arily increasing the cost of living.

I have said elsewhere that it is not because the landlord does not want
children in the house but because he does not want such ill-bred children,
vandals, who have no respect for anything. He charges high rent because
his investment is good for only ten years.

The shibboleth of duty to own a home has so strong a hold on the moral
sense of the people that it is made use of by the promoter who may in some
cases think himself the philanthropist he intends others to call him. I
mean that the duty of owning and the heinousness of paying rent are so
ingrained that buying on the instalment plan has seemed a righteous thing,
even with the examples of broken lives in plain sight. As an incentive to
save, if there were anything to save, it might have been justified in the
days of feudalism. But for an independent American to confess that he
cannot put money in the bank, and that he must bind himself and his family
to slavery, for the sake of owning a bit of property which they will
probably wish to sell before they have it paid for, is disgraceful.
Intelligent men should see that here is the profit in the transaction;
that enough go to the wall to pay for the trouble of the rest, just as in
life insurance enough die before the expected time to put money in the
pockets of the riskers.

A drunken father may need to be held, but the young professor, the lawyer,
the engineer, should have sufficient self-respect and firmness to save
that which in his judgment is necessary, without being tied by "the
instalment plan." This method is a very viper in the finances of to-day.
The wise business man never ventures more than he can afford to lose in a
risk, but the man who takes bread and milk from his children to invest in
"a sure thing" takes a risk with what is not his to give.

To buy land for investment is another supposed virtue, an inheritance from
the time when slow growth, once started in a given direction, kept on, so
that great acumen was not needed to buy; but that is all changed to-day.
Only those "in the ring" can tell where the "boom" will go next.

In these days of unparalelled rapidity of change in industrial and social
conditions it is most undesirable for a man to be hampered by a shell
which is too large to carry about with him and too valuable to be left
behind. To each reader will occur instances of the refusal of an
advantageous offer because the family home could not be realiz