“I think myself,” said Professor Adler, “that the idea is thoroughly good, and if cautiously and wisely carried out would be a success. I should like to see the experiment tried. I have all my life been preaching coöperation, not only for the poor, but for ourselves as well, but with small success.”
“The chief objection, I suppose,” said Mildred, “is, that when food is cooked in large quantities it never tastes so good. In time everything seems to get a sort of boarding-house flavor, and individual tastes cannot be consulted as in one’s own home. This may be made an objection by the rich, but that a fastidiousness about a flavor should prevent people from trying coöperation, who have all they can do to keep soul and body together, seems to me more than ridiculous.”
“It is more than ridiculous, and I for one have faith that people can be taught to see it,” said the blond young man with the clear, crisp speech. “The people who have lived in the model tenement houses have already learned to use dumb-waiters, speaking-tubes, set tubs, ash-shutes, and the like, and have seen the advantages of these modern conveniences. Now, with patience on our part and a painstaking explanation of your scheme, I think that they could be led to see the saving in time, fuel, space, money, and quality of food as well as the increased variety of food and cleanliness incident to an arrangement such as you propose, and which I heartily hope you will carry out. The thing to do, as Octavia Hill in her work in London has wisely taught us, is to make sure that we put in the right sort of men and women to manage such a place. As she once said, ‘We have more model tenements than we know how to take care of. My present work is to train women who will go down and oversee them.’
“If, beside the man who is employed to attend to the business part of it and to see that the sanitary condition is good, you will also put in one or two nice American women who will look after the families in a friendly way, giving suggestions and advice with tact, and carefully explaining the advantages of improvements, I will vouch for the success of the experiment. If some object, there are enough people of common sense in the city to fill one house at least.”
“It seems to me,” said one speaker, “that we ought to be careful about talking or even allowing ourselves to think of those whom we call the ‘lower classes’ as being essentially different from ourselves. They are ignorant, of course, and dreadfully shiftless, some of them, but they have the same instincts and affections as we, and I for one respect their individuality and their privacy as I would our own. I shouldn’t like to ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself under similar circumstances. If we aren’t ready for coöperation, how can we expect them to be?”
“I ask nothing of any one,” replied Mildred, “which I would not be glad to do myself under the same conditions, or under better conditions. We are learning to coöperate in a thousand ways of which our grandfathers never dreamed. Under the pressure of new duties and interests which our age has brought with it, we are learning to eliminate useless individual work where combined work is better. The law of reciprocity is the divine law. Wasteful individual effort belongs to the age of savagery. Communism, the mingling of families, and absence of personal privacy can never I am convinced be tolerated by civilized people; but coöperation with one’s fellows in harnessing up the forces of nature to subserve our material interests and leave man more free for the development of his higher nature, seems to me the only rational thing for rational beings. Any reluctance to see and accept this seems to me the result of prejudice.”
“I should put it even a little stronger than that,” said Professor Adler, gently. “Under every objection which has been presented to me by the friends with whom I have for years been laboring in this very line of effort, I have felt that there was not mere prejudice but a real, unconscious selfishness. All objections like the one you mention are mere matters of detail which could be properly adjusted, and the freedom of the wife from all petty details that eat up the greater part of her life ought to more than compensate for the slight sacrifice of feeling involved in doing an unaccustomed thing. I believe that we shall gradually come to it; and meanwhile our boarding-houses and hotels will shelter larger and larger numbers of women driven from housekeeping by the weight of domestic cares. They will have lost their home in losing their cook!”
CHAPTER IX.
Fifth Avenue Hotel.
Dear Alice: What an age it seems since I left Boston and exchanged the peace and quiet of my dear old attic room for all this turmoil and whirl of excitement! I have done more thinking in the last two months than ever before in my life, and sometimes I feel as though every idea had been squeezed out of my brain. If it were not that I insist upon getting some hours every week for a canter in the park, I fear I should be in a state of nervous collapse. However, I am beginning to see my way clear, and hope to get away in a month or so and be off to the West. Then when I get a conscience tolerably clear I shall run riot like a school-boy out of school.