o home-like that friends will gladly share it when
permitted.

Let good manners, keen intelligence, bright and entertaining conversation
take the place of the showy but frequently uncomfortable houses and
wholesale entertainments of to-day.

It is time that a beginning was made of that form of social pleasure and
mental recreation which the century must develop, or fail of its promise.

What is the value, of present-day knowledge if not to stimulate the
conscious group, through the individual perhaps, but the group finally, to
better use of its powers and opportunities toward a higher form of social
life?

We have been told that the house should be as much an expression of
individuality as clothes. Since clothes are constantly and easily changed,
and a family home built to order is comparatively permanent, such
expression in wood or stone should be carefully thought out; but how
rarely do we gain a pleasant impression from the houses built for the
purpose of setting forth social standards! The owner and the architect
have neither of them the highest ideals, and a sort of ready-made,
composite, often irritating, always displeasing result follows. The
pretence shows through more often than the occupant realizes.

Society has the power to regulate its own conventions. Once convinced that
it is dangerous to put the strain of living on to mere superficial
pretence, mere location, ornament, new standards will be set up; as,
indeed, they are under other conditions. In frontier life, for instance,
where shortness of tenure is recognized, dress and the table take the
place of the house as indications. In a mining town, one is astonished at
the costumes seen on persons issuing from insignificant houses, and at the
excellent bill of fare in a restaurant with the barest necessities of
furnishing. Cursory observation often reads the signs of civilization
wrongly. The eastern traveller, accustomed to the outward glitter and the
finish of settled communities, fails to interpret the real efficiency of a
more flexible society. West of the Mississippi, that new empire we are
just beginning to appreciate, good food is recognized as of prime
importance, dress gives an opportunity for showing conspicuous waste, and
buildings are made for show only when permanence of residence is assured.

Let society once thoroughly understand that safe shelter is essential to
its very life, that this safety is threatened, if not lost, by present
habi