic phase, borrowed from England. Then, instead of selecting everything to match, a young or old couple bought so as just not to match, but to harmonize. All sorts of queer and subtle shades and tints in wall-papers and fabrics appeared, principally dallyings with and improvisings upon green, brown, and yellow; frescos and dados were the rage; and a wave of interest in the scope and mission of eccentric color spread over the land. Valuable as this movement was as an educational factor, there was nothing American in it; or in other words, we were again simply imitative. The very fact, however, that we were ready to imitate, betokened that horse-hair and rep had ceased to satisfy national aspiration, and that we were willing to accept suggestions from without, inasmuch as no native prophet had arisen. But though the impetus came from abroad, the awakening was genuine. Since then the desire to furnish tastefully has been steadily waxing among the more well-to-do portion of the population. As in the case of architecture, the increasing interest has called into existence a professional class, which, though still small and less generally employed than their house-designing brethren, is beginning to play an important part in the education of the public taste in internal house decoration and equipment. The idea that any man or woman may be more fitted than his or her neighbor to choose a carpet or a wall-paper has been grudgingly admitted, and still irritates the average house-owner who is ready to furnish. But the masters, and more conspicuously the mistresses, of the competing superb establishments in our cities, have learned, from the sad experience of some of their predecessors, to swallow their individual trust in their own powers of selection, and to put themselves unreservedly into the clutches of a professional house decorator.

Furnishing a mammoth establishment from top to bottom with somebody else’s money, and plenty of it, must be a delightful occupation. There can be no carking consciousness of price to act as a drag on genius, and it would seem as though the house decorator who was not interfered with under these circumstances had a rare chance to show what is what. When he fails, which is by no means out of the question, he can ordinarily shift the responsibility on to his employer, for an employer can rarely resist the temptation of insisting on some one touch to prove his or her own capacity, and of course it is a simple matter for the man of art to demonstrate that this one touch has spoiled everything. The temptation to try to be as original and captivating in results as possible must be almost irresistible, especially when one’s elbow is constantly jogged by furniture and other dealers, who are only too eager to reproduce a Directory drawing-room or any other old-time splendor. But there is no denying that, whatever his limitations, the house decorator is becoming the best of educators on this side of the water, for though we cannot afford or have too much confidence in our own taste to employ him, our wives watch him like cats and are taking in his ideas through the pores, if not directly.

There are, it is true, almost as many diverse styles of internal ornamentation as of external architecture in our modern residences, for everyone who has, or thinks he has, an aptitude for furnishing is trying his professional or ’prentice hand, sometimes with startling results; yet the diversities seem less significant than in the case of external architecture, or perhaps it may be said that the sum total of effect is much nearer to finality or perfection. If as a nation we are deriving the inspiration for the furniture and upholsteries of our drawing-rooms and libraries from the best French and Dutch models of a century or more ago, we certainly can boast that the comfortable features which distinguish our apartments from their prototypes are a native growth. If as a people we cannot yet point to great original artistic triumphs, may we not claim the spacious and dignified contemporary refrigerator, the convenient laundry, the frequently occurring and palatial bath-room, the health-conducing ventilator-pipe and sanitary fixtures, and the various electrical and other pipes, tubes, and appliances which have become a part of every well-ordered house, as a national cult? To be genuinely comfortable in every-day life seems to have become the aim all the world over of the individual seeking to live wisely, and the rest of the world is in our debt for the many valuable mechanical aids to comfort in the home which have been invented on this side of the water.

This quest for comfort is being constantly borne in mind also in the æsthetic sense. We fit our drawing-rooms now to live in as well as to look at. We expect to sit on our sofas and in our easy chairs; hence we try to make them attractive to the back as well as to the eye. Though our wives may still occasionally pull down the window-shades to exclude a too dangerous sun, they no longer compel us to view our best rooms from the threshold as a cold, flawless, forbidden land. The extreme æsthetic tendencies which were rampant twenty years ago have been toned down by this inclination, among even our most elaborate house-furnishers, to produce the effect that rooms are intended for every-day use by rational beings. The ultra-queer colors have disappeared, and the carpets and wall-papers no longer suggest perpetual biliousness or chronic nightmare.

I think, too, the idea that a drawing-room can be made bewitchingly cosey by crowding it with all one’s beautiful and ugly earthly possessions has been demonstrated to be a delusion. In these days of many wedding presents, it is difficult for young people to resist the temptation of showing all they have received. I remember that Mrs. George J. Spriggs—she was the daughter, you will remember, of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Homer W. Green—had seven lamps in her parlor in Locust Road, three of them with umbrageous Japanese shades. Her husband explained to me that there had been a run on lamps and pepper-pots in their individual case.

Now, Mrs. Julius Cæsar would have managed more cleverly. She would have made the lamp-dealer exchange four or five of the lamps for, say, an ornamental brass fender, a brass coal-scuttle, or a Japanese tea-tray, and have made the jeweller substitute some equally desirable table ornaments for the pepper-pots. And yet, when I made my wedding call on Mrs. Cæsar, ten years ago, I remember thinking that her drawing-room was a sort of compromise between a curiosity shop and a menagerie. To begin with, I stumbled over the head of a tiger skin, which confronted me as I passed through the portière, so that I nearly fell into the arms of my hostess. It seemed to me that I had stepped into a veritable bazaar. A large bear skin lay before the fire as a hearth-rug, and on either side of the grate squatted a large, orientally conceived china dragon with an open mouth. Here and there, under furniture or in corners, were gaping frogs in bronze or china. A low plush-covered table was densely arrayed with small china dogs of every degree. On another table was spread a number of silver ornaments—a silver snuff-box, a silver whistle, a silver feather, a silver match-box, and a silver shoe-buckle—all objects of virtu of apparently antique workmanship. There were three lamps with ornamental shades—a fluted china shade, a paper shade in semblance of a full-blown rose, and a yellow satin shade with drooping fringe. From the low studded ceiling depended a vast Japanese paper lantern. Sundry and divers china vases and shepherdesses occupied the mantel-piece and the top of the book-case, and had overflowed on to a writing-table supplied with brass ornaments. There were numerous pictures, large and small, on the walls, under many of which colored china plates had been hung. There were photographs in frames everywhere. The actual space where I could stand without knocking over anything was about the size of a hat bath, and was shut in by a circle of low chairs and divans besprinkled with æsthetic yellow, green, and pink soft silk cushions. On one of these divans my hostess was reclining in a Grosvenor gallery tea-gown, so that she seemed to wallow in cushions, and Julius Cæsar himself was sunk in the depths of one of the chairs, so near the ground that his knees seemed to rest on his chin, and one might fairly have taken him for another china frog of extraordinary proportions. All this in a comparatively small room where there were several other knick-knacks which I have omitted to mention. Better this, perhaps, than the drawing-room of forty years ago, when the visitor’s gaze was bounded by cold green rep, and he was restrained only by decorum from hurling into the fire the tidy or antimacassar which tickled his neck, or detached itself and wriggled down between his back and the back of the chair.

But Mrs. Cæsar’s drawing-room, in her new house on Belport Avenue, has been furnished from a very different point of view than her first one, which shows how rapidly tastes change in a progressive society. Mrs. Cæsar and Julius chose everything themselves this time as they did before, but they had learned from experience, and from the new work of the contemporary decorator. There is plenty of unoccupied space now to show her possessions to advantage, and there are not too many possessions visible for the size of the parlor; there is neither so much uniformity of color and design as to weary the eye, nor so much variety or eccentricity as to irritate it; consequently, the effect on the visitor is not that he is in a room intended for luxurious display, but in an exquisitely furnished room adapted for daily use. In other words, the controlling idea at present, of those who seek to make their houses charming, seems to be to combine comfort with elegance so skilfully that while one may realize the latter, one is conscious only of the former. Though decorators are still experimenting, as probably they always will be, to attain novel effects, they are disposed to make use of queer or attenuated hues, Moorish blazonry, stamped leather, peacock feathers, elephant tusks, stained-glass windows, and Japanese lacquer-work with much more discretion than a few years ago. Virgin-white instead of dirt-brown lights up our halls and stair-cases, and the vast chandeliers which used to dazzle the eye no longer dangle from the ceiling. Indeed, it seems as though it would be difficult to make the interior of the homes of our well-to-do class more comfortable and attractive than they are at present. It may be that some of our very rich people are disposed to waste their energies in devising and striving for more consummate elegance, thereby exposing us all to the charge that we are becoming too luxurious for our spiritual good. But there can be little question that the ambition to surround one’s self with as much beauty, consistent with comfort, as one can afford is desirable, even from the ethical standpoint.

Undeniably our point of view has changed extraordinarily in the last thirty years in regard to house-furnishing, as in regard to so many other matters of our material welfare, and there certainly is some ground for fearing that the pendulum is swinging just at present too far in the direction opposite to that of high thinking and low living; but, after all, though the reaction from ugliness has been and continues to be exuberant, it is as yet by no means wide-embracing. In fact, our cultivated well-to-do class—though it is well abreast of the rest of the civilized world in aspiration and not far behind it in accomplishment, with certain vivifying traits of its own which the old world societies do not possess or have lost—is still comparatively small; and there is still so much Stygian darkness outside it in respect to house-furnishing and home comfort in general, that we can afford to have the exuberance continue for the present; for there is some reason to believe that most of the descendants of our old high thinkers have become high livers, or at least, if low livers, have ceased to be high thinkers. Mutton-soup for breakfast and unattractive domestic surroundings seem to comport nowadays with ignoble aims, if nothing worse; moreover, it must not be forgotten that the plain people of the present is no longer the plain people of forty years ago, but is largely the seed of the influx of foreign peasants, chiefly inferior and often scum, which the sacredness of our institutions has obliged us to receive.

House-Furnishing and the Commissariat.

II.

If we have become cosmopolitan in the matter of domestic comfort and elegance as regards our drawing-rooms, the same is certainly true of our dining-rooms, and dinner-tables. But here it seems to me that we are more justly open to criticism on the score of over-exuberance. That is, the fairly well-to-do class, for the plain people of foreign blood, and the low liver of native blood, eat almost as indigestible food, and quite as rapidly and unceremoniously, as the pie and doughnut nurtured yeoman of original Yankee stock, who thrived in spite of his diet, and left to his grandchildren the heritage of dyspepsia which has become nervous prostration in the present generation. It seems as though our instincts of hospitality have grown in direct ratio with our familiarity with and adoption of civilized creature comforts, and any charge of exuberance may doubtless be fairly ascribed to the national trait of generosity, the abuse of which is after all a noble blemish. But, on the other hand, facts remain, even after one has given a pleasing excuse for their existence, and it may be doubted if a spendthrift is long consoled by the reflection that his impecuniosity is due to his own disinclination to stint. May it not truthfully be charged against the reasonably well-to-do American citizen that he has a prejudice against thrift, especially where the entertainment of his fellow man or woman is concerned? The rapid growth of wealth and the comparative facility of becoming rich during the last half century of our development, has operated against the practice of small economies, so that we find ourselves now beset by extravagant traditions which we hesitate to deviate from for fear of seeming mean. Many a man to-day pays his quarter of a dollar ruefully and begrudgingly to the colored Pullman car porter at the end of his journey, when he is “brushed off,” because he cannot bring himself to break the custom which fixed the fee. It would be interesting to estimate what the grand total of saving to the American travelling public would have been if ten instead of twenty-five cents a head had been paid to the tyrant in question since he first darkened the situation. If not enough to maintain free schools for the negro, at least sufficient to compel railroad managements to give their employees suitable wages instead of letting the easy-going traveller, who has already paid for the privilege of a reserved seat, pay a premium on that. The exorbitant fees bestowed on waiters is but another instance of a tendency to be over-generous, which, once reduced to custom, becomes the severest kind of tax, in that it is likely to affect the warmest-hearted people.

This tendency to be needlessly lavish in expenditure is most conspicuous when we are offering hospitality in our own homes. Among the viands which we have added to the bills of fare of humanity, roast turkey and cranberry-sauce, Indian meal, and probably baked beans, are entitled to conspicuous and honorable mention, but is it not true, notwithstanding champagne is a foreign wine, that the most prodigious discovery in the line of food or drink yet made by the well-to-do people of this country, is the discovery of champagne? Does it not flow in one golden effervescing stream, varied only by the pops caused by the drawing of fresh corks, from the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World to the Golden Gate? And the circumstance that every pop costs the entertainer between three and four dollars, seems in no wise to interrupt the cheery explosions. There are some people who do not drink champagne or any other wine, from principle, and there are some with whom it does not agree, but the average individual finds that the interest of festive occasions is heightened by its presence in reasonable abundance, and is apt to deplore its total absence with internal groans. But surely ninety-nine men in our large cities out of one hundred, who are accustomed to entertain and be entertained, must be weary of the sight of this expensive tempter at the feast, which it is so difficult to refuse when set before one, and which is so often quaffed against better judgment or inclination. The champagne breakfast, the champagne luncheon, the champagne dinner, and the champagne supper, with a champagne cocktail tossed in as a stop-gap, hound the social favorite from January to December, until he is fain to dream of the Old Oaken Bucket, and sooner or later to drink Lithia water only.

With perpetual and unremitting champagne as the key-note of social gatherings, no wonder that the table ornaments and the comestibles become more splendid. A little dinner of eight or ten is no longer a simple matter of a cordial invitation and an extra course. The hostess who bids her contemporaries to dine with her most informally ten days hence, uses a figure of speech which is innocuous from the fact that it is known to be a deliberate falsehood. She begins generally by engaging a cook from outside to prepare the dinner, which must surely wound the sensibilities of any self-respecting couple the first time, however hardened to the situation they may become later.

At this stage of my reflections I am interrupted by my wife, Barbara—for I was thinking aloud—with a few words of expostulation.

