and girls to overcome obstacles,
not to ignore them. Let the educated, intelligent young people join in
devising a way to surmount this obstacle as the engineers of 1890 invented
new ways of crossing impassable gorges and "impossible" mountain ranges.

The writer has no ready-prepared panacea to offer. Patent medicine is not
the remedy. This kind cometh out only by fasting and prayer. A long course
of diet is needed to cure a chronic disease.

This little volume is intended merely as a spur to the imagination of the
indolent student, to arouse him to the mental effort required to deal with
the readjustment of ideas to conditions before it is too late.

It is no exaggeration to say that the social well-being of the community
is threatened. The habits of years are broken up; sad to say, the
middle-aged will suffer unrelieved, but the young can be incited to
grapple with the situation and hew out for themselves a way through.

Certain elements in the problem will be touched upon in the following
pages as a result of much going to and fro in the "most favored land on
earth." Certain questions will be raised as to what constitutes a home and
a shelter for the family in the twentieth-century sense of both family and
shelter.

CHAPTER II.

THE HOUSE CONSIDERED AS A MEASURE OF SOCIAL STANDING.

It is not what we lack, but what we see others have,
that makes us discontented.

There has been noted in every age a tendency to measure social preeminence
by the size and magnificence of the family abode. Mediaeval castles,
Venetian palaces, colonial mansions, all represented a form of social
importance, what Veblen has called conspicuous waste. This was largely
shown in maintaining a large retinue and in giving lavish entertainments.
The so-called patronage of the arts--furnishings, fabrics, pictures,
statues, valued to this day--came under the same head of rivalry in
expenditure.

In America a similar aspiration results in immense establishments far
beyond the needs of the immediate family. But, unlike society in the
middle ages, social aspiration does not stop short at a well-defined line.
In the modern state each level reaches up toward the next higher and,
failing to balance itself, drops into the abyss which never fills.

There is no contented layer of humanity to equalize the pressure; heads
and hands are thrust up through from below at every point. Democracy has
taken possession of the age and must be