fancy that, before we turn the whole house over to the cook, we shall dispense with her and get our meals from co-operative kitchens.

I have noticed of late years in the magazines that deal with architectural and decorative problems increasing stress on the absurdity of having a dining-room. Why absurd? For only one reason: that here is a room which must be cleaned, which, therefore, means more service. If you have your meals in the "livingroom," you dispense with so much floor-andwall space to be gone over. In only that sense is it absurd. For most of us will agree that while English lodgings are all very well, especially for a solitary creature, it is a painful business for a large family to eat three meals a day in a room which has to be lived in otherwise. All people may not have the prejudice known to some of us against social consumption of food; but any one will agree that the best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind it. A dining-room may be a luxury, but it is not an absurdity, so long as you can by any means afford it. If the æsthetic and pseudoæsthetic experts in domesticity are telling us that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is only because they wish to prepare us for an inevitable contraction of our comfort, an unavoidable mitigation of decency. The one most aristocratic element in life, physically speaking, is spaciousness; it has always been in the best

tradition to be frugal to starvation in a corner of a palace. But we have come nowadays to care more for what we eat (I fear) than for how or where we eat it. The abolition of the dining-room is only a further step on the road we entered when we moved en masse out of houses into flats. It has been hard to get service; and meanwhile we have grown soft and would rather do without those amenities which are not conveniences than to furnish them for ourselves.

It must in fairness be admitted that two things have combined to bring us to this pass. The most obvious fact is this of the labor situation, which is now immensely accentuated by the war. But another force has always been at work. Except in that part of the country which imported slaves early and kept them as long as it could, more or less pioneer standards prevailed. We were a new country; we dispensed perforce (as in other colonies) with many of the inherited comforts. Our love of personal (I do not mean political) independence was a kind of protective coloring. The enforced simplicity of the pioneer scene bred in us a distaste for being waited on too importunately. Because we had to do certain things for ourselves, we developed a preference for doing them, a distaste for the constant interposition of another human being among the more private processes of existence. Even in the South, some modifica

tion of the tradition must have been necessary, for the South must always have been badly, though exuberantly, served. Here and there a butler, a lady's maid, may, after years of struggle, have been highly trained; and the colored race has a gift for cooking. But in many ways Southerners must have contended with the disheartening conditions faced by all English households in the outposts of empire, dependent on another and a stupid race for the satisfaction of their needs. Southern luxury lay in having a score of inadequate menials to keep the masters as comfortable as three or four really good servants would have done. It was slave labor, and slave labor reaches competence only by sheer force of numbers. There was never an ideal of domestic service there, because there was never the rounded conception of civilized domestic comfort in any slave's mind. And nothing is more slovenly or incompetent in domestic service than the younger generation of free-born negroes. I do not think the colored race is going to prove our domestic salvation.

We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the first place, for the reasons I have given. By the labor-saving device we have been brought insensibly to an almost animal dependence on creature comforts. With all our theoretical glorification of simplicity, we have really prided ourselves supremely on our physical luxuries,

and most of all, it must be said, on those physical luxuries which have no æsthetic value. Our plumbing has been our civilization. The European aristocracy is for the most part not so "comfortable" as the American middle class; and therefore we have considered ourselves the greatest nation in the world. We have been snobbish about many things, but about nothing so much as our electrical appliances and our skyscrapers. We have sinned, all of us together, as I said before; and now we are paying. Simplicity, austerity, even, are forced upon us; and it behooves those of us who really care, in spite of temporary apostasies, about real values, to take thought and to plan. The vital question is not whether we shall simplify, but how. On that depends our civilization.

Neither the new war millionaires nor skilled labor can teach us that. We shall have need of all our trained perceptions, of all our first-hand and all our book knowledge, of what money has been most wisely spent for in the past, to make our choice intelligently. The new millionaire and the enriched laboring man will not, for the most part, be able to help us; for, by and large, having no experience of the finer things of civilization, they will not know. For ourselves, it does not much matter-for us who have seen a world in ruin and can never "care" for anything in the same way again

but this is perhaps our first duty to our children. They cannot have all the things we were brought up to crave and expect; but they must have the essentials. What, in a practical sense, are those going to be?

The Pennsylvania miner, making from forty to seventy-five dollars a day, buys an automobile-not necessarily a Ford-which waits for him at the entrance to the mine. His wife buys finery. Both buy the best food they can get. It has been publicly said, I understand, by a distinguished representative of the Food Administration, that almost every class of the community was doing its duty in the way of food conservation, except skilled labor. That is the class which cannot be reached by appeal. The very poorest are still very poor, and they have neither the money nor the knowledge to enable them to indulge in forbidden gastronomic luxuries. The rich are apparently-in most cases-making it a point of honor to help out. But skilled labor, which is so necessary to the prosecution of war, which has never in its life been so pampered, so flattered, so kowtowed to, so overpaid (yes, I mean that; it is overpaid, and I will explain what I mean presently), has lost its head. It probably believes the things the politicians and its own leaders have been saying to it. It will work, and consider itself patriotic for working-but it will exact from the rest of us, the public, a price it