“Are you not a little severe? I assume that you are referring now to people with a comfortable income, but who are not disgustingly rich. Of course, nowadays, the very rich people keep cooks who can cook for a dinner-party, cooks at eight dollars or more a week and a kitchen maid; so it is only the hostess with a cook at four and a half to six dollars a week and no kitchen maid who is likely to engage an accommodator. But what is the poor thing to do? Give a wretched, or plain dinner which may make her hair grow white in a single night? Surely, when a woman invites friends to her house she does not wish them to go away half starved, or remembering that they have had disagreeable things to eat. In that case she would prefer not to entertain at all.”

“The question is,” I answered, “whether it is more sensible to try to be content with what one has, or to vie with those who are better off. We do not attempt to dine on gold plate, nor have we a piano decorated with a five-thousand-dollar painting by one of the great artists, like Patterson, the banker. Why should we endeavor to compete with his kitchen?”

“The clever thing, of course, is to find a cook for six dollars a week who can cook for a dinner-party,” answered Barbara, pensively; “and yet,” she added, “though our cook can, the chances are that nine out of ten of the people who dine with us think that we hired her for the occasion.”

“Precisely. Just because the custom has grown so. It is sheer extravagance.”

“After all, my dear, it is a comparatively small matter—a five-dollar bill.”

“Pardon me. Five dollars for the cook, because one’s own cook is not good enough; three or five dollars for an accommodating maid or waiter, because you cannot trust your chamber-maid to assist your waitress; eight dollars for champagne, and so on.”

“Do not say ‘your’—mine can.”

“Her, then—the woman of the day. I am trying to show that a small informal dinner is a cruelly expensive affair for the average man with a comfortable working income.”

“I admit that a dinner for eight or ten is expensive,” said Barbara. “It means twenty-five dollars at the lowest, even if you have your own cook. But what is one to do? You don’t seem to appreciate that a good plain cook cannot usually prepare dinner-party dishes, and that a plain dinner is now almost as different from a dinner-party dinner as a boiled egg is from caviare.”

“Precisely. There is the pity of it. The growth here of the French restaurant and the taste for rich and elaborate cookery has doubtless been a good thing in its way, if only that it is now possible to obtain a tolerably well-cooked meal at most of the hotels in our large cities and principal watering-places; but why should people of moderate means and social instincts feel constrained to offer a banquet on every occasion when they entertain? I for one consider it a bore to have so much provided when I go out to dinner.”

“You must admit,” said Barbara, “that dinners are not nearly so long as they were a few years ago. Now, by means of the extra service you complain of, and by keeping the number of courses down, a dinner ought not to last longer than an hour and a half, whereas it used to take two hours and over. In England they are much worse than here. You are given, for instance, two puddings, one after the other, and ices to follow.”

“I agree,” said I, “that we have curtailed the length so that there is not much to complain of on that score. I think, though, that comparatively plain dishes well served are quite as apt to please as the aspics, chartreuses, timbales, and other impressive gallicisms under which the accommodating party cook is wont to cater to the palates of informally invited guests. I sometimes think that the very few of our great great-grandfathers who knew how to live at all must have had more appetizing tables than we. Their family cooks, from all accounts, knew how to roast and boil and bake and stew, culinary arts which somehow seem to be little understood by the chefs of to-day. Then again, the old-fashioned Delft crockery—blue ships sailing on a blue sea—was very attractive. Our modern dinner-tables, when arrayed for a party, have almost too much fuss and feathers. Women worry until they get cut glass, if it is not given them as a wedding present, and several sets of costly plates—Sèvres, Dresden, or Crown Derby—are apt to seem indispensable to housekeepers of comparatively limited means.”

“Cut glass is lovely, and the same plates through seven courses are rather trying,” said Barbara, parenthetically.

“Of course it is lovely, and I am very glad you have some. But is not the modern American woman of refined sensibilities just a little too eager to crowd her table with every article of virtu she possesses—every ornamental spoon, dish, cup, and candlestick—until one is unable to see at any one spot more than a square inch of tablecloth? In the centre of the table she sets a crystal bowl of flowers, a silver basket of ferns, or a dish of fruit. This is flanked by apostle or gold-lined spoons, silver dishes of confectionery of various kinds, silver candlesticks or candelabra fitted with pink or saffron shades, one or two of which are expected to catch fire, an array of cut glass or Venetian glass at every plate, and, like as not, pansies strewn all over the table.”

“The modern dinner-table is very pretty,” responded Barbara. “I don’t see how it could be improved materially.”

“I dare say, but somehow one can’t help thinking at times that the effort for effect is too noticeable, and that the real object of sitting down to dinner in company, agreeable social intercourse, is consequently lost sight of. If only the very rich were guilty of wanton display, the answer would be that the rank and file of our well-to-do, sensible people have very simple entertainments. Unfortunately, while the very rich are constantly vying to outstrip one another, the dinner-table and the dinner of the well-to-do American are each growing more and more complex and elaborate. Perhaps not more so than abroad among the nobility or people of means; but certainly we have been Europeanized in this respect to such an extent that, not only is there practically nothing left for us to learn in the way of being luxurious, but I am not sure that we are not disposed to convince the rest of the civilized world that a free-born American, when fully developed, can be the most luxurious individual on earth.”

Barbara looked a little grave at this. “Everything used to be so ugly and unattractive a little while ago that I suppose our heads have been turned,” she answered. “After this I shall make a rule, when we give a dinner-party, to keep one-half of my table ornaments in the safe as a rebuke to my vanity. Only if I am to show so much of the tablecloth, I shall have to buy some with handsome patterns. Don’t you see?”

Perhaps this suggestion that our heads have been turned for the time being by our national prosperity, and that they will become straight again in due course of time, is the most sensible view to take of the situation. There can be no doubt that among well-to-do people, who would object to be classed in “the smart set,” as the reporters of social gossip odiously characterize those prominent in fashionable society in our large cities, the changes in the last thirty years connected with every-day living, as well as with entertaining, have all been in the direction of cosmopolitan usage. It is now only a very old-fashioned or a very blatant person who objects to the use of evening dress at the dinner-table, or the theatre, as inconsistent with true patriotism. The dinner-hour has steadily progressed from twelve o’clock noon until it has halted at seven post meridian, as the ordinary hour for the most formal meal of the day, with further postponement to half-past seven or even eight among the fashionable for the sake of company. The frying-pan and the tea-pot have ceased to reign supreme as the patron saints of female nutrition, and the beefsteak, the egg, both cooked and raw, milk and other flesh-and-blood-producing food are abundantly supplied to the rising generation of both sexes by the provident parent of to-day. The price of beef in our large cities has steadily advanced in price until its use as an article of diet is a serious monster to encounter in the monthly bills, but the husband and father who is seeking to live wisely, seems not to be deterred from providing it abundantly.

From this it is evident that if we are unduly exuberant in the pursuit of creature comforts, it is not solely in the line of purely ornamental luxuries. If we continue to try our nervous systems by undue exertion, they are at least better fitted to stand the strain, by virtue of plenty of nutritious food, even though dinner-parties tempt us now and then to over-indulgence, or bore us by their elaborateness. Yet it remains to be seen whether the income of the American husband and father will be able to stand the steady drain occasioned by the liberal table he provides, and it may be that we have some lessons in thrift on this score still in store for us. There is this consolation, that if our heads have been turned in this respect also, and we are supplying more food for our human furnaces than they need, the force of any reaction will not fall on us, but on the market-men, who are such a privileged class that our candidates for public office commonly provide a rally for their special edification just before election-day, and whose white smock-frocks are commonly a cloak for fat though greasy purses. Yet Providence seems to smile on the market-man in that it has given him the telephone, through which the modern mistress can order her dinner, or command chops or birds, when unexpected guests are foreshadowed. Owing to the multiplicity of the demands upon the time of both men and women, the custom of going to market in person has largely fallen into decay. The butcher and grocer send assistants to the house for orders, and the daily personal encounter with the smug man in white, which used to be as inevitable as the dinner, has now mainly been relegated to the blushing bride of from one week to two years’ standing, and the people who pay cash for everything. Very likely we are assessed for the privilege of not being obliged to nose our turkeys and see our chops weighed in advance, and it is difficult to answer the strictures of those who sigh for what they call the good old times, when it was every man’s duty, before he went to his office, to look over his butcher’s entire stock and select the fattest and juiciest edibles for the consumption of himself and family. As for paying cash for everything, my wife Barbara says that, unless people are obliged to be extremely economical, no woman in this age of nervous prostration ought to run the risk of bringing on that dire malady by any such imprudence, and that to save five dollars a month on a butcher’s bill, and pay twenty-five to a physician for ruined nerves, is false political economy.

“I agree with you,” she added, “that we Americans live extravagantly in the matter of daily food—especially meat—as compared with the general run of people in other countries; but far more serious than our appetites and liberal habits, in my opinion, is the horrible waste which goes on in our kitchens, due to the fact that our cooks are totally ignorant of the art of making the most of things. Abroad, particularly on the Continent, they understand how to utilize every scrap, so that many a comfortable meal is provided from what our servants habitually cast into the swill-tub. Here there is perpetual waste—waste—waste, and no one seems to understand how to prevent it. There you have one never-failing reason for the size of our butchers’ and grocers’ bills.”

I assume that my wife, who is an intelligent person, must be correct in this accusation of general wastefulness which she makes against the American kitchen. If so, here we are confronted again with the question of domestic service from another point of view. How long can we afford to throw our substance into the swill-tub? If our emigrant cooks do not understand the art of utilizing scraps and remnants, are we to continue to enrich our butchers without let or hindrance? It would seem that if the American housewife does not take this matter in hand promptly, the cruel laws of political economy will soon convince her by grisly experience that neither poetry nor philanthropy can flourish in a land where there is perpetual waste below stairs.

Education.

I.

On occasions of oratory in this country, nothing will arouse an audience more quickly than an allusion to our public school system, and any speaker who sees fit to apostrophize it is certain to be fervidly applauded. Moreover, in private conversation, whether with our countrymen or with foreigners, every citizen is prone to indulge in the statement, commonly uttered with some degree of emotion, that our public schools are the great bulwarks of progressive democracy. Why, then, is the American parent, as soon as he becomes well-to-do, apt to send his children elsewhere?

I was walking down town with a friend the other day, and he asked me casually where I sent my boys to school. When I told him that they attended a public school he said, promptly, “Good enough. I like to see a man do it. It’s the right thing.” I acquiesced modestly; then, as I knew that he had a boy of his own, I asked him the same question.

“My son,” he replied slowly, “goes to Mr. Bingham’s”—indicating a private school for boys in the neighborhood. “He is a little delicate—that is, he had measles last summer, and has never quite recovered his strength. I had almost made up my mind to send him to a public school, so that he might mix with all kinds of boys, but his mother seemed to think that the chances of his catching scarlet fever or diphtheria would be greater, and she has an idea that he would make undesirable acquaintances and learn things which he shouldn’t. So, on the whole, we decided to send him to Bingham’s. But I agree that you are right.”

There are many men in the community who, like my friend, believe thoroughly that every one would do well to send his boys to a public school—that is, every one but themselves. When it comes to the case of their own flesh and blood they hesitate, and in nine instances out of ten, on some plea or other, turn their backs on the principles they profess. This is especially true in our cities, and it has been more or less true ever since the Declaration of Independence; and as a proof of the flourishing condition of the tendency at present, it is necessary merely to instance the numerous private schools all over the country. The pupils at these private schools are the children of our people of means and social prominence, the people who ought to be the most patriotic citizens of the Republic.

I frankly state that I, for one, would not send my boys to a public school unless I believed the school to be a good one. Whatever other motives may influence parents, there is no doubt that many are finally deterred from sending their boys to a public school by the conviction that the education offered to their sons in return for taxes is inferior to what can be obtained by private contract. Though a father may be desirous to have his boys understand early the theory of democratic equality, he may well hesitate to let them remain comparatively ignorant in order to impress upon them this doctrine. In this age, when so much stress is laid on the importance of giving one’s children the best education possible, it seems too large a price to pay. Why, after all, should a citizen send his boys to a school provided by the State, if better schools exist in the neighborhood which he can afford to have them attend?

This conviction on the part of parents is certainly justified in many sections of the country, and when justifiable, disarms the critic who is prepared to take a father to task for sending his children to a private school. Also, it is the only argument which the well-to-do aristocrat can successfully protect himself behind. It is a full suit of armor in itself, but it is all he has. Every other excuse which he can give is flimsy as tissue-paper, and exposes him utterly. Therefore, if the State is desirous to educate the sons of its leading citizens, it ought to make sure that the public schools are second to none in the land. If it does not, it has only itself to blame if they are educated apart from the sons of the masses of the population. Nor is it an answer to quote the Fourth of July orator, that our public schools are second to none in the world; for one has only to investigate to be convinced that, both as regards the methods of teaching and as regards ventilation, many of them all over the country are signally inferior to the school as it should be, and the school, both public and private, as it is in certain localities. So long as school boards and committees, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, are composed mainly of political aspirants without experience in educational matters, and who seek to serve as a first or second step toward the White House, our public schools are likely to remain only pretty good. So long as people with axes to grind, or, more plainly speaking, text-books to circulate, are chosen to office, our public schools are not likely to improve. So long—and here is the most serious factor of all—so long as the well-to-do American father and mother continue to be sublimely indifferent to the condition of the public schools, the public schools will never be so good as they ought to be.

