eering which can initiate Boarding Homes for
the Elderly. Many of these are still strong and well, but need special
consideration in particular ways. Many others are not ill, but
delicate, and in need not of full-time nursing care but of occasional
good offices of trained helpers. One nurse, a "practical nurse" or a
trained nurse past in age and strength full service of her profession,
could easily give occasional service needed for twenty or more elderly
persons in usual health or for ten or more aged, in greater need of
care but not helpless, if all were under the same roof. The
cooeperative plans that often fail in serving the family of father,
mother, and children, may be found exactly suited to special classes,
and among them the aged. The Social Settlements were started to serve
and have served the neighborhood needs of the poor and the immigrant.
They have also, incidentally, demonstrated the financial advantages of
cooeperative housekeeping. A company of congenial people living
together in groups of twenty to forty can secure the essentials of
food, shelter, and necessary service at a cost per person far below
the average expense for boarding or private housekeeping. This does
not mean that families can combine easily in multiple households. The
personal equation counts for its greatest influence in the real family
group, of father, mother, and their children under eighteen years of
age. Few, if any, schemes of cooeperative housekeeping have as yet
worked well for the combination of such groups.

The aged, especially the aged widow or widower, are not in the direct
family group. They belong to but they are not inside the inmost
circle. If one alone is left the life of the personal home is broken
for the elderly, however dear and kind the children may be. For such
there surely needs something easier than the attempt to maintain a
separate home with half its life gone. And also something more
independent and more secure than either enforced residence with
children or compulsory use of the ordinary commercialized boarding
house.

=To Prevent Premature Old Age.=--The second social demand, that
premature old age shall be more effectively prevented, is one that is
pressed upon this generation with new and imperative considerations. A
knowledge of health conditions shows that although infant mortality is
greatly lessened and infectious and epidemic diseases greatly brought
under control, the diseases of middle age, s