Chapter XVIII: Domestic Reform

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

In the nest-building propensity of the social insects the biologist can recognize the first germ of the instinctive desire for the establishment of a permanent home. Certain birds, like the weaver-thrush of the tropics, imitate the community life of the ant and bee, but in all higher animals the homestead instinct is associated with the desire for domestic privacy. The eagle will suffer no other bird to approach the rock that shelters his eyrie; the hawk, the heron, and the kingfisher rear their brood at the greatest possible distance from the nesting-place of their next relatives. Each pair of squirrels try to get a tree all to themselves; and even the social prairie-dog shares its home with strangers (owls and serpents) rather than with another family of its own tribe. The “homestead instinct” of our primitive forefathers formed the first, and perhaps the most potent, stimulus to the acquisition of personal property. There is a period in life when the desire for the possession of a private domicile asserts itself with the power almost of a vital passion; and success in the realization of that desire solves in many respects the chief problems of individual existence. The love of domestic peace, the delight in the improvement of a private homestead, are the best guarantees of staid habits. There was a time when the neglect of husbandry was considered a conclusive proof of profligate habits; and the office of a Roman censor comprised the duty of reproving careless housekeepers. The poorest citizen of the Roman commonwealth had a little patrimonium of his own, a dwelling-house, an orchard, and a small lot of land, which he did his best to improve, and where his children learned their first lesson of personal rights in defense of their private playgrounds.

The ruins of Pompeii show that the civilization of the Mediterranean coast-lands had anticipated the conclusion of our sanitarian reformers, who recommend the advantage of cottage-suburbs as a remedy for the horrors of tenement life. Between the acropolis and the seaside villas the town forms an aggregation of small dwelling-houses, mostly one-story, but each with a private yard (probably a little garden) or a wide portico, with bath-room and private gymnasiums. And though the ancients were well acquainted with the manufacture of glass, their dwelling-houses were lighted by mere lattice-windows, excluding rain and the glare of the sun, but freely admitting every breeze, and thus solving the problem of ventilation in the simplest and most effective manner. The dwellings of our Saxon forefathers, too, resembled the log-cabins of the Kentucky backwoods, and admitted fresh air so freely that the large family-hearth could dispense with a chimney, and vented its smoke through the open eaves of the roof. In the palaces of the Roman patricians there were special winter-rooms, with a smoke-flue resembling a narrow alcove; but even there, ventilation was insured by numerous lattice doors, communicating with as many balconies or terrace roofs.

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The evolution of all hereditary instincts has been explained by the “survival of the fittest,” and the instinct of homestead-love has doubtlessly been developed in the same way. The results of its predominance prevailed against the results of its absence. Defensive love of a private “hearth and home” is the basis of patriotism, so unmistakably, indeed, that the fathers of the Roman republic for centuries refused to employ foreign mercenaries, who had no personal interest in the defense of the soil. As a modern humorist has cleverly expressed it: “Few men have been patriotic enough to shoulder a musket in defense of a boarding-house.” And the golden age of civic virtues is almost limited to the time when every free citizen of Greece and Rome was a landowner.

Nor would it be easy to overrate the subjective advantages of home-life. Health, happiness, and longevity have no more insidious foe than the canker-worm of vexation; and for the unavoidable disappointments of social life there is no more effective specific than the peace of a prosperous private homestead, soothing the mind with evidences of success in the growth of a promising orchard, in the increase and improvement of domestic animals, in the happiness of merry children and contented dependents. Xenophon, after proving the excitements of an adventurous life by land and sea, found a truer happiness in the solitude of his Arcadian hunting-lodge. Felix Sylla, Fortune’s most constant favorite, abandoned the throne of a mighty empire to enjoy the frugal fare of a small hill-farm. Voltaire, worn out by the trials of a fifty years’ life-and-death struggle against the rancor of bigots, recovered his health and his peace of mind amidst the pear-tree plantations of Villa Ferney.

In the resources of medicine and scientific surgery the ancients were far behind even the half-civilized nations of modern times, but their children could enjoy their holidays on their own playground, their sleepers could breathe pure air, their worn-out laborers could retire to the peace of a private home; and they enjoyed a degree of health and vigor which our most progressive nations can hope to re-attain only after centuries of sanitary reform.

C.—PERVERSION.

The germ of the ignoble patience which submits to the miseries of modern tenement-life, and learns to prefer the fetor of a crowded slum-alley to the free air of the woods and fields, can be traced to the voluntary prison-life of the first Christian monasteries. With all the gregariousness of the African race, the very slaves of our American plantations preferred to avoid quarrels and constraint by building a separate cabin for the use of each family; but the ethics of the Galilean church recognized no privilege of personal rights; the sympathies of family-life were crushed out by the enforcement of celibacy; every symptom of self-assertion was denounced as a revolt against the duty of passive subordination; the very instincts of individuality were systematically suppressed to make each convert a whining, emasculated, self-despising, and world-renouncing “member of the church of Christ.” The mortification of the body being the chief object of monastic seclusion, the hygienic architecture of convent buildings was considered a matter of such absolute unimportance that many of the cells (dormitories) had no windows at all, but merely a door communicating with an ill-ventilated gallery, after the plan of our old-style prisons. Eight feet by ten, and eight high, were the usual dimensions of those man-pens; and that utter indifference to the physical health of the inmates was but rarely seconded by a view to the advantages of private meditation is proved by the circumstance that the convent-slaves of the eastern church (in the Byzantine empire, for instance) were not often permitted to enjoy the privacy of their wretched dens; their dormitories were packed like the bunks of a Portuguese slave-ship, and the word Syncellus (cell-mate) is used as a cognomen of numerous ecclesiastics. The abbot, and in less ascetic centuries perhaps the learned clerks (legend-writers, etc.), were the only members of a monastic community who could ever rely on the privacy of a single hour. For the admitted purpose of mortifying their love of physical comforts, the weary sleepers, worn-out with penance and hunger, were summoned to prayer in the middle of the night, or sent out on begging expeditions in the roughest weather. Every vestige of furniture or clothing apt to mitigate the dreariness of discomfort was banished from their cells; they suffered all the hardships without enjoying the peace and security of a hermit’s home; novices (on probation), and even the pupils of the convent-schools, were submitted to a similar discipline, and thus monasticism became the training-school of modern tenement-life.