It must certainly be a source of constant discouragement to the earnest-minded people in this country, who are interested in education, and are at the same time believers in our professed national hostility to class distinctions, that the well-to-do American parent so calmly turns his back on the public schools, and regards them very much from the lofty standpoint from which certain persons are wont to regard religion—as an excellent thing for the masses, but superfluous for themselves. Of course, if we are going, in this respect also, to model ourselves on and imitate the older civilizations, there is nothing to be said. If the public schools are to be merely a semi-charitable institution for children whose parents cannot afford to separate them from the common herd, the discussion ceases. But what becomes, then, of our cherished and Fourth of July sanctified theories of equality and common school education? And what do we mean when we prate of a common humanity, and no upper class?

It is in the city or town, where the public school is equal or superior to the private school, that the real test comes. Yet in these places well-to-do parents seem almost as indifferent as when they have the righteous defence that their children would be imperfectly educated, or breathe foul air, were they to be sent to a public school. They take no interest, and they fairly bristle with polite and ingenious excuses for evading compliance with the institutions of their country. This is true, probably, of three-fifths of those parents, who can afford, if necessary, to pay for private instruction. And having once made the decision that, for some reason, a public school education is not desirable for their children, they feel absolved from further responsibility and practically wash their hands of the matter. It is notorious that a very large proportion of the children of the leading bankers, merchants, professional men, and other influential citizens, who reside in the so-called court end of our large cities, do not attend the public schools, and it is equally notorious that the existence of a well-conducted and satisfactory school in the district affects the attendance comparatively little. If only this element of the population, which is now so indifferent, would interest itself actively, what a vast improvement could be effected in our public school system! If the parents in the community, whose standards of life are the highest, and whose ideas are the most enlightened, would as a class co-operate in the advancement of common education, the charge that our public schools produce on the whole second-rate acquirements, and second-rate morals and manners, would soon be refuted, and the cause of popular education would cease to be handicapped, as it is at present, by the coolness of the well-to-do class. If the public schools, in those sections of our cities where our most intelligent and influential citizens have their homes, are unsatisfactory, they could speedily be made as good as any private school, were the same interest manifested by the tax-payers as is shown when an undesirable pavement is laid, or a company threatens to provide rapid transit before their doors. Unfortunately, that same spirit of aloofness, which has in the past operated largely to exclude this element in the nation from participation in the affairs of popular government, seems to be at the bottom of this matter. Certainly much progress has been made in the last twenty years in remedying the political evil, and the public good appears to demand a change of front from the same class of people on the subject of common education, unless we are prepared to advocate the existence and growth of a favored, special class, out of touch with, and at heart disdainful of, the average citizen.

The most serious enemies of the public schools among well-to-do people appear to be women. Many a man, alive to the importance of educating his sons in conformity with the spirit of our Constitution, would like to send his boys to a public school, but is deterred by his wife. A mother accustomed to the refinements of modern civilization is apt to shrink from sending her fleckless darling to consort, and possibly become the boon companion or bosom friend, of a street waif.

She urges the danger of contamination, both physical and moral, and is only too glad to discover an excuse for refusing to yield. “Would you like to have your precious boy sit side by side with a little negro?” I was asked one day, in horrified accents, by a well-to-do American mother; and I have heard many fears expressed by others that their offspring would learn vice, or contract disease, through daily association with the children of the mass. It is not unjust to state that the average well-to-do mother is gratified when the public school, to which her sons would otherwise be sent, is so unsatisfactory that their father’s patriotism is overborne by other considerations. All theories of government or humanity are lost sight of in her desire to shelter her boys, and the simplest way to her seems to be to set them apart from the rest of creation, instead of taking pains to make sure that they are suitably taught and protected side by side with the other children of the community.

Excellent as many of our private schools are, it is doubtful if either the morals are better, or the liability to disease is less, among the children who attend them than at a public school of the best class. To begin with, the private schools in our cities are eagerly patronized by that not inconsiderable class of parents who hope or imagine that the social position of their children is to be established by association with the children of influential people. Falsehood, meanness, and unworthy ambitions are quite as dangerous to character, when the little man who suggests them has no patches on his breeches, as when he has, and unfortunately there are no outward signs on the moral nature, like holes in trousers, to serve as danger signals to our darlings. Then again, those of us who occupy comfortable houses in desirable localities, will generally find on investigation that the average of the class of children which attend the public school in such a district is much superior to what paternal or maternal fancy has painted. In such a district the children of the ignorant emigrant class are not to be found in large numbers. The pupils consist mainly of the rank and file of the native American population, whose tendencies and capacities for good have always been, and continue to be, the basis of our strength as a people. There is no need that a mother with delicate sensibilities should send her son into the slums in order to obtain for him a common school education; she has merely to consent that he take his chances with the rest of the children of the district in which he lives, and bend her own energies to make the standards of that school as high as possible. In that way she will best help to raise the tone of the community as a whole, and best aid to obliterate those class distinctions which, in spite of Fourth of July negations, are beginning to expose us to the charge of insincerity.

When a boy has reached the age of eleven or twelve, another consideration presents itself which is a source of serious perplexity to parents. Shall he be educated at home—that is, attend school in his own city or town—or be sent to one of the boarding-schools or academies which are ready to open their doors to him and fit him for college? Here again we are met by the suggestion that the boarding-school of this type is not a native growth, but an exotic. England has supplied us with a precedent. The great boarding-schools, Rugby, Eton, and Harrow, are the resort of the gentlemen of England. Though termed public schools, they are class schools, reserved and intended for the education of only the highly respectable. The sons of the butcher, the baker, and candlestick-maker are not formally barred, but they are tacitly excluded. The pupils are the sons of the upper and well-to-do middle classes. A few boarding-schools for boys have been in existence here for many years, but in the last twenty there has been a notable increase in their number and importance. These, too, are essentially class schools, for though ostensibly open to everybody, the charges for tuition and living are beyond the means of parents with a small income. Most of them are schools of a religious denomination, though commonly a belief in the creed for which the institution stands is not made a formal requisite for admission. The most successful profess the Episcopalian faith, and in other essential respects are modelled deliberately on the English public schools.

The strongest argument for sending a boy to one of these schools is the fresh-air plea. Undeniably, the growing boy in a large city is at a disadvantage. He can rarely, if ever, obtain opportunities for healthful exercise and recreation equal to those afforded by a well-conducted boarding-school. He is likely to become a little man too early, or else to sit in the house because there is nowhere to play. At a boarding-school he will, under firm but gentle discipline, keep regular hours, eat simple food, and between study times be stimulated to cultivate athletic or other outdoor pursuits. It is not strange that parents should be attracted by the comparison, and decide that, on the whole, their boys will fare better away from home. Obviously the aristocratic mother will point out to her husband that his predilection for the public school system is answered by the fact that the State does not supply schools away from the city, where abundant fresh air and a famous foot-ball field are appurtenant to the institution. Tom Brown at Rugby recurs to them both, and they conclude that what has been good enough for generations of English boys will be best for their own son and heir.

On the other hand, have we Americans ever quite reconciled ourselves to, and sympathized with, the traditional attitude of English parents toward their sons as portrayed in veracious fiction? The day of parting comes; the mother, red-eyed from secret weeping, tries not to break down; the blubbering sisters throw their arms around the neck of the hero of the hour, and slip pen-wipers of their own precious making into his pockets; the father, abnormally stern to hide his emotion, says, bluffly, “Good-by, Tom; it’s time to be off, and we’ll see you again at Christmas.” And out goes Tom, a tender fledgeling, into the great world of the public school, and that is the last of home. His holidays arrive, but there is no more weeping. He is practically out of his parents’ lives, and the sweet influence of a good mother is exercised only through fairly regular correspondence. And Tom is said to be getting manly, and that the nonsense has nearly been knocked out of him. He has been bullied and has learned to bully; he has been a fag and is now a cock. Perhaps he is first scholar, if not a hero of the cricket or foot-ball field. Then off he goes to college, half a stranger to those who love him best.

This is fine and manly perhaps, in the Anglo-Saxon sense, but does it not seem just a little brutal? Are we well-to-do Americans prepared to give up to others, however exemplary, the conduct of our children’s lives? Granting that the American private boarding-school is a delightful institution, where bullying and fags and cocks are not known, can it ever take the place of home, or supply the stimulus to individual life which is exercised by wise parental love and precept? Of course, it is easier, in a certain sense, to send one’s boy to a select boarding-school, where the conditions are known to be highly satisfactory. It shifts the responsibility on to other shoulders, and yet leaves one who is not sensitive, in the pleasing frame of mind that the very best thing has been done for the young idea. In our busy American life—more feverish than that of our English kinsfolk whose institution we have copied—many doubtless are induced to seek this solution of a perplexing problem by the consciousness of their own lack of efficiency, and their own lack of leisure to provide a continuous home influence superior or equal to what can be supplied by headmasters and their assistants, who are both churchmen and athletes. Many, too, especially fathers, are firm believers in that other English doctrine, that most boys need to have the nonsense knocked out of them, and that the best means of accomplishing this result is to cut them loose from their mothers’ apron-strings.

It is to be borne in mind in this connection that the great English public schools are a national cult. That is, everybody above a certain class sends his sons to one of them. On the other hand, the private boarding-schools on this side of the water, fashioned after them, have thus far attracted the patronage of a very small element of the population. It is their misfortune, rather than their fault, that they are chiefly the resort of the sons of rich or fashionable people, and consequently are the most conspicuously class schools in the country. Doubtless the earnest men who conduct most of them regret that this is so, but it is one of the factors of the case which the American parent with sons must face at present. It may be that this is to be the type of school which is to become predominant here, and that, as in England, the nation will recognize it as a national force, even though here, as there, only the sons of the upper classes enjoy its advantages. That will depend partly on the extent to which we shall decide, as a society, to promote further class education. At present these schools are essentially private institutions. They are small; they do not, like our American colleges, offer scholarships, and thus invite the attendance of ambitious students without means. Moreover, they are almost universally conducted on a sectarian basis, or with a sectarian leaning, which is apt to proselytize, at least indirectly.

While those in charge of them indisputably strive to inculcate every virtue, the well-to-do American father must remember that his sons will associate intimately there with many boys whose parents belong to that frivolous class which is to-day chiefly absorbed in beautiful establishments, elaborate cookery, and the wholly material vanities of life, and are out of sympathy with, or are indifferent to, the earnest temper and views of that already large and intelligent portion of the community, which views with horror the development among us of an aristocracy of wealth, which apes and is striving to outdo the heartless inanities of the Old World. He must remember that a taste for luxury and sensuous, material aims, even though they be held in check by youthful devotion to the rites of the church, will prove no less disastrous, in the long run, to manhood and patriotism, than the lack of fresh air or a famous foot-ball field.

If, however, the American father chooses to keep his sons at home, he is bound to do all he can to overcome the physical disadvantages of city life. Fresh air and suitable exercise can be obtained in the suburbs of most cities by a little energy and co-operation on the part of parents. As an instance, in one or two of our leading cities, clubs of twelve to fifteen boys are sent out three or four afternoons a week under the charge of an older youth—usually a college or other student—who, without interfering with their liberty, supervises their sports, and sees that they are well occupied. On days when the weather is unsuitable for any kind of game, he will take them to museums, manufactories, or other places of interest in the vicinity. In this way some of the watchfulness and discipline which are constantly operative at a boarding-school, are exercised without injury to home ties. There is no doubt that, unless parents are vigilant and interest themselves unremittingly in providing necessary physical advantages, the boys in a crowded city are likely to be less healthy and vigorous in body, and perhaps in mind, than those educated at a first-class boarding-school. It may be, as our cities increase in size, and suburbs become more difficult of access, that the boarding-school will become more generally popular; but there is reason to believe that, before it is recognized as a national institution, sectarian religion will have ceased to control it, and it will be less imitative of England in its tone and social attitude. Until then, at least, many a parent will prefer to keep his boys at home.

Education.

II.

“Supposing you had four daughters, like Mr. Perkins, what would you do with them, educationally speaking?” I said to my wife Barbara, by way of turning my attention to the other sex.

“You mean what would they do with me? They would drive me into my grave, I think,” she answered. “Woman’s horizon has become so enlarged that no mother can tell what her next daughter may not wish to do. I understand, though, that you are referring simply to schools. To begin with, I take for granted you will agree that American parents, who insist on sending their boys to a public school, very often hesitate or decline point-blank to send their girls.”

“Precisely. And we are forthwith confronted by the question whether they are justified in so doing.”

Barbara looked meditative for a moment, then she said: “I am quite aware there is no logical reason why girls should not be treated in the same way, and yet as a matter of fact I am not at all sure, patriotism and logic to the contrary notwithstanding, I should send a daughter to a public school unless I were convinced, from personal examination, that she would have neither a vulgar teacher nor vulgar associates. Manners mean so much to a woman, and by manners I refer chiefly to those nice perceptions of everything which stamp a lady, and which you can no more describe than you can describe the perfume of the violet. The objection to the public schools for a girl is that the unwritten constitution of this country declared years ago that every woman was a born lady, and that manners and nice perceptions were in the national blood, and required no cultivation for their production. Latterly, a good many people interested in educational matters have discovered the fallacy of this point of view; so that when the name of a woman to act as the head of a college or other first-class institution for girls is brought forward to-day, the first question asked is, ‘Is she a lady?’ Ten years ago mental acquirements would have been regarded as sufficient, and the questioner silenced with the severe answer that every American woman is a lady. The public school authorities are still harping too much on the original fallacy, or rather the new point of view has not spread sufficiently to cause the average American school-teacher to suspect that her manners might be improved and her sensibilities refined. There, that sounds like treason to the principles of democracy, yet you know I am at heart a patriot.”

“And yet to bring up boys on a common basis and separate the girls by class education seems like a contradiction of terms,” I said.

“I am confident—at least if we as a nation really do believe in obliterating class distinctions—that it won’t be long before those who control the public schools recognize more universally the value of manners, and of the other traits which distinguish the woman of breeding from the woman who has none,” said Barbara. “When that time comes the well-to-do American mother will have no more reason for not sending her daughters to a public school than her sons. As it is, they should send them oftener than they do.”

