gh, I see many
more causes of disquiet for the older generation, and I wonder with a
certain fear whether I, too, shall not be dismayed when I become the
older generation. For the destruction of the old home is extending now
much farther than bricks and mortar. It is touching the center of human
life, the kitchen. There are now in London quite a number of flats, such
as, I think, Queen Anne's Mansions, St. James's Court, Artillery
Mansions, where the tenants live in agreeable suites and either take
their meals in the public restaurant or have them brought up to their
flat. The difficulty of service is being reduced. The sixty households
are beginning to do without the sixty cooks, and never use more than a
few dozen at a time of their two hundred pieces of crockery. There are
no more tradesmen, nor is there any ordering; there is a menu and a
telephone. There are no more heated interviews with the cook, and no
more notices given ten minutes before the party, but a chat with a
manager who has the manners and the tact of an ambassador. There is no
more home work in these places.

I think these blocks of flats point the way to the future much more
clearly than the hotels and the boarding houses, for those are only
makeshifts. Generally speaking, boarding houses are bad and
uncomfortable, for the landlady is sometimes drunk and generally
ill-tempered, the servants are usually dirty and always overworked; the
furniture clamors for destruction by the city council. The new
system--blocks of flats with a central restaurant--will probably, in a
more or less modified form, be the home of new British generations. I
conceive the future homes of the people as separate communities, say
blocks of a hundred flats or perhaps more, standing in a common garden
which will be kept up by the estate. Each flat will probably have one
room for each inhabitant, so as to secure the privacy which is very
necessary even to those who no longer believe in the home idea; it will
also have a common room where privacy can be dispensed with. Its
furniture will be partly personal, but not very, for a movement which is
developing in America will extend, and we too in England may be
provided, as are to-day the more fortunate Americans, with an abundance
of cupboards and dressers ready fixed to the walls. There will be no
coal, but only electricity and gas, run from the central plant. There
will be no kitchens, but one central kitchen, and a central dining r