not earned or even saved. It has gone back to its primitive use--shelter
from weather and a sleeping-place, a temporary one at that. A real-estate
authority has made the assertion that three fifths of the rent-payers in
large cities are made up of non-householders and one half of these are
confined to one room--mostly women. This indicates a change in
requirements for the housing of the individual as distinguished from the
family. And it is this element which has complicated city living to a
great extent, and to which attention has been drawn by the accusation that
home life is shirked by it.

To the bachelor man and maid are added the commercial traveller who leaves
wife and possibly child behind four fifths of the time. For him, as for
several other classes of young business men, the locality which he can
choose for headquarters changes with the requirements of business. He is
under orders and must go at a moment's notice across the continent,
perhaps. It is not his fault but the exigency of business that destroys
the desire for a permanent abiding-place. The numbers of such homeless
young people are far greater than any one but the real-estate agent
realizes. Then this loosening of the home tie renders easy the shifting
from city to country and seashore. A considerable proportion of the $2000
to $5000 class shut up the flat or leave the boarding-house several times
in the year. There is usually one place where the furniture and
bric-a-brac and the other season's clothing are kept, but it is only a
storehouse or a temporary retreat that holds their property, growing less
and less as they move, until they may practically live in their trunks.

The legacy which outranks all the others in disastrous consequences is the
notion that the young people must begin where their parents left off; that
the house must be, if anything, a little more elaborate. Therefore in
starting life the rent is allowed to consume one third the income in