“Of course,” continued Barbara, presently, “the best private schools are in the East, and a very much larger percentage, both of girls and boys, attends the public schools in the West than in the East. Indeed, I am inclined to think that comparatively few people west of Chicago do not send their children to public schools. But, on the other hand, there are boarding-schools for girls all over the East which are mainly supported by girls from the West, whose mothers wish to have them finished. They go to the public schools at home until they are thirteen or fourteen, and then are packed off to school for three or four years in order to teach them how to move, and wear their hair, and spell, and control their voices—for the proper modulation of the voice has at last been recognized as a necessary attribute of the well-bred American woman. As for the Eastern girl who is not sent to the public school, she usually attends a private day-school in her native city, the resources of which are supplemented by special instruction of various kinds, in order to produce the same finished specimen. But it isn’t the finished specimen who is really interesting from the educational point of view to-day; that is, the conventional, cosmopolitan, finished specimen such as is turned out with deportment and accomplishments from the hands of the English governess, the French Mother Superior, or the American private school-mistress.

“After making due allowance for the national point of view, I don’t see very much difference in principle between the means adopted to finish the young lady of society here and elsewhere. There are thousands of daughters of well-to-do mothers in this country who are brought up on the old aristocratic theory that a woman should study moderately hard until she is eighteen, then look as pretty as she can, and devote herself until she is married to having what is called on this side of the Atlantic a good time. To be sure, in France the good time does not come until after marriage, and there are other differences, but the well-bred lady of social graces is the well-bred lady, whether it be in London, Paris, Vienna, or New York, and a ball-room in one capital is essentially the same as in all the others, unless it be that over here the very young people are allowed to crowd out everybody else. There are thousands of mothers who are content that this should be the limit of their daughter’s experience, a reasonably good education and perfect manners, four years of whirl, and then a husband, or no husband and a conservative afternoon tea-drinking spinsterhood—and they are thankful on the whole when their girls put their necks meekly beneath the yoke of convention and do as past generations of women all over the civilized world have done. For the reign of the unconventional society young woman is over. She shocks now her own countrywoman even more than foreigners; and though, like the buffalo, she is still extant, she is disappearing even more rapidly than that illustrious quadruped.”

“Are you not wandering slightly from the topic?” I ventured to inquire.

“Not at all,” said Barbara. “I was stating merely that the Old-World, New-World young lady, with all her originality and piquancy, however charming, and however delightfully inevitable she may be, is not interesting from the educational point of view. Or rather I will put it in this way: the thoughtful, well-to-do American mother is wondering hard whether she has a right to be content with the ancient programme for her daughters, and is watching with eager interest the experiments which some of her neighbors are trying with theirs. We cannot claim as an exclusive national invention collegiate education for women, and there’s no doubt that my sex in England is no less completely on the war-path than the female world here; but is there a question that the peculiar qualities of American womanhood are largely responsible for the awakening wherever it has taken place? My dear, you asked me just now what a man like Mr. Perkins should do with his four daughters. Probably Mrs. Perkins is trying to make up her mind whether she ought to send them to college. Very likely she is arguing with Mr. Perkins as to whether, all things considered, it wouldn’t be advisable to have one or two of them study a profession, or learn to do something bread-winning, so that in case he, poor man—for he does look overworked—should not succeed in leaving them the five thousand dollars a year he hopes, they need not swell the category of the decayed gentlewoman of the day. I dare say they discuss the subject assiduously, in spite of the views Mr. Perkins has expressed to you regarding the sacredness of unemployed feminine gentility; for it costs so much to live that he can’t lay up a great deal, and there are certainly strong arguments in favor of giving such girls the opportunity to make the most of themselves, or at least to look at life from the self-supporting point of view. At first, of course, the students at the colleges for women were chiefly girls who hoped to utilize, as workers in various lines, the higher knowledge they acquired there; but every year sees more and more girls, who expect to be married sooner or later—the daughters of lawyers, physicians, merchants—apply for admission, on the theory that what is requisite for a man is none too good for them; and it is the example of these girls which is agitating the serenity of so many mothers, and suggesting to so many daughters the idea of doing likewise. Even the ranks of the most fashionable are being invaded, though undeniably it is still the fashion to stay at home, and I am inclined to think that it is only the lack of the seal of fashion that restrains many conservative people, like the Perkinses, from educating their daughters as though they probably would not be married, instead of as though they were almost certain to be.”

“You may remember that Perkins assured me not long ago, that marriage did not run in the Perkins female line,” said I.

“All the more reason, then, that his girls should be encouraged to equip themselves thoroughly in some direction or other, instead of waiting disconsolately to be chosen in marriage, keeping up their courage as the years slip away, with a few cold drops of Associated Charity. Of course the majority of us will continue to be wives and mothers—there is nothing equal to that when it is a success—but will not marriage become still more desirable if the choicest girls are educated to be the intellectual companions of men, and taught to familiarize themselves with the real conditions of life, instead of being limited to the rose garden of a harem, over the hedges of which they are expected only to peep at the busy world—the world of men, the world of action and toil and struggle and sin—the world into which their sons are graduated when cut loose from the maternal apron-strings? We intend to learn what to teach our sons, so that we may no longer be silenced with the plea that women do not know, and be put off with a secretive conjugal smile. And as for the girls who do not marry, the world is open to them—the world of art and song and charity and healing and brave endeavor in a hundred fields. Become just like men? Never. If there is one thing which the educated woman of the present is seeking to preserve and foster, it is the subtle delicacy of nature, it is the engaging charm of womanhood which distinguishes us from men. Who are the pupils at the colleges for women to-day? The dowdy, sexless, unattractive, masculine-minded beings who have served to typify for nine men out of ten the crowning joke of the age—the emancipation of women? No; but lovely, graceful, sympathetic, earnest, pure-minded girls in the flower of attractive maidenhood. And that is why the well-to-do American mother is asking herself whether she would be doing the best thing for her daughter if she were to encourage her to become merely a New-World, Old-World young lady of the ancient order of things. For centuries the women of civilization have worshipped chastity, suffering resignation and elegance as the ideals of femininity; now we mean to be intelligent besides, or at least as nearly so as possible.”

“In truth a philippic, Barbara,” I said. “It would seem as though Mrs. Grundy would not be able to hold out much longer. Will you tell me, by the way, what you women intend to do after you are fully emancipated?”

“One thing at a time,” she answered. “We have been talking of education, and I have simply been suggesting that no conscientious mother can afford to ignore or pass by with scorn the claims of higher education for girls—experimental and faulty as many of the present methods to attain it doubtless are. As to what women are going to do when our preliminary perplexities are solved and our sails are set before a favorable wind, I have my ideas on that score also, and some day I will discuss them with you. But just now I should like you to answer me a question. What are the best occupations for sons to follow when they have left school or college?”

Pertinent and interesting as was this inquiry of Barbara’s, I felt the necessity of drawing a long breath before I answered it.

Occupation.

I.

The American young man, in the selection of a vocation, is practically cut off from two callings which are dear to his contemporaries in other civilized countries—the Army and the Navy. The possibility of war, with all its horrors and its opportunities for personal renown, is always looming up before the English, French, German, or Russian youth, who is well content to live a life of gilded martial inactivity in the hope of sooner or later winning the cross for conspicuous service, if he escapes a soldier’s grave. We have endured one war, and we profoundly hope never to undergo another. Those of us who are ethically opposed to the slaughter of thousands of human beings in a single day by cannon, feel that we have geography on our side. Even the bloodthirsty are forced to acknowledge that the prospects here for a genuine contest of any kind are not favorable. Consequently, the ardor of the son and heir, who would like to be a great soldier or a sea captain, is very apt to be cooled by the representation that his days would be spent in watching Indians or cattle thieves on the Western plains, or in cruising uneventfully in the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Mexico. At all events our standing, or, more accurately speaking, sitting Army, and our Navy are so small, that the demand for generals and captains is very limited. Therefore, though we commend to our sons the prowess of Cæsar, Napoleon, Nelson, Von Moltke, and Grant, we are able to demonstrate to them, even without recourse to modern ethical arguments, that the opportunities for distinction on this side of the water are likely to be very meagre.

Also, we Americans, unlike English parents, hesitate to hold out as offerings to the Church a younger son in every large family. We have no national Church; moreover, the calling of a clergyman in this country lacks the social picturesqueness which goes far, or did go far, to reconcile the British younger son to accept the living which fell to his lot through family influence. Then again, would the American mother, like the conventional mother of the older civilizations, as represented in biography and fiction, if asked which of all vocations she would prefer to have her son adopt, reply promptly and fervidly, “the ministry?”

I put this question to my wife by way of obtaining an answer. She reflected a moment, then she said, “If one of my boys really felt called to be a clergyman, I should be a very happy woman; but I wouldn’t on any account have one of them enter the ministry unless he did.” This reply seems to me to express not merely the attitude of the American mother, but also the point of view from which the American young man of to-day is apt to look at the question. He no longer regards the ministry as a profession which he is free to prefer, merely because he needs to earn his daily bread; and he understands, when he becomes a clergyman, that lukewarm or merely conventional service will be utterly worthless in a community which is thirsty for inspirational suggestion, but which is soul-sick of cant and the perfervid reiteration of outworn delusions. The consciousness that he has no closer insight into the mysteries of the universe than his fellow-men, and the fear that he may be able to solace their doubts only by skilful concealment of his own, is tending, here and all over the civilized world, to deter many a young man from embracing that profession, which once seemed to offer a safe and legitimate niche for any pious youth who was uncertain what he wished to do for a living. Happy he who feels so closely in touch with the infinite that he is certain of his mission to his brother-man! But is any one more out of place than the priest who seems to know no more than we do of what we desire to know most? We demand that a poet should be heaven-born; why should we not require equivalent evidence of fitness from our spiritual advisers?

And yet, on the other hand, when the conviction of fitness or mission exists, what calling is there which offers to-day more opportunities for usefulness than the ministry? The growing tendency of the Church is toward wider issues and a broader scope. Clergymen are now encouraged and expected to aid in the solution of problems of living no less than those of dying, and to lead in the discussion of matters regarding which they could not have ventured to express opinions fifty years ago without exposing themselves to the charge of being meddlesome or unclerical. The whole field of practical charity, economics, hygiene, and the relations of human beings to each other on this earth, are fast becoming the legitimate domain of the Church, and the general interest in this new phase of usefulness is serving to convince many of the clergy themselves that the existence of so many creeds, differing but slightly and unimportantly from one another, is a waste of vital force and machinery. In this age of trusts, a trust of all religious denominations for the common good of humanity would be a monopoly which could pay large dividends without fear of hostile legislation.

In this matter of the choice of a vocation, the case of the ambitious, promising young man is the one which commends itself most to our sympathies; and next to it stands that of the general utility man—the youth who has no definite tastes or talents, and who selects his life occupation from considerations other than a consciousness of fitness or of natural inclination. There are here, as elsewhere, born merchants, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, architects, engineers, inventors, and poets, who promptly follow their natural bents without suggestion and in the teeth of difficulties. But the promising young man in search of a brilliant career, and the general utility man, are perhaps the best exponents of a nation’s temper and inclination.

In every civilization many promising youths and the general run of utility men are apt to turn to business, for trade seems to offer the largest return in the way of money with the least amount of special knowledge. In this new country of ours the number of young men who have selected a business career during the last fifty years, from personal inclination, has been very much greater than elsewhere, and the tone and temper of the community has swept the general utility man into mere money making almost as a matter of course. The reasons for this up to this time have been obvious: The resources and industries of a vast and comparatively sparsely settled continent have been developed in the last fifty years, and the great prizes in the shape of large fortunes resulting from the process have naturally captivated the imagination of ambitious youth. We have unjustly been styled a nation of shopkeepers; but it may in all fairness be alleged that, until the last fifteen years, we have been under the spell of the commercial and industrial spirit, and that the intellectual faculties of the nation have been mainly absorbed in the introduction and maintenance of railroads and factories, in the raising and marketing of grain, in the development of real estate enterprises, and in trading in the commodities or securities which these various undertakings have produced.

The resources of the country are by no means exhausted; there are doubtless more mines to open which will make their owners superbly rich; new discoveries in the mechanical or electrical field will afford fresh opportunities to discerning men of means; and individual or combined capital will continue to reap the reward of both legitimate and over-reaching commercial acumen. But it would seem as though the day of enormous fortunes, for men of average brains and luck, in this country were nearly over, and that the great pecuniary prizes of the business world would henceforth be gleaned only by extraordinary or exceptional individuals. The country is no longer sparsely settled; fierce competition speedily cuts the abnormal profit out of new enterprises which are not protected by a patent; and in order to be conspicuously successful in any branch of trade, one will have more and more need of unusual ability and untiring application.

In other words, though ours is still a new country, it will not be very long before the opportunities and conditions of a business life resemble closely those which confront young men elsewhere. As in every civilized country, trade in some form will necessarily engage the attention of a large portion of the population. From physical causes, a vast majority of the citizens of the United States must continue to derive their support from agriculture and the callings which large crops of cereals, cotton, and sugar make occasion for. Consequently business will always furnish occupation for a vast army of young men in every generation, and few successes will seem more enviable than those of the powerful and scrupulous banker, or the broad-minded and capable railroad president. But, on the other hand, will the well-to-do American father and mother, eager to see their promising sons make the most of themselves, continue to advise them to go into business in preference to other callings? And will the general utility man still be encouraged to regard some form of trade as the most promising outlook, for one who does not know what he wishes to do, to adopt? He who hopes to become a great banker or illustrious railway man, must remember that the streets of all our large cities teem with young men whose breasts harbor similar ambitions.

