by it.” We are hearing a good deal about prosperity without profit. We may soon be giving consideration to prosperity without peace of mind. It is a fact not without its significance, perhaps, for social trends and tendencies that when the disaster in Florida and Porto Rico occurred a year ago, less than one person in a thousand in the richest city in our country, a country formerly quick to respond to the call for help, has contributed even one of those dimes we are told are so unconsidered in New York. [Pg 48] IV Let us turn to some of the other social effects of this high standard. It is obvious that with a national income of even ninety billions, a hundred and twenty million people cannot buy everything. Some things have to go if we are to have new things constantly and pay double or treble for the old. We are electing, in many cases perforce, to let go the home. This is due partly to the cost of housing and partly to that of servants as well as general costs. In the urban centers, at least, gild the pill as we may, the people who fifteen years ago had comfortable homes are by no means so comfortable to-day. The New York papers advertise “beautiful one-room homes” consisting of a room eleven by fourteen with a bath, a bed that folds up into the wall, and a cooking shelf in a dark closet. The one I have in mind costs as much in yearly rent as twenty-five years ago the dignified three-story eleven-room house on one of the finest streets in town cost my father—that is, $1200. Even if one succeeds in finding a five- to seven-room apartment, with one or two of the rooms of good size, at $2000 (which is by no means easy to do), one has only half the space at about double the cost of two decades back, and nothing like the dignity, quiet, or privacy. Moreover, the maid service, when it can be afforded, is at two to three times the former cost.