During the latter half of the Middle Ages, feudalism found an additional motive for suppressing the love of domestic independence. The church usurers and aristocrats monopolized real estate, and made it more and more difficult, even for the most industrious of their dependants, to acquire a share of landed property. Every feudal lord secured his control over his serfs by crowding them together in a small village (literally an abode of villains, i.e., of vile pariahs), where his slave-drivers could at any time rally them for an extra job of socage duty. The incessant raids of mail-clad highway-robbers—robber knights and marauding partisans—obliged all peace-loving freemen to congregate for mutual protection and rear their children in the stone prisons of an over-crowded burgh. The suppression of all natural sciences, including the science of health, aggravated the evil by a persistent neglect of such partial remedies as disinfectants and artificial ventilation. The home of a medieval artisan combined all the disadvantages of a jail and a pest-house.

The revolt against feudalism has at last broken the stone-fetters of our larger cities; city walls have been turned into promenades, and convents into store-houses or lunatic asylums; but the spirit of monasticism still survives; indifference to the blessings of health and domestic independence seems to have acquired the strength of a second nature, and thousands of our modern factory slaves actually prefer their slum-prisons to the freedom of a cheaper suburban home.

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

Nature rarely fails to avenge the violation of her laws, but it might be doubted if the perversion of any other natural instinct has entailed more numerous or direr penalties than our habitual outrages against the instinct of home-life. The monstrosities of our tenement system, by a moderate estimate, cost on the average every year the lives of 1,500,000 children under ten years of age (in Europe and North America), and of 1,200,000 consumptives, besides thousands of victims to epidemic disorders, aggravated, if not engendered, by the influence of vitiated air. Habitual intemperance, too, has undoubtedly been increased by the dearth of home-comforts. Our factory-laborers, our mechanics, and thousands of students and young clerks, spend their evenings in riot, because the man-trap of the lowest grog-shop is, after all, less unattractive than the dungeon of a stifling tenement home. In many of our larger cities similar causes have led to a constant increase of a manner of existence which a modern reformer calls the “celibacy of vice.” But the decreasing demand for independent homes is not the only cause of the decreased supply, and the heartless selfishness of our wealthy land-gluttons has provoked a form of nihilism which threatens to shake, if not to subvert, the very foundations of social life.

E.—REFORM.

That latter danger seems, at last, to have awakened our political economists to the necessity of redressing a many-sided abuse, and the failure of earlier reform projects has at least helped to emphasize the demand for more adequate remedies. The traffic in human life in the floating hells of the African slave-traders hardly called for more stringent repressive measures than the inhumanity of our tenement speculators who fatten on the profits of a system propagating the infallible seeds of pulmonary consumption, and sacrificing the lives of more children than the superstition of the dark ages ever doomed to the altars of Moloch. Even in a country where the jealousy of personal rights would hardly countenance legislative interference with the construction of private dwelling-houses, the license of tenement-owners ought to be circumscribed by the conditions of Dr. Paul Boettger’s rule, providing for appropriation of a certain number of cubic feet of breathing space, and square feet of window, front, and garden (or play-ground) room for each tenant or family of tenants. The abuse of sub-renting could be limited by similar provisions, and the adoption of the separate cottage plan should be promoted by the reduction of municipal passenger tariffs and suburban taxes.

The plan of equalizing the burden of taxation and the opportunities of land tenure by a general confiscation and redistribution of real estate might recommend itself as a last resort, though hardly in preference to the project of Fedor Bakunin, the “Russian Mirabeau,” who proposed to found new communities under a charter, reserving the tenth part of all building lots for communal purposes, and lease the tenant-right to the highest bidder. The value of those reserve lots would increase with the growth of the town, and by renewing their lease from ten to ten years, the rent could be made to cover the budget of all direct municipal expenses, and leave a fair surplus for charitable and educational purposes. In comparison with the confiscation plan, that project could claim all the advantages which make prevention preferable to a drastic cure.

As a check to the evils of land monopoly the least objectionable plan would seem to be Professor De Graaf’s proposition of a graded system of real estate taxation, increasing the rate of tallage with each multiple of a fair homestead lot, and thus taxing a land-shark for the privilege of acquisition, as well as for the actual possession, of an immoderate estate.

The art of making home-life pleasant will yet prove the most effective specific in the list of temperance remedies, and will aid the apostles of Secularism in that work of redemption which the gospel of renunciation has failed to achieve.