finish, color, etc., can give individuality to the
simplest chair.

Therefore the first outlay for the new order will be beyond the purse of
any single family of this group. If we had learned to cooperate sanely, a
group might undertake it, but the most probable method will be for some
far-sighted men to agree to sink a certain amount of money in experiment,
just as they now sink money in prospecting a mine with all the uncertainty
it brings. Ability to _risk_ in an experiment must go hand in hand with
capital to use.

The objection commonly made is that all individuality will be taken away,
that each one must live like every one else in the neighborhood. This is
not an essential consequence, but will it be so impossible to have a
certain similarity in the dwellings of like-minded people? In
"Anticipations" it is declared that "Unless some great catastrophe in
Nature breaks down all that man has built, these great kindred groups of
capable men and educated adequate women must be under the forces we have
considered so far, the element finally emergent amid the vast confusions
of the coming time."[1]

[Footnote 1: Anticipations, pp. 153-4.]

The practical people, the engineering and medical and scientific people,
will become more and more _homogeneous_ in their fundamental culture.

The decreasing of the space one can call one's own within urban limits has
so steadily increased, and the need for freer air has become so fully
recognized, that the case of the single householder in the suburbs and
even in the country is bound to press harder and harder. The group system
elsewhere referred to, with central heating plant and workers of all
grades at telephone-call, will make possible at a reasonable rent within
easy reach of the city the single household of one, two, or three, as the
case may be, and if without children of their own, to such shelter may
come some of those homeless little ones we have with us always, to share
in the sun and wind and garden. In the real country, with acres instead of
feet of land, much of the same kind of elaborate simplicity will be found.
Certainly the same kind of fire-proof house of only one story with more
light, "roofs of steel and glass on the louver principle," will obviate so
frequent a change of air as a shut-in house requires, and give more
equable temperature.

In the city? Since physicians will surely be more insistent on light, as
well as fresh air, roof-gardens and balconies