Doubtless, it was the expectation of our forefathers that our American civilization would add new occupations to the callings inherited from the old world, which would be alluring both to the promising young man and the youth without predilections, and no less valuable to society and elevating to the individual than the best of those by which men have earned their daily bread since civilization first was. As a matter of fact, we Americans have added just one, that of the modern stock-broker. To be sure, I am not including the ranchman. It did seem at one time as though we were going to add another in him—a sort of gentleman shepherd. But be it that the cattle have become too scarce or too numerous, be it that the demon of competition has planted his hoofs on the farthest prairie, one by one the brave youths who went West in search of fortune, have returned East for the last time, and abandoned the field to the cowboys and the native settler. The pioneers in this form of occupation made snug fortunes, but after them came a deluge of promising or unpromising youths who branded every animal within a radius of hundreds of miles with a letter of the alphabet. Their only living monument is the polo pony.

Our single and signal contribution to the callings of the world has been the apotheosis of the stock-broker. For the last twenty-five years, the well-to-do father and mother and their sons, in our large cities, have been under the spell of a craze for the brokerage business. The consciousness that the refinements of modern living cannot adequately be supplied in a large city to a family whose income does not approximate ten thousand dollars a year, is a cogent argument in favor of trying to grow rich rapidly, and both the promising young man and the general utility man welcomed the new calling with open arms. Impelled by the notion that here was a vocation which required no special knowledge or attainments, and very little capital, which was pleasant, gentlemanly, and not unduly confining, and which promised large returns almost in the twinkling of an eye, hundreds and thousands of young men became brokers—chiefly stock-brokers, but also cotton-brokers, note-brokers, real-estate-brokers, insurance-brokers, and brokers in nearly everything. The field was undoubtedly a rich one for those who first entered it. There was a need for the broker, and he was speedily recognized as a valuable addition to the machinery of trade. Many huge fortunes were made, and we have learned to associate the word broker with the possession of large means, an imposing house on a fashionable street, and diverse docked and stylish horses.

Of course, the king of all brokers has been the stock-broker, for to him was given the opportunity to buy and sell securities on his own account, though he held himself out to his customers as merely a poor thing who worked for a commission. No wonder that the young man, just out of college, listened open-mouthed to the tales of how many thousands of dollars a year so and so, who had been graduated only five years before, was making, and resolved to try his luck with the same Aladdin’s lamp. Nor was it strange that the sight of men scarcely out of their teens, driving down town in fur coats, in their own equipages, with the benison of successful capitalists in their salutations, settled the question of choice for the youth who was wavering or did not know what he wished to do.

It is scarcely an extreme statement that the so-called aristocracy of our principal cities to-day is largely made up of men who are, or once were, stock-brokers, or who have made their millions by some of the forms of gambling which our easy-going euphemism styles modern commercial aggressiveness. Certainly, a very considerable number of our most splendid private residences have been built out of the proceeds of successful ventures in the stock market, or the wheat pit, or by some other purely speculative operations. Many stars have shone brilliantly for a season, and then plunged precipitately from the zenith to the horizon; and much has been wisely said as to the dangers of speculation; but the fact remains that a great many vast fortunes owe their existence to the broker’s office; fortunes which have been salted down, as the phrase is, and now furnish support and titillation for a leisurely, green old age, or enable the sons and daughters of the original maker to live in luxury.

Whatever the American mother may feel as to her son becoming a clergyman, there is no doubt that many a mother to-day would say “God grant that no son of mine become a stock-broker.” I know stock-brokers—many indeed—who are whole-souled, noble-natured men, free from undue worldliness, and with refined instincts. But the stock-broker, as he exists in the every-day life of our community, typifies signally the gambler’s yearning to gain wealth by short cuts, and the monomania which regards as pitiable those who do not possess and display the gewgaws of feverish, fashionable materialism. There are stock-brokers in all the great capitals of the world, but nowhere has the vocation swallowed up the sons of the best people to the extent that it has done here during the last thirty years. And yet, apart from the opportunity it affords to grow rich rapidly, what one good reason is there why a promising young man should decide to buy and sell stocks for a living? Indeed, not merely decide, but select, that occupation as the most desirable calling open to him? Does it tend either to ennoble the nature or enrich the mental faculties? It is one of the formal occupations made necessary by the exigencies of the business world, and as such is legitimate and may be highly respectable; but surely it does not, from the nature of the services required, deserve to rank high; and really there would seem to be almost as much occasion for conferring the accolade of social distinction on a dealer in excellent fish as on a successful stock-broker.

However, alas! it is easy enough to assign the reason why the business has been so popular. It appears that, even under the flag of our aspiring nationality, human nature is still so weak that the opportunity to grow rich quickly, when presented, is apt to over-ride all noble considerations. Foreign censors have ventured not infrequently to declare that there was never yet a race so hungry for money as we free-born Americans; and not even the pious ejaculation of one of our United States Senators, “What have we to do with abroad?” is conclusive proof that the accusation is not well founded. In fact: there seems to be ample proof that we, who sneered so austerely at the Faubourg St. Germain and the aristocracies of the Old World, and made Fourth of July protestations of poverty and chastity, have fallen down and worshipped the golden calf merely because it was made of gold. Because it seemed to be easier to make money as stock-brokers than in any other way, men have hastened to become stock-brokers. To be sure it may be answered that this is only human nature and the way of the world. True, perhaps; except that we started on the assumption that we were going to improve on the rest of the world, and that its human nature was not to be our human nature. Would not the Faubourg St. Germain be preferable to an aristocracy of stock-brokers?

At all events, the law of supply and demand is beginning to redeem the situation, and, if not to restore our moral credit, at least to save the rising generation from falling into the same slough. The stock-broker industry has been overstocked, and the late young capitalists in fur overcoats, with benedictory manners, wear anxious countenances under the stress of that Old World demon, excessive competition. Youth can no longer wake up in the morning and find itself the proprietor of a rattling business justifying a steam-yacht and a four-in-hand. The good old days have gone forever, and there is weeping and gnashing of teeth where of late there was joy and much accumulation. There is not business enough for all the promising young men who are stock-brokers already, and the youth of promise must turn elsewhere.

Occupation.

II.

But though the occupation of broker has become less tempting, the promising youth has not ceased to look askance at any calling which does not seem to foreshadow a fortune in a short time. He is only just beginning to appreciate that we are getting down to hard pan, so to speak, and are nearly on a level, as regards the hardships of individual progress, with our old friends the effete civilizations. He finds it difficult to rid himself of the “Arabian Nights’” notion that he has merely to clap his hands to change ten dollars into a thousand in a single year, and to transform his bachelor apartments into a palace beautiful, with a wife, yacht, and horses, before he is thirty-five. He shrinks from the idea of being obliged to take seriously into account anything less than a hundred-dollar bill, and of earning a livelihood by slow yet persistent acceptance of tens and fives. His present ruling ambition is to be a promoter; that is, to be an organizer of schemes, and to let others do the real work and attend to the disgusting details. There are a great many gentry of this kind in the field just at present. Among them is, or rather was, Lewis Pell, as I will call him for the occasion. I don’t know exactly what he is doing now. But he was, until lately, a promoter.

A handsome fellow was Lewis Pell. Tall, gentlemanly, and athletic-looking, with a gracious, imposing presence and manner, which made his rather commonplace conversation seem almost wisdom. He went into a broker’s office after leaving college, like many other promising young men of his time, but he was clever enough either to realize that he was a little late, or that the promoter business offered a more promising scope for his genius, for he soon disappeared from the purlieus of the Stock Exchange, and the next thing we heard of him was as the tenant of an exceedingly elaborate set of offices on the third floor of a most expensive modern monster building. Shortly after I read in the financial columns of the daily press that Mr. Lewis Pell had sold to a syndicate of bankers the first mortgage and the debenture bonds of the Light and Power Traction Company, an electrical corporation organized under the laws of the State of New Jersey. Thirty days later I saw again that he had sailed for Europe in order to interest London capital in a large enterprise, the nature of which was still withheld from the public.

During the next two or three years I ran across Pell on several occasions. He seemed always to be living at the highest pressure, but the brilliancy of his career had not impaired his good manners or attractiveness. I refer to his career as brilliant at this time because both his operations and the consequent style of living which he pursued, as described by him on two different evenings when I dined with him, seemed to me in my capacity of ordinary citizen to savor of the marvellous, if not the supernatural. He frankly gave me to understand that it seemed to him a waste of time for an ambitious man to pay attention to details, and that his business was to originate vast undertakings, made possible only by large combinations of corporate or private capital. The word combination, which was frequently on his lips, seemed to be the corner-stone of his system. I gathered that the part which he sought to play in the battle of life was to breathe the breath, or the apparent breath, of existence into huge schemes, and after having given them a quick but comprehensive squeeze or two for his own pecuniary benefit, to hand them over to syndicates, or other aggregations of capitalists, for the benefit of whom they might concern. He confided to me that he employed eleven typewriters; that he had visited London seven, and Paris three times, in the last three years, on flying trips to accomplish brilliant deals; that though his headquarters were in New York, scarcely a week passed in which he was not obliged to run over to Chicago, Boston, Washington, Denver, Duluth, or Cincinnati, as the case might be. Without being boastful as to his profits, he did not hesitate to acknowledge to me that if he should do as well in the next three years as in the last, he would be able to retire from business with a million or so.

Apart from this confession, his personal extravagance left no room for doubt that he must be very rich. Champagne flowed for him as Croton or Cochituate for most of us, and it was evident from his language that the hiring of special trains from time to time was a rather less serious matter than it would be for the ordinary citizen to take a cab. The account that he gave of three separate entertainments he had tendered to syndicates—of ten, twelve, and seventeen covers respectively, at twenty dollars a cover—fairly made my mouth water and my eyes stick out, so that I felt constrained to murmur, “Your profits must certainly be very large, if you can afford that sort of thing.”

Pell smiled complacently and a little condescendingly. “I could tell you of things which I have done which would make that seem a bagatelle,” he answered, with engaging mystery. Then after a moment’s pause he said, “Do you know, my dear fellow, that when I was graduated I came very near going into the office of a pious old uncle of mine who has been a commission merchant all his life, and is as poor as Job’s turkey in spite of it all—that is, poor as men are rated nowadays. He offered to take me as a clerk at one thousand dollars a year, with the promise of a partnership before I was bald-headed in case I did well. Supposing I had accepted his offer, where should I be to-day? Grubbing at an office-desk and earning barely enough for board and lodging. I remember my dear mother took it terribly to heart because I went into a broker’s office instead. By the way, between ourselves, I’m building a steam-yacht—nothing very wonderful, but a neat, comfortable craft—and I’m looking forward next summer to inviting my pious old uncle to cruise on her just to see him open his eyes.”

That was three years ago, and to-day I have every reason to believe that Lewis Pell is without a dollar in the world, or rather, that every dollar which he has belongs to his creditors. I had heard before his failure was announced that he was short of money, for the reason that several enterprises with which his name was connected had been left on his hands—neither the syndicates nor the public would touch them—so his suspension was scarcely a surprise. He at present, poor fellow, is only one of an army of young men wandering dejectedly through the streets of New York or Chicago in these days of financial depression, vainly seeking for something to promote.

When the promising youth and the general utility man do get rid of the “Arabian Nights’” notion, and recognize that signal success here, in any form, is likely to become more and more difficult to attain, and will be the legitimate reward only of men of real might, of unusual abilities, originality, or dauntless industry, some of the callings which have fallen, as it were, into disrepute through their lack of gambling facilities, are likely to loom up again socially. It may be, however, that modern business methods and devices have had the effect of killing for all time that highly respectable pillar of society of fifty years ago, the old-fashioned merchant, who bought and sold on his own behalf, or on commission, real cargoes of merchandise, and real consignments of cotton, wheat, and corn. The telegraph and the warehouse certificate have worked such havoc that almost everything now is bought and sold over and over again before it is grown or manufactured, and by the time it is on the market there is not a shred of profit in it for anybody but the retail dealer. It remains to be seen whether, as the speculative spirit subsides, the merchant is going to reinstate himself and regain his former prestige. It may already be said that the promising youth does not regard him with quite so much contempt as he did.

We have always professed in this country great theoretical respect for the schoolmaster, but we have been careful, as the nation waxed in material prosperity, to keep his pay down and to shove him into the social background more and more. The promising youth could not afford to spend his manhood in this wise, and we have all really been too busy making money to think very much about those who are doing the teaching. Have we not always heard it stated that our schools and colleges are second to none in the world? And if our schools, of course our schoolmasters. Therefore why bother our heads about them? It is indeed wonderful, considering the little popular interest in the subject until lately, that our schoolmasters and our college professors are so competent as they are, and that the profession has flourished on the whole in spite of indifference and superiority. How can men of the highest class be expected to devote their lives to a profession which yields little more than a pittance when one is thoroughly successful? And yet the education of our children ought to be one of our dearest concerns, and it is difficult to see why the State is satisfied to pay the average instructor or instructress of youth about as much as the city laborer or a horse-car conductor receives.

There are signs that those in charge of our large educational institutions all over the country are beginning to recognize that ripe scholarship and rare abilities as a teacher are entitled to be well recompensed pecuniarily, and that the breed of such men is likely to increase somewhat in proportion to the size and number of the prizes offered. Our college presidents and professors, those at the head of our large schools and seminaries, should receive such salaries as will enable them to live adequately. By this policy not only would our promising young men be encouraged to pursue learning, but those in the highest places would not be forced by poverty to live in comparative retirement, but could become active social figures and leaders. In any profession or calling under present social conditions only those in the foremost rank can hope to earn more than a living, varying in quality according to the degree of success and the rank of the occupation; but it is to be hoped—and there seems some reason to believe—that the great rewards which come to those more able and industrious than their fellows will henceforth, in the process of our national evolution, be more evenly distributed, and not confined so conspicuously to gambling, speculative, or commercial successes. The leaders in the great professions of law and medicine have for some time past declined to serve the free-born community without liberal compensation, and the same community, which for half a century secretly believed that only a business man has the right to grow rich, has begun to recognize that there are even other things besides litigation and health which ought to come high. For instance, although the trained architect still meets serious and depressing competition from those ready-made experimenters in design who pronounce the first c in the word architect as though it were an s, the public is rapidly discovering that a man cannot build an attractive house without special knowledge.

