ed. They are atrocious imitations of the most debased Elizabethan
style; they show concrete where they should use stone, but, as their
predecessors showed stucco, they are not much worse. They exhibit
painted black stripes where there should be beams; they have sloping
roofs, gables, dormer windows, everything cunningly arranged to make as
many corners as possible where no chair can stand. They have horrid
little gardens where the builder has buried many broken bricks, sardine
tins, and old hats; they represent the taste of the twentieth century;
they are quite abominable. But still the fact remains that they are
infinitely smaller, more manageable, more intelligently planned than
the spacious old houses of the past, where every black cupboard bred
the cockroach and the mouse. They are easy to warm and easy to clean;
their windows are not limited by the old window tax; they have bathrooms
even when their rent is only one hundred and fifty dollars a year; and
especially they have no basement. The disappearance of the basement is
one of the most significant aspects of the downfall of the old
household, for it was essentially the servants' floor, where they could
be kept apart from their masters, maintaining their own sports and the
mysterious customs of a strange people; when the door of the kitchen
stairs was shut, one would keep out everything connected with the
servants, except perhaps the smell of the roast leg of mutton. That did
not matter, for that was homelike. The basement was a vestige of feudal
English society; it was brother to the servants' quarters and the
servants' hall. Now it is gone. In many places the tradesmen's entrance
has vanished, and the cabbage comes to the front door. The sacred
suppressions are no more, and in a developing democracy the master and
mistress of the house stately dine, while on the other side of a wall
about an inch thick Jane can be heard conversing with the policeman.

The growth of the small house has never stopped during the last forty or
fifty years. A builder in the southwest of London, of whom I made
inquiries, told me that he had erected four hundred and twenty houses,
and that not one of them had a basement; this form of architecture had
not even occurred to him. I have also visited very many homes in the
suburbs of London, and I have looked in vain for the old precincts of
the serving maid. The small house has powerfully affected the old
individual attitude of home, for t