If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on
the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them.
But if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock
tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man
the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure.
It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.
The home is the one place where he can put the carpet
on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to.
When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar or from
music-hall to music-hall, we say that he is living an irregular life.
But he is not; he is living a highly regular life,
under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of such places.
Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars;
and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls.
Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress;
and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden
to smoke. A man can only picnic at home.

Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence,
this possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty,
as the working model for the present inquiry.
Whether we can give every English man a free home of his own
or not, at least we should desire it; and he desires it.
For the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he
expects to get. He wants, far instance, a separate house;
he does not want a semi-detached house. He may be forced
in the commercial race to share one wall with another man.
Similarly he might be forced in a three-legged race to share
one leg with another man; but it is not so that he pictures
himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again, he does