In the same class with the law, medicine, and architecture, and seemingly offering at present a greater scope for an ambitious young man, is engineering in all its branches. The furnaces, mines, manufactories, and the hydraulic, electrical, or other plants connected with the numerous vast mechanical business enterprises of the country are furnishing immediate occupation for hundreds of graduates of the scientific or polytechnic schools at highly respectable salaries. This field of usefulness is certain for a long time to come to offer employment and a fair livelihood to many, and large returns to those who outstrip their contemporaries. More and more is the business man, the manufacturer, and the capitalist likely to be dependent for the economical or successful development and management of undertakings on the judgment of scientific experts in his own employment or called in to advise, and it is only meet that the counsel given should be paid for handsomely.

Those who pursue literature or art in their various branches in this country, and have talents in some degree commensurate with their ambition, are now generally able to make a comfortable livelihood. Indeed the men and women in the very front rank are beginning to receive incomes which would be highly satisfactory to a leading lawyer or physician. Of course original work in literature or art demands special ability and fitness, but the general utility man is beginning to have many opportunities presented to him in connection with what may be called the clerical work of these professions. The great magazines and publishing houses have an increasing need for trained, scholarly men, for capable critics, and discerning advisers in the field both of letter-press and illustration. Another calling which seems to promise great possibilities both of usefulness and income to those who devote themselves to it earnestly is the comparatively new profession of journalism. The reporter, with all his present horrors, is in the process of evolution; but the journalist is sure to remain the high-priest of democracy. His influence is almost certain to increase materially, but it will not increase unless he seeks to lead public thought instead of bowing to it. The newspaper, in order to flourish, must be a moulder of opinion, and to accomplish this those who control its columns must more and more be men of education, force, and high ideals. Competition will winnow here as elsewhere, but those who by ability and industry win the chief places will stand high in the community and command large pay for their services.

An aristocracy of brains—that is to say, an aristocracy composed of individuals successful and prominent in their several callings—seems to be the logical sequence of our institutions under present social and industrial conditions. The only aristocracy which can exist in a democracy is one of honorable success evidenced by wealth or a handsome income, but the character of such an aristocracy will depend on the ambitions and tastes of the nation. The inevitable economic law of supply and demand governs here as elsewhere, and will govern until such a time as society may be reconstructed on an entirely new basis. Only the leaders in any vocation can hope to grow rich, but in proportion as the demands of the nation for what is best increase will the type and characteristics of these leaders improve. The doing away with inherited orders of nobility and deliberate, patented class distinctions, gives the entire field to wealth. We boast proudly that no artificial barriers confine individual social promotion; but we must remember at the same time that those old barriers meant more than the perpetuation of perfumed ladies and idle gentlemen from century to century. We are too apt to forget that the aristocracies of the old world signified in the first place a process of selection. The kings and the nobles, the lords and the barons, the knights who fought and the ladies for whom they died, were the master-spirits of their days and generations, the strong arms and the strong brains of civilized communities. They stood for force, the force of the individual who was more intelligent, more capable, and mightier in soul and body than his neighbors, and who claimed the prerogatives of superiority on that account. These master-spirits, it is true, used these prerogatives in such a manner as to crystallize society into the classes and the masses, so hopelessly for the latter that the gulf between them still is wide as an ocean, notwithstanding that present nobilities have been shorn of their power so that they may be said to exist chiefly by sufferance. And yet the world is still the same in that there are men more intelligent, more capable, and mightier in soul and body than their fellows. The leaders of the past won their spurs by prowess with the battle-axe and spear, by wise counsel in affairs of state, by the sheer force of their superior manhood. The gentleman and lady stood for the best blood of the world, though they so often belied it by their actions.

We, who are accustomed to applaud our civilization as the hope of the world, may well look across the water and take suggestions from the institutions of Great Britain, not with the idea of imitation, but with a view to consider the forces at work there. For nearly a century now the government, though in form a monarchy, has been substantially a constitutional republic, imbued with inherited traditions and somewhat galvanized by class distinctions, but nevertheless a constitutional republic. The nobility still exists as a sort of French roof or Eastern pagoda to give a pleasing appearance to the social edifice. The hereditary meaning of titles has been so largely negatived by the introduction of new blood—the blood of the strongest men of the period—that they have become, what they originally were, badges to distinguish the men most valuable to the State. Their abolition is merely a question of time, and many of the leaders to whom they are proffered reject them as they would a cockade or a yellow satin waistcoat. On the other hand, and here is the point of argument, the real aristocracy of England for the last hundred years has been an aristocracy of the foremost, ablest, and worthiest men of the nation, and with few exceptions the social and pecuniary rewards have been bestowed both by the State and by public appreciation on the master-spirits of the time in the best sense. Brilliant statesmanship, wisdom on the bench, the surgeon’s skill, the banker’s sound discernment, genius in literature and art, when signally contributed by the individual, have won him fame and fortune.

It may be said, perhaps, that the pecuniary rewards of science and literature have been less conspicuous than those accorded to other successes, but that has been due to the inherent practical temperament and artistic limitations of the Englishman, and can scarcely be an argument against the contention that English society in the nineteenth century, with all its social idiosyncrasies, has really been graded on the order of merit.

The tide of democracy has set in across the water and is running strongly, and there can be no doubt that the next century is likely to work great and strange changes in the conditions of society in England as well as here. The same questions practically are presented to each nation, except that there a carefully constructed and in many respects admirable system of society is to be disintegrated. We are a new country, and we have a right to be hopeful that we are sooner or later to outstrip all civilizations. Nor is it a blemish that the astonishing development of our material resources has absorbed the energies of our best blood. But it now remains to be seen whether the standards of pure democracy, without traditions or barriers to point the way, are to justify the experiment and improve the race. The character of our aristocracy will depend on the virtues and tastes of the people, and the struggle is to be between aspiration and contentment with low ambitions. Our original undertaking has been made far more difficult by the infusion of the worst blood in Christendom, the lees of foreign nations; but the result of the experiment will be much more convincing because of this change in conditions.

Who are to be the men of might and heroes of democracy? That will depend on the demands and aspirations of the enfranchised people. With all its imperfections, the civilization of the past has fostered the noble arts and stirred genius to immortalize itself in bronze and marble, in cathedral spires, in masterpieces of painting and literature, in untiring scholarship, in fervent labors in law, medicine, and science. Democracy must care for these things, and encourage the individual to choose worthy occupations, or society will suffer. We hope and believe that, in the long run, the standards of humanity will be raised rather than lowered by the lifting of the flood-gates which divide the privileged classes from the mass; but it behooves us all to remember that while demand and supply must be the leading arbiters in the choice of a vocation, the responsibility of selection is left to each individual. Only by the example of individuals will society be saved from accepting the low, vulgar aims and ambitions of the mass as a desirable weal, and this is the strongest argument against the doctrines of those who would repress individuality for the alleged benefit of mankind as a whole. The past has given us many examples of the legislator who cannot be bribed, of the statesman faithful to principle, of the student who disdains to be superficial, of the gentleman who is noble in thought, and speech and action, and they stand on the roll of the world’s great men. Democracy cannot afford not to continue to add to this list, and either she must steel her countenance against the cheap man and his works, or sooner or later be confounded. Was Marie Antoinette a more dangerous enemy of the people than the newspaper proprietor who acquires fortune by catering to the lowest tastes and prejudices of the public, or the self-made capitalist who argues that every man has his price, and seeks to accomplish legislation by bribery?

The Use of Time.

I.

I brought Rogers home with me again the other day. I do not mean Rogers in the flesh; but the example of Rogers as a bogy with which to confound my better half and myself. You may recall that Rogers is the book-keeper for Patterson the banker, and that he has brought up and educated a family on a salary of twenty-two hundred dollars a year.

“Barbara,” said I, “we were reflecting yesterday that we never have time to do the things we really wish to do. Have you ever considered how Rogers spends his time?”

My wife admitted that she had not, and she dutifully waited for me to proceed, though I could tell from the expression of her mouth that she did not expect to derive much assistance from the example of Mr. Rogers. Therefore I made an interesting pathological deduction to begin with.

“Rogers does not live on his nerves from one year’s end to the other, as we do.”

“I congratulate him,” said Barbara, with a sigh.

“And yet,” I continued, “he leads a highly respectable and fairly interesting life. He gets up at precisely the same hour every morning, has his breakfast, reads the paper, and is at his desk punctually on time. He dines frugally, returns to his desk until half-past four or five, and after performing any errands which Mrs. Rogers has asked him to attend to, goes home to the bosom of his family. There he exchanges his coat and boots for a dressing-gown, or aged smoking-jacket, and slippers, and remains by his fireside absorbed in the evening paper until tea-time. Conversation with the members of his family beguiles him for half an hour after the completion of the meal; then he settles down to the family weekly magazine, or plays checkers or backgammon with his wife or daughters. After a while, if he is interested in ferns or grasses, he looks to see how his specimens are growing under the glass case in the corner. He pats the cat and makes sure that the canary is supplied with seed. Now and then he brings home a puzzle, like ‘Pigs in Clover,’ which keeps him up half an hour later than usual, but ordinarily his head is nodding before the stroke of ten warns him that his bed-hour has come. And just at the time that the wife of his employer, Patterson, may be setting out for a ball, he is tucking himself up in bed by the side of Mrs. Rogers.”

“Poor man!” interjected Barbara.

“He has his diversions,” said I. “Now and again neighbors drop in for a chat, and the evening is wound up with a pitcher of lemonade and angel-cake. He and his wife drop in, in their turn, or he goes to a political caucus. Once a fortnight comes the church sociable, and every now and then a wedding. From time to time he and Mrs. Rogers attend lectures. His young people entertain their friends, as the occasion offers, in a simple way, and on Sunday he goes to church in the morning and falls to sleep after a heavy dinner in the afternoon. He leads a quiet, peaceful, conservative existence, unharassed by social functions and perpetual excitement.”

“And he prides himself, I dare say,” said Barbara, “on the score of its virtuousness. He saves his nerves and he congratulates himself that he is not a society person, as he calls it. Your Mr. Rogers may be a very estimable individual, dear, in his own sphere, and I do think he manages wonderfully on his twenty-two hundred dollars a year; but I should prefer to see you lose your nerves and become a gibbering victim of nervous prostration rather than that you should imitate him.”

“I’m not proposing to imitate him, Barbara,” I answered, gravely. “I admit that his life seems rather dull and not altogether inspiring, but I do think that a little of his repose would be beneficial to many of us whose interests are more varied. We might borrow it to advantage for a few months in the year, don’t you think so? I believe, Barbara, that if you and I were each of us to lie flat on our backs for one hour every day and think of nothing—and not even clinch our hands—we should succeed in doing more things than we really wish to do.”

“I suppose it’s the climate—they say it’s the climate,” said Barbara, pensively. “Foreigners don’t seem to be affected in that way. They’re not always in a hurry as we are, and yet they seem to accomplish very nearly as much. We all know what it is to be conscious of that dreadful, nervous, hurried feeling, even when we have plenty of time to do the things we have to do. I catch myself walking fast—racing, in fact—when there is not the least need of it. I don’t clinch my hands nearly so much as I used, and I’ve ceased to hold on to the pillow in bed as though it were a life-preserver, out of deference to Delsarte, but when it comes to lying down flat on my back for an hour a day—every day—really it isn’t feasible. It’s an ideal plan, I dare say, but the days are not long enough. Just take to-day, for instance, and tell me, please, when I had time to lie down.”

“You are clinching your hands now,” I remarked.

“Because you have irritated me with your everlasting Mr. Rogers,” retorted Barbara. She examined, nevertheless, somewhat dejectedly, the marks of her nails in her palms. “In the morning, for instance, when I came down to breakfast there was the mail. Two dinner invitations and an afternoon tea; two sets of wedding-cards, and a notice of a lecture by Miss Clara Hatheway on the relative condition of primary schools here and abroad; requests for subscriptions to the new Cancer Hospital and the Children’s Fresh Air and Vacation Fund; an advertisement of an after-holiday sale of boys’ and girls’ clothes at Halliday’s; a note from Mrs. James Green asking particulars regarding our last cook, and a letter from the President of my Woman’s Club notifying me that I was expected to talk to them at the next meeting on the arguments in favor of and against the ownership by cities and towns of gas and water-works. All these had to be answered, noted, or considered. Then I had to interview the cook and the butcher and the grocer about the dinner, give orders that a button should be sewn on one pair of your trousers and a stain removed from another, and give directions to the chore-man to oil the lock of the front-door, and tell him to go post-haste for the plumber to extract the blotting-paper which the children yesterday stuffed down the drain-pipe in the bath-tub, so that the water could not escape. Then I had to sit down and read the newspaper. Not because I had time, or wished to, but to make sure that there was nothing in it which you could accuse me of not having read. After this I dressed to go out. I stopped at the florist’s to order some roses for Mrs. Julius Cæsar, whose mother is dead; at Hapgood & Wales’s and at Jones’s for cotton-batting, hooks and eyes, and three yards of ribbon; at Belcher’s for an umbrella to replace mine, which you left in the cable-cars, and at the library to select something to read. I arrived home breathless for the children’s dinner, and immediately afterward I dressed and went to the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Woman’s Club, stopping on the way to inquire if Mrs. Wilson’s little boy were better. We started by discussing a proposed change in our Constitution regarding the number of black-balls necessary to exclude a candidate, and drifted off on to ‘Trilby.’ It was nearly five when I got away, and as I felt it on my conscience to go both to Mrs. Southwick’s and Mrs. Williams’s teas, I made my appearance at each for a few minutes, but managed to slip away so as to be at home at six. When you came in I had just been reading to the children and showing them about their lessons. Now I have only just time to dress for dinner, for we dine at the Gregory Browns, at half-past seven. We ought to go later to the reception at Mrs. Hollis’s—it is her last of three and we haven’t been yet—but I suppose you will say you are too tired. There! will you tell me when I could have found time to lie down for an hour to-day?”

