of cleanliness. The supply of hot water, together with the
gas stove, has done much to reconcile the housewife who does her own work
to the cramped quarters of the flat, and also has done more than anything
else to render the maids discontented with that legacy from the nineteenth
century which requires the building of a coal fire before hot water can be
had. The coal fire makes necessary rising an hour earlier and this, after
the late hours the seven-o'clock dinner enforces, causes friction all
along the line.

The acceptance by young women without a study of cause and effect of
whatever presents itself makes them bad housekeepers, in the sense of
ignorant ones unable to cope with present conditions, because lack of
experience is not supplemented by a spirit of investigation and a
resolution to work out the problem. They seem to think that housekeeping
is to go on in the same old way no matter whatever else may change,
whereas it is most sensitive to the general direction of progress if they
but knew it. The wage-earner is more fully aware of the currents of the
irresistible river modern life has become (the slow-moving car of
Juggernaut is no longer an adequate symbol) than is the money spender.

Indeed is any part of the house, as we now most frequently find it,
adapted to the uses of the twentieth century?

The careless capitalist who makes possible the "cockroach landlord," he
who sublets and crowds and skimps the tenants for his own gain, is greatly
to blame for the distressing conditions of the lower income limit of the
wage-earner, but I fear he is not altogether blameless for the sort of
house the $1500 man has to look for in the city. Decent living with light
and air within half an hour of work is growing so rare that society must
take a hand in the matter.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PLACE OF THE HOUSE IN THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY.

"We have entered upon the period of conscious evolution, have
begun the adaptation of the environment to the organism."--Sir
OLIVER LODGE.

The hopeless pessimism of the past, that saw in the unmerciful progress of
organic evolution no escape for the human animal from the grip of fate, is
about to give way to the enthusiasm of conscious directing and controlling
power.

This is the beneficent result of the age of the machine. Man has
discovered that he can not only change his environment, but that by this
change he can modify himself. The hope