More threatening to the solidarity of the family is believed to be the individualistic tendencies arising in existing urban and economic life.[785] With the rise of corporate and associated industry comes a weakening of the intimacy of home ties. Through the division of labor the "family hearth-stone" is fast becoming a mere temporary meeting-place of individual wage-earners. The congestion of population in cities is forcing into being new and lower modes of life. The tenement and the "sweating system" are destructive of the home. Neither the lodging-house, the "flat," nor the "apartment" affords an ideal environment for domestic joys. In the vast hives of Paris, London, or New York even families of the relatively well-to-do have small opportunity to flourish--for self-culture and self-enjoyment. To the children of the slum the street is a perilous nursery. For them squalor, disease, and sordid vice have supplanted the traditional blessings of the family sanctuary. The cramped, artificial, and transient associations of the boarding-house are a wretched substitute for the privacy of the separate household.[786] For very many men club life has stronger allurements than the connubial partnership. Prostitution advances with alarming speed. For the poor, sometimes for the rich, the great city has many interests and many places more attractive than the home circle. The love of selfish indulgence and the spirit of commercial greed, not less than grinding penury, restrain men and women from wedlock. Yet the urban environment has also the opposite effect. In the crowded, heterogeneous, and shifting population of the great towns marriages are often lightly made and as lightly dissolved. Indeed, the remarkable mobility of the American people, the habit of frequent migration, under the powerful incentives of industrial enterprise, gold-hunting, or other adventure, and under favor of the marvelously developed means of swift transportation, will account in no small degree for the laxity of matrimonial and family ties in the United States. May not one gather courage even from this untoward circumstance? Assuredly the present thus clearly appears to be an age of transition to a more stable condition of social life. Furthermore, the perils to the family of the kind under review need not be fatal. They are inherent mainly in economic institutions which may be scientifically studied and intelligently brought into harmony with the requirements of the social order. Already in great municipal centers, through improved facilities for rapid transit, the evils resulting from dense population are being somewhat ameliorated. Of a truth, every penny's reduction in street-railway fares means for the family of small means a better chance for pure air, sound health, and a separate home in the suburbs. The dispersion of the city over a broader area at once cheapens and raises the standard of living. Every hour's reduction in the period