I was constrained to laugh at my wife’s recital, and I was not able at the moment to point out to her exactly what she might have omitted from her category so as to make room for the hour of repose. Nor, indeed, as I review the events of my own daily life and of the daily lives of my friends and acquaintances, am I able to define precisely where it could be brought in. And yet are we not—many of us who are in the thick of modern life—conscious that our days are, as it were, congested? We feel sure that so far as our physical comfort is concerned we ought to be doing less, and we shrewdly suspect that, if we had more time in which to think, our spiritual natures would be the gainers. The difficulty is to stop, or rather to reduce the speed of modern living to the point at which these high-pressure nervous symptoms disappear, and the days cease to seem too short for what we wish to accomplish. Perhaps those who take an intense interest in living will never be able to regain that delightful condition of equipoise, if it ever existed, which our ancestors both here and across the water are said to have experienced. Perhaps, too, our ancestors were more in a hurry when they were alive than they seem to have been now that they are dead; but, whether this be true or otherwise, we are confidently told by those who ought to know that we Americans of this day and generation are the most restless, nervous people under the sun, and live at a higher pressure than our contemporaries of the effete civilizations. It used to be charged that we were in such haste to grow rich that there was no health in us; and now that we are, or soon will be, the wealthiest nation in the world, they tell us that we continue to maintain the same feverish pace in all that we undertake or do.

I am not sure that this charge could not be brought against the Englishman, Frenchman, or German of to-day with almost equal justice, or, in other words, that it is a characteristic of the age rather than of our nation; but that conviction would merely solace our pride and could not assuage “that tired feeling” of which so many are conscious. At all events, if we do not work harder than our kinsmen across the sea, we seem to bear the strain less well. It may be the climate, as my wife has said, which causes our nervous systems to rebel; but then, again, we cannot change the climate, and consequently must adapt ourselves to its idiosyncrasies.

Ever since we first began to declare that we were superior to all other civilizations we have been noted for our energy. The way in which we did everything, from sawing wood to electing a President, was conspicuous by virtue of the bustling, hustling qualities displayed. But it is no longer high treason to state that our national life, in spite of its bustle, was, until comparatively recently, lacking in color and variety. The citizen who went to bed on the stroke of ten every night and did practically the same thing each day from one year’s end to the other was the ideal citizen of the Republic, and was popularly described as a conservative and a strong man. His life was led within very repressed limits, and anything more artistic than a chromo or religious motto was apt to irritate him and shock his principles. To be sure, we had then our cultivated class—more narrowly but possibly more deeply cultivated than its flourishing successor of to-day—but the average American, despite his civic virtues and consciousness of rectitude, led a humdrum existence, however hustling or bustling. There is a large percentage of our population that continues to live in much the same manner, notwithstanding the wave of enlightenment which has swept over the country and keyed us all up to concert pitch by multiplying the number of our interests. I feel a little guilty in having included Rogers among this number, for I really know of my own knowledge nothing about his individual home life. It may be that I have been doing him a rank injustice, and that his home is in reality a seething caldron of progress. I referred to him as a type rather than as an individual, knowing as I do that there are still too many homes in this country where music, art, literature, social tastes, and intelligent interest in human affairs in the abstract, when developed beyond mere rudimentary lines, are unappreciated and regarded as vanities or inanities.

On the other hand, there is nothing more interesting in our present national evolution than the eager recognition by the intelligent and aspiring portion of the people that we have been and are ignorant, and that the true zest of life lies in its many-sidedness and its possibilities of development along æsthetic, social, and intellectual as well as moral lines. The United States to-day is fairly bristling with eager, ambitious students, and with people of both sexes, young and middle-aged, who are anxiously seeking how to make the most of life. This eagerness of soul is not confined to any social class, and is noticeable in every section of the country in greater or less degree. It is quite as likely to be found among people of very humble means as among those whose earliest associations have brought them into contact with the well-to-do and carefully educated. Therefore I beg the pardon of Rogers in case I have put him individually in the wrong category. A divine yet cheery activity has largely taken the place of sodden self-righteousness on the one hand, and analytical self-consciousness on the other. The class is not as yet very large as compared with the entire population of the country, but it is growing rapidly, and its members are the most interesting men and women of the Republic—those who are in the van of our development as a people.

Overcrowded and congested lives signify at least earnestness and absorption. Human nature is more likely to aspire and advance when society is nervously active, than when it is bovine and self-congratulatory. But nerves can endure only a certain amount of strain without reminding human beings that strong and healthy bodies are essential to true national progress. Only recently in this country have we learned to consider the welfare of the body, and though we have begun to be deadly in earnest about athletics, the present generation of workers was, for the most part, brought up on the theory that flesh and blood was a limitation rather than a prerequisite. We are doing bravely in this matter so far as the education of our children is concerned, but it is too late to do much for our own nerves. Though stagnation is a more deplorable state, it behooves us, nevertheless, if possible, to rid ourselves of congestion for our ultimate safety.

An active man or woman stopping to think in the morning may well be appalled at the variety of his or her life. The ubiquity of the modern American subconsciousness is something unique. We wish to know everything there is to know. We are interested not merely in our own and our neighbors’ affairs—with a knowledge of which so many citizens of other lands are peacefully contented—but we are eager to know, and to know with tolerable accuracy, what is going on all over the world—in England, China, Russia, and Australia. Not merely politically, but socially, artistically, scientifically, philosophically, and ethically. No subject is too technical for our interest, provided it comes in our way, whether it concern the canals in Mars or the antitoxin germ. The newspaper and the telegraph have done much to promote this ubiquity of the mind’s eye all over the world, but the interests of the average American are much wider and more diversified than those of any other people. An Englishman will have his hobbies and know them thoroughly, but regarding affairs beyond the pale of his limited inquiry he is deliberately and often densely ignorant. He reads, and reads augustly, one newspaper, one or two magazines—a few books; we, on the other hand, are not content unless we stretch out feelers in many directions and keep posted, as we call it, by hasty perusals of almost innumerable publications for fear lest something escape us. What does the Frenchman—the average intelligent Frenchman—know or care about the mode of our Presidential elections, and whether this Republican or that Democrat has made or marred his political reputation? We feel that we require to inform ourselves not only concerning the art and literature of France, but to have the names and doings of her statesmen at our fingers’ ends for use in polite conversation, and the satisfaction of the remains of the New England conscience. All this is highly commendable, if it does not tend to render us superficial. The more knowledge we have, the better, provided we do not fall into the slough of knowing nothing very well, or hunt our wits to death by over-acquisitiveness. There is so much nowadays to learn, and seemingly so little time in which to learn it, we cannot afford to spread ourselves too thin.

The energy of our people has always been conspicuous in the case of women. The American woman, from the earliest days of our history, has refused to be prevented by the limitations of time or physique from trying to include the entire gamut of human feminine activity in her daily experience. There was a period when she could demonstrate successfully her ability to cook, sweep, rear and educate children, darn her husband’s stockings, and yet entertain delightfully, dress tastefully, and be well versed in literature and all the current phases of high thinking. The New England woman of fifty years ago was certainly an interesting specimen from this point of view, in spite of her morbid conscience and polar sexual proclivities. But among the well-to-do women of the nation to-day—the women who correspond socially to those just described—this achievement is possible only by taxing the human system to the point of distress, except in the newly or thinly settled portions of the country, where the style of living is simple and primitive.

In the East, of course, in the cities and towns the women in question ceased long ago to do all the housework; and among the well-to-do, servants have relieved her of much, if not of all of the physical labor. But, on the other hand, the complexities of our modern establishments, and the worry which her domestics cause her, make the burden of her responsibilities fully equal to what they were when she cooked flap-jacks and darned stockings herself. In other countries the women conversant with literature, art, and science, who go in for philanthropy, photography, or the ornamentation of china, who write papers on sociological or educational matters, are, for the most part, women of leisure in other respects. The American woman is the only woman at large in the universe who aims to be the wife and mother of a family, the mistress of an establishment, a solver of world problems, a social leader, and a philanthropist or artistic devotee at one and the same time. Each of these interests has its determined followers among the women of other civilizations, but nowhere except here does the eternal feminine seek to manifest itself in so many directions in the same individual.

This characteristic of our womanhood is a virtue up to a certain point. The American woman has certainly impressed her theory that her sex should cease to be merely pliant, credulous, and ignorantly complacent so forcibly on the world that society everywhere has been affected by it. Her desire to make the most of herself, and to participate as completely as possible in the vital work of the world without neglecting the duties allotted to her by the older civilizations, is in the line of desirable evolution. But there is such a thing as being superficial, which is far more to be dreaded than even nervous prostration. Those absorbed in the earnest struggle of modern living may perhaps justly claim that to work until one drops is a noble fault, and that disregard of one’s own sensations and comfort is almost indispensable in order to accomplish ever so little. But there is nothing noble in superficiality; and it would seem that the constant flitting from one interest to another, which so many American women seem unable to avoid, must necessarily tend to prevent them from knowing or doing anything thoroughly.

As regards the creature man, the critics of this country have been accustomed to assert that he was so much absorbed in making money, or in business, as our popular phrase is, that he had no time for anything else. This accusation used to be extraordinarily true, and in certain parts of the country it has not altogether ceased to be true; though even there the persistent masculine dollar-hunter regards wistfully and proudly the æsthetic propensities of the female members of his family, and feels that his labors are sweetened thereby. This is a very different attitude from the self-sufficiency of half a century ago. The difficulty now is that our intelligent men, like our women, are apt to attempt too much, inclined to crowd into each and every day more sensations than they can assimilate. An Englishwoman, prominent in educational matters, and intelligent withal, recently expressed her surprise to my wife, Barbara, that the American gentleman existed. She had been long familiar with the American woman as a charming, if original, native product, but she had never heard of the American gentleman—meaning thereby the alert, thoughtful man of high purposes and good-breeding. “How many there are!” the Briton went on to say in the enthusiasm of her surprise. Indeed there are. The men prominent in the leading walks of life all over this country now compare favorably, at least, with the best of other nations, unless it be that our intense desire to know everything has rendered, or may render, us accomplished rather than profound.

The Use of Time.

II.

After all, whether this suggestion of a tendency toward superficiality be well founded or not, the proper use of time has come to be a more serious problem than ever for the entire world. The demands of modern living are so exacting that men and women everywhere must exercise deliberate selection in order to live wisely. To lay down general rules for the use of time would be as futile as to insist that every one should use coats of the same size and color, and eat the same kind and quantity of food. The best modern living may perhaps be correctly defined as a happy compromise in the aims and actions of the individual between self-interest and altruism.

If one seeks to illustrate this definition by example it is desirable in the first place to eliminate the individuals in the community whose use of time is so completely out of keeping with this doctrine that it is not worth while to consider them. Murderers, forgers, and criminals of all kinds, including business men who practise petty thefts, and respectable tradesmen who give short weight and overcharge, instinctively occur to us. So do mere pleasure-seekers, drunkards, and idle gentlemen. On the same theory we must exclude monks, deliberate celibates, nuns, and all fanatical or eccentric persons whose conduct of life, however serviceable in itself as a leaven or an exception, could not be generally imitated without disaster to society. It would seem also as though we must exclude those who have yet to acquire such elemental virtues of wise living as cleanliness, reverence for the beautiful, and a certain amount of altruism. There is nothing to learn as to the wise use of time from those whose conceptions of life are handicapped by the habitual use of slang and bad grammar and by untidiness; who regard the manifestations of good taste and fine scholarship as “frills,” and who, though they be unselfish in the bosoms of their families, take no interest in the general welfare of the community.

Let me in this last connection anticipate the criticism of the sentimentalist and of the free-born American who wears a chip on his shoulder, by stating that time may be as beautifully and wisely spent, and life be as noble and serviceable to humanity in the home of the humblest citizen as in that of the well-to-do or rich. Of course it may. Who questions it? Did I not, in order not even to seem to doubt it, take back all I hazarded about the manner in which Rogers spends his time? It may be just as beautifully and wisely spent, and very often is so. But, on the other hand, I suggest, timorously and respectfully, that it very often is not, and I venture further to ask whether the burden is not on democracy to show that the plain life of the plain people as at present conducted is a valuable example of wise and improving use of time? The future is to account for itself, and we all have faith in democracy. We are all plain people in this country. But just as a passing inquiry, uttered not under my breath, yet without levity or malice, what is the contribution so far made by plainness as plainness to the best progress of the world? Absolutely nothing, it seems to me. Progress has come from the superiority of individuals in every class of life to the mass of their contemporaries. The so-called plainness of the plain people too often serves at the present day as an influence to drag down the aspiring individual to the dead level of the mass which contents itself with bombastic cheapness of thought and action. This is no plea against democracy, for democracy has come to stay; but it is an argument why the best standards of living are more likely to be found among those who do not congratulate themselves on their plainness than those who are content to live no better and no worse than their neighbors. Discontent with self is a valuable Mentor in the apportionment of time.

