autiful their rooms shall
not be dens and holes. And on this score I foresee a fight with the
architect. They shall have bath-rooms, toilet conveniences, and comforts
for their leisure time and human life--if I have to work Sundays to pay
for it. Even under the division of labour I recognize that no man has a
right to servants who will not treat them as humans compounded of the
same clay as himself, with similar bundles of nerves and desires,
contradictions, irritabilities, and lovablenesses. Heaven in the
drawing-room and hell in the kitchen is not the atmosphere for a growing
child to breathe--nor an adult either. One of the great and selfish
objections to chattel slavery was the effect on the masters themselves.

And because of the foregoing, one chief aim in the building of my house
beautiful will be to have a house that will require the minimum of
trouble and work to keep clean and orderly. It will be no spick and span
and polished house, with an immaculateness that testifies to the tragedy
of drudge. I live in California where the days are warm. I'd prefer
that the servants had three hours to go swimming (or hammocking) than be
compelled to spend those three hours in keeping the house spick and span.
Therefore it devolves upon me to build a house that can be kept clean and
orderly without the need of those three hours.

But underneath the spick and span there is something more dreadful than
the servitude of the servants. This dreadful thing is the philosophy of
the spick and span. In Korea the national costume is white. Nobleman
and coolie dress alike in white. It is hell on the women who do the
washing, but there is more in it than that. The coolie cannot keep his
white clothes clean. He toils and they get dirty. The dirty white of
his costume is the token of his inferiority. The nobleman's dress is
always spotless white. It means that he doesn't have to work. But it
means, further, that somebody else has to work for him. His superiority
is not based upon song-craft nor state-craft, upon the foot-races he has
run nor the wrestlers he has thrown. His superiority is based upon the
fact that he doesn't have to work, and that others are compelled to work
for him. And so the Korean drone flaunts his clean white clothes, for
the same reason that the Chinese flaunts his monstrous finger-nails, and
the white man and woman flaunt the spick-and-spanness of their spotless
houses.

There will be hardwo