This home is the home of a live animal, a large animal, bigger than a sheep—about as big as a fallow deer. The comfort and health of this animal we seek to insure by first wrapping it in many thicknesses of cloth and then shutting it up in a big box, carefully lined with cloth and paper and occasionally "aired" by opening windows. We feed the animal in the box, bringing into it large and varied supplies of food, and cooking them there. Growing dissatisfied with the mess resultant upon this process, disliking the sight and sound and smell of our own preferred food-processes, yet holding it essential that they shall all be carried on in the same box with the animal to be fed; we proceed to enlarge the box into many varied chambers, to shut off by closed doors these offensive details (which we would not do without for the world), and to introduce into the box still other animals of different grades to perform the offensive processes.
You thus find in a first-class modern home peculiar warring conditions, in the adjustment of which health and comfort are by no means assured. The more advanced the home and its inhabitants, the more we find complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort and potential disease, involved in the integral—supposedly integral—processes of the place. The more lining and stuffing there are, the more waste matter fills the air and settles continually as dust; the more elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit for a healthy animal to live in; the more labour required, the greater the wear and tear on both the heads of the family.
The conditions of health in a representative modern home are by no means what we are capable of compassing.
We consider "antiseptic cleanliness" as belonging only to hospitals, and are content to spend our daily, and nightly, lives in conditions of septic dirt.
An adult human being consumes six hundred cubic feet of air in an hour. How many homes provide such an amount, fresh, either by day or night?
Diseases of men may be attributed to exposure, to wrong conditions in shop and office, to chances of the crowd, or to special drug habits. Diseases of women and children must be studied at home, where they take rise. The present conditions of the home as to health and comfort are not satisfactory.
As to beauty: we have not much general knowledge of beauty, either in instinct or training; yet, even with such as we have, how ill satisfied it is in the average home. The outside of the house is not beautiful; the inside is not beautiful; the decorations and furnishings are not beautiful. The home, by itself, in its age-long traditionalism, does not allow of growth in these lines; nor do its physical limitations permit of it. But as education progresses and money accumulates we hire "art-decorators" and try to creep along the line of advance.
A true natural legitimate home beauty is rare indeed. We may be perfectly comfortable among our things, and even admire them; people of any race or age do that; but that sense of "a beautiful home" is but part of the complex ideal, not a fact recognised by those who love and study beauty and art. We do not find our common "interiors" dear to the soul of the painter. So we may observe that in general the home does not meet the demands of the physical nature, for simple animal health and comfort; nor of the psychical for true beauty.
Now for our happy family. Let it be carefully borne in mind that no question is raised as to the happiness of husband and wife; or of parent and child in their essential relation; but of their happiness as affected by the home.
The effect of the home, as it now is, upon marriage is a vitally interesting study. Two people, happily mated, sympathetic physically and mentally, having many common interests and aspirations, proceed after marrying to enter upon the business of "keeping house," or "home-making." This business is not marriage, it is not parentage, it is not child-culture. It is the running of the commissary and dormitory departments of life, with elaborate lavatory processes.