apartment-house, where the entire daily adventure of living is taken out
of your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to be
deprived of one of the main interests of existence. The apartment-house
ranks in my opinion among the more pernicious influences in American
life. As an institution it is unhappily establishing itself in England,
and in England it is terrible. I doubt if it is less terrible in its
native land. It is anti-social because it works always against the
preservation of the family unit, and because it is unfair to children,
and because it prevents the full flowering of an individuality. (Nobody
can be himself in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he would
instantly be thrown out.) It is immoral because it fosters bribery and
because it is pretentious itself and encourages pretense in its victims.
It is unfavorable to the growth of taste because its decorations and
furniture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic standard of
the vulgarest people in it, and have not even the merit of being the
expression of any individuality at all. It is enervating because it
favors the creation of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself.
It is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it seems, and
because often it forces its victims to eat in a dining-room whose walls
are a distressing panorama of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine is
and must be at best mediocre, since meals at once sound and showy
cannot be prepared wholesale.

Some apartment-houses are better than others; many are possibly marvels
of organization and value for money. But none can wholly escape the
indictment. The institution itself, though it may well be a natural and
inevitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad. An experienced
dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent house
which I had visited and sampled: "We pay six hundred dollars for two
poor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week for