Therefore I offer as the most valuable study in the use of time under modern conditions the men and women in our large cities who are so far evolved that they are not tempted to commit common crimes, are well educated, earnest and pleasing, and are keenly desirous to effect in their daily lives that happy compromise between self-interest and altruism to which I have referred as the goal of success in the use of time. Let us consider them from the point of every day in the week and of the four seasons. In every man’s life his occupation, the calling or profession by which he earns his bread, must necessarily be the chief consumer of his time. We Americans have never been an idle race, and it is rare that the father of a family exposes himself to the charge of sloth. His work may be unintelligent or bungling, but he almost invariably spends rather too much than too little time over it. If you ask him why, he says he cannot help it; that in order to get on he must toil early and late. If he is successful, he tells you that otherwise he cannot attend to all he has to do. There is plausibility in this. Competition is undoubtedly so fierce that only those who devote themselves heart and soul to any calling are likely to succeed. Moreover, the consciousness of success is so engrossing and inspiriting that one may easily be tempted to sacrifice everything else to the game.

But can it be doubted, on the other hand, that the man who refuses to become the complete slave either of endeavor or success is a better citizen than he who does? The chief sinners in this respect in our modern life are the successful men, those who are in the thick of life doing reasonably well. The man who has not arrived, or who is beginning, must necessarily have leisure for other things for the reason that his time is not fully employed, but the really busy worker must make an effort or he is lost. If he does not put his foot down and determine what else he will do beside pursuing his vocation every day in the year except Sunday, and often on Sunday to boot, he may be robust enough to escape a premature grave, but he will certainly not make the best use of his life.

The difficulty for such men, of course, is to select what they will do. There are so many things, that it is easy to understand why the mind which abhors superficiality should be tempted to shut its ears out of sheer desperation to every other interest but business or profession. If every one were to do that what would be the result? Our leading men would simply be a horde of self-seekers, in spite of the fact that their individual work in their several callings was conscientious and unsparing of self. Deplorable as a too great multiplicity of interests is apt to be to the welfare and advancement of an ambitious man, the motive which prompts him to endeavor to do many things is in reality a more noble one, and one more beneficial to society than absorption to excess in a vocation. The cardinal principle in the wise use of time is to discover what one can do without and to select accordingly. Man’s duty to his spiritual nature, to his æsthetic nature, to his family, to public affairs, and to his social nature, are no less imperative than his duty to his daily calling. Unless each of these is in some measure catered to, man falls short in his true obligations. Not one of them can be neglected. Some men think they can lighten the load to advantage by disregarding their religious side. Others congratulate themselves that they never read novels or poetry, and speak disrespectfully of the works of new schools of art as daubs. A still larger number shirks attention to political and social problems, and declares bluffly that if a man votes twice a year and goes to a caucus, when he is sent for in a carriage by the committee, it is all that can be expected of a busy man. Another large contingent swathes itself in graceless virtue, and professes to thank God that it keeps aloof from society people and their doings. Then we are all familiar with the man who has no time to know his own family, though, fortunately, he is less common than he used to be.

If I were asked to select what one influence more than another wastes the spare time of the modern man, I should be inclined to specify the reading of newspapers. The value of the modern daily newspaper as a short cut to knowledge of what is actually happening in two hemispheres is indisputable, provided it is read regularly so that one can eliminate from the consciousness those facts which are contradicted or qualified on the following day. Of course it is indispensable to read the morning, and perhaps the evening, newspaper in order to know what is going on in the world. But the persistent reading of many newspapers, or the whole of almost any newspaper, is nearly as detrimental to the economy of time as the cigarette habit to health. Fifteen minutes a day is ample time in which to glean the news, and the busy man who aspires to use his time to the best advantage may well skip the rest. There is no doubt that many of our newspapers contain some of the best thought of the day scattered through their encyclopædic columns; but there is still less doubt that they are conducted to please, first of all, those who otherwise would read nothing. From this point of view they are most valuable educators; moreover, the character of the newspaper is steadily improving, and it is evident that those in charge of the best of them are seeking to raise the public taste instead of writing down to it; but the fact remains that they at present contain comparatively little which the earnest man can afford to linger over if he would avoid mental dissipation of an insidious kind. A newspaper containing only the news and the really vital thought of the day compressed into short space is among the successful enterprises of the future which some genius will perpetuate. How many of us, already, weary of the social gossip, the sensational personalities, the nauseous details of crime, the custom-made articles, the Sunday special features, the ubiquitous portrait, and finally the colored cartoon, would write our names large on such a subscription-list!

In the matter of books, too, the modern man and woman may well exercise a determined choice. There is so much printed nowadays between ornamental covers, that any one is liable to be misled by sheer bewilderment, and deliberate selection is necessary to save us from being mentally starved with plenty. We cannot always be reading to acquire positive knowledge; entertainment and self-oblivion are quite as legitimate motives for the hard worker as meditated self-improvement; but whether we read philosophy and history, or the novel, the poem, and the essay, it behooves us to read the best of its kind. From this standpoint the average book club is almost a positive curse. A weekly quota of books appears on our library tables, to be devoured in seven days. We read them because they come to us by lot, not because we have chosen them ourselves. There is published in every year of this publishing age a certain number of books of positive merit in the various departments of literature and thought, which a little intelligent inquiry would enable us to discover. By reading fewer books, and making sure that the serious ones were sound and the light or clever ones really diverting, the modern man and woman would be gainers both in time and approbation.

In this connection let me head off again the sentimentalist and moralist by noting that old friends in literature are often more satisfying and engaging than new. Those of us who are in the thick of life are too apt to forget to take down from our shelves the comrades we loved when we were twenty-one—the essayists, the historians, the poets, and novelists whose delightful pages are the literature of the world. An evening at home with Shakespeare is not the depressing experience which some clever people imagine. One rises from the feast to go to bed with all one’s æsthetic being refreshed and fortified as though one had inhaled oxygen. What a contrast this to the stuffy taste in the roof of the mouth, and the weary, dejected frame of mind which follow the perusal of much of the current literature which cozening booksellers have induced the book club secretary to buy.

A very little newspaper reading and a limited amount of selected reading will leave time for the hobby or avocation. Every man or woman ought to have one; something apart from business, profession, or housekeeping, in which he or she is interested as a study or pursuit. In this age of the world it may well take the form of educational, economic, or philanthropic investigation, or co-operation, if individual tastes happen to incline one to such work. The prominence of such matters in our present civilization is, of course, a magnet favorable to such a choice. In this way one can, as it were, kill two birds with one stone, develop one’s own resources and perform one’s duty toward the public. But, on the other hand, there will be many who have no sense of fitness for this service, and whose predilections lead them toward art, science, literature, or some of their ramifications. The amateur photographer, the extender of books, the observer of birds, are alike among the faithful. To have one hobby and not three or four, and to persevere slowly but steadily in the fulfilment of one’s selection, is an important factor in the wise disposal of time. It is a truism to declare that a few minutes in every day allotted to the same piece of work will accomplish wonders; but the result of trying will convince the incredulous. Indeed one’s avocation should progress and prevail by force of spare minutes allotted daily and continuously; just so much and no more, so as not to crowd out the other claimants for consideration. Fifteen minutes before breakfast, or between kissing the children good-night and the evening meal, or even every other Saturday afternoon and a part of every holiday, will make one’s hobby look well-fed and sleek at the end of a few years.

Perhaps the most difficult side of one’s nature to provide for adequately is the social side. It is easy enough to make a hermit of one’s self and go nowhere; and it is easy enough to let one’s self be sucked into the vortex of endless social recreation until one’s sensations become akin to those of a highly varnished humming-top. I am not quite sure which is the worse; but I am inclined to believe that the hermit, especially if self-righteous, is more detestable in that he is less altruistic. He may be a more superior person than the gadfly of society, but ethics no longer sanctions self-cultivation purely for the benefit of self. Every man and woman who seeks to play an intelligent part in the world ought to manage to dine out and attend other social functions every now and then, even if it be necessary to bid for invitations. Most of us have more invitations than we can possibly accept, and find the problem of entertaining and being entertained an exceedingly perplexing one to solve from the standpoint of time. But in spite of the social proclivities of most of us, there are still many people who feel that they are fulfilling their complete duty as members of society if they live lives of strict rectitude far from the madding crowd of so-called society people, and never darken the doors of anybody. It is said that it takes all sorts of people to make up the world, but disciplinarians and spoil-sports of this sort are so tiresome that they would not be missed were they and their homilies to be translated prematurely to another sphere.

Those of us, however, who profess a contrary faith, experience difficulty at times in being true to it, and are often tempted to slip back into domestic isolation by the feverishness of our social life. It sometimes seems as though there were no middle way between being a humming-top and a hermit. Yet nothing is more fatal to the wise use of time than the acceptance of every invitation received, unless it be the refusal of every one. Here again moderation and choice are the only safeguards, in spite of the assurance of friends that it is necessary to go a great deal in order to enjoy one’s self. In our cities the bulk of the entertainments of the year happen in the four winter months; from which many far from frivolous persons argue that the only way is to dine out every night, and go to everything to which one is asked during this period, and make up between April 15th and December 15th for any arrears due the other demands of one’s nature. This is plausible, but a dangerous theory, if carried to excess. Wise living consists in living wisely from day to day, without excepting any season. Three evenings in a week spent away from one’s own fireside may not be an easy limit for some whose social interests are varied, but both the married and the single who regret politely in order to remain tranquilly at home four evenings out of seven, need not fear that they have neglected the social side of life even in the gayest of seasons.

And here, for the sake of our sometimes dense friend the moralist—especially the moralist of the press, who raves against society people from the virtuous limit of an occasional afternoon tea—let me add that by entertainments and recreation I intend to include not merely formal balls and dinner-parties, but all the forms of more or less innocent edification and diversion—teas, reform meetings, theatres, receptions, concerts, lectures, clubs, sociables, fairs, and tableaux, by which people all over the country are brought together to exchange ideas and opinions in good-humored fellowship.

In the apportionment of time the consideration of one’s physical health is a paramount necessity, not merely for a reasonably long life, but to temper the mind’s eye so that the point of view remain sane and wholesome. An overwrought nervous system may be capable of spasmodic spurts, but sustained useful work is impossible under such conditions. To die in harness before one’s time may be fine, and in exceptional cases unavoidable, but how much better to live in harness and do the work which one has undertaken without breaking down. Happily the young men and women of the country of the present generation may almost be said to have athletics and fresh air on the brain. What with opportunity and precept they can scarcely help living up to the mark in this respect. The grown-up men and women, absorbed in the struggle of life, are the people who need to keep a watchful eye upon themselves. It is so easy to let the hour’s fresh air and exercise be crowded out by the things which one feels bound to do for the sake of others, and hence for one’s immortal soul. We argue that it will not matter if we omit our walk or rest for a day or two, and so we go on from day to day, until we are brought up with a round turn, as the saying is, and realize, in case we are still alive, that we are chronic invalids. The walk, the ride, the drive, the yacht, the bicycle, the search for wild flowers and birds, the angler’s outing, the excursion with a camera, the deliberate open-air breathing spell on the front platform of a street-car, some one of these is within the means and opportunities of every busy worker, male and female.

For many of us the most begrudged undertaking of all is to find time for what we owe to the world at large or the State, the State with a capital S, as it is written nowadays. There is no money in such bestowals, no private gain or emolument. What we give we give as a tribute to pure altruism, or, in other words, because as men and women we feel that it is one of the most important elements in wise living. It is indisputable that there was never so much disinterested endeavor in behalf of the community at large as there is to-day, but at the same time it is true that the agitations and work are accomplished by a comparatively small number of people. There are probably among the intelligent, aspiring portion of the population at least five persons who intend to interest themselves in public affairs, and regard doing so as essential to a useful life, to every one who puts his theories into practice. No man or woman can do everything. We cannot as individuals at one and the same time busy ourselves successfully in education, philanthropy, political reform, and economic science. But if every one would take an active, earnest concern in something, in some one thing, and look into it slowly but thoroughly, this man or woman in the public schools, this in the methods of municipal government, and this in the problems of crime or poverty, reforms would necessarily proceed much faster. Just a little work every other day or every week. Let it be your hobby if you will, if you have no time for a hobby too. If five thousand men in every large city should take an active interest in and give a small amount of time in every week to the school question, we should soon have excellent public schools; if another five thousand would devote themselves to the affairs of municipal government in a similar fashion, would there be so much corruption as at present, and would so inferior a class of citizens be chosen to be aldermen and to fill the other city offices? And so on to the end of the chapter. Is not something of the kind the duty of every earnest man and woman? Let those who boast of being plain people put this into their pipes and smoke it. When the self-styled working-classes are prohibited by law from working more than eight hours, will they contribute of their spare time to help those who are trying to help them?

American men have the reputation of being considerate husbands and indulgent fathers; but they have been apt at all events, until recently, to make permission to spend take the place of personal comradeship. This has been involuntarily and regretfully ascribed to business pressure; but fatalistic remorse is a poor substitute for duty, even though the loved ones eat off gold plate and ride in their own carriages as a consequence. We Americans who have begotten children in the last twenty years do not need to be informed that the time given to the society of one’s wife and family is the most precious expenditure of all, both for their sakes and our own. But though the truth is obvious to us, are we not sometimes conscious at the end of the week that the time due us and them has been squandered or otherwise appropriated? Those walks and talks, those pleasant excursions from city to country, or country to city, those quiet afternoons or evenings at home, which are possible to every man and woman who love each other and their children, are among the most valuable aids to wise living and peace of mind which daily existence affords. Intimacy and warm sympathy, precept and loving companionship, are worth all the indulgent permission and unexpected cheques in the world. Some people, when Sunday or a holiday comes, seem to do their best to get rid of their families and to try to amuse themselves apart from them. Such men and women are shutting out from their lives the purest oxygen which civilization affords; for genuine comradeship of husband and wife, and father or mother and child, purges the soul and tends to clear the mind’s eye more truly than any other influence.