lars has any right to maintain a maid." This
estimate seems not only economically correct but shows why so few
families have incomes that can release the housemother from housework.
It also shows why only the exceptionally trained and competent
vocational worker, if a married woman and mother of young children,
can earn enough to release herself from the miscellaneous tasks of the
private household without loss to the family treasury. The easing of
the burden of housework, almost unbearable as it has been and
responsible, as we have good reason to believe, for much ill-health of
women and much unhappiness in marriage, is coming fast and from quite
other directions than is often perceived. The commercial aids of
wholesale preparation of food and clothing, and the new fashions in
house-building and household management are alike working toward such
a reduction of private household service as may enable the average
woman to meet the family needs, even where there are several young
children, if she is strong in body and trained in efficient ways of
working, and yet have considerable time left for other activities.

The apartment house has set the fashion of simplification and
reduction of necessary personal service in the home. The apartment
house, with its continuous hot water, its ready heat and its relief
from care of sidewalks, halls and stairs, and with its hour-service at
command is obviously becoming a favorite place to live in. Especially
do women like it. The multiple house, however, does not seem the best
place for children after the earliest months of infancy, and in many
such houses they are openly "not wanted." The multiple house has also
many disadvantages from the social side in the lack of home
associations which support family affection. They are also for the
most part in localities where people are brought together without plan
or friendship and hence can not cultivate that neighborliness which,
so far in the history of the race, has been a nursery of the community
spirit.

=The Apartment House and the Family.=--The apartment house seems to be
the best place for those families in which all the adult members are
busy at some vocation, and in which the children are of age to profit
by educational opportunities usually found only in cities. In such
families the burdens of the person who is in command of the family
comfort as to food and raiment and house-keeping are reduced to the
lowest terms. If to the us