There is money enough, brains enough, and good will enough in this city to abolish these hideous conditions of life by which thousands of lives are wrecked every year. I am very doubtful about much state socialism; but municipal socialism to this extent seems to me the only rational thing in view of the present evils. A century hence we shall look back with wonder that our mania for individualism and dread of governmental interference should have led us to tolerate these things a day. I was never more convinced of anything than of this, and never more terribly in earnest about anything in my life. Meanwhile my agents are buying up and cleansing some of the worst old tenement houses in the city, and I am searching in every direction for the right person to put in charge of them. I find that this is the most important feature of it all. There must be constant, tireless supervision, and I find that it really pays to give one good tenant his rent free on condition that he keep the building clean and orderly. He must, of course, be one who has enough moral power to enforce all necessary rules.
These details must sound very prosaic to you, I fear, in comparison with all the delightful things which you are studying; but just at present I am finding the subject of dumb-waiters and ash-shoots quite as fascinating as I ever used to find Correggios or cryptogamia.
By the way, I am going to see a beautiful private car which is to be sold. I am thinking of buying it and taking aunt Madison and some delightful people whom I know on a trip to the Yellowstone Park and Puget Sound this summer. What do you say to joining us? By the time you have finished at the Annex you will be ready to drop, and will be quite unfit to think of getting up your trousseau. Tell that impatient young professor that he must wait for three months, and give you a chance to know how sweet it is to get a love-letter when it comes three thousand miles....
Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, Apr. 10.
To Chas. W. Turner, Esq., Boston, Mass.
Dear Sir,—Your letter has come to hand with the inclosed deed for the eight lots on Huntington Avenue, each twenty-three by one hundred feet.
I will now write you in detail about the buildings which I wish to put upon those lots. I want you to understand my plans exactly, together with my reasons for them, as I shall ask you to take the responsibility of carrying them out.
I want to try an experiment that I have long had in mind. I hope to have it pay a fair per cent. and at the same time serve as a hint toward the solution of some of the difficulties in the problems of modern housekeeping.
For the last twenty years we have been blundering our way toward better methods of meeting the exigencies of our modern city life, but with indifferent success.
However, one thing is certain. In our great cities, where land is growing more and more expensive, and where people are swarming in constantly increasing numbers, building their houses higher and higher into the air, something must be done to readjust the methods of living, if life is to remain anything but drudgery to a large majority of wives and mothers.