The attention to school decoration of recent years has given new standards for the home. The wage-earning world grows more harmonious in its demands on wages; the home now makes its demands for decoration that the workers obey. Signs outside of tenement houses renting suites of four rooms for twenty and twenty-five dollars per month announce: "Burlaped halls; parlors in white and blue;" or, "Tiled halls, open gas grates, fancy chandeliers." The men who hire these apartments earn from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week or more. Thousands of American working men pay these rentals to save their children from the environment inseparable from the surroundings that must be endured if a fair proportion of their wages were used for rent. One grows to reverence the courage that enables a husband and wife, with only one pair of hands earning the home needs, to assume such rents. No higher evidence of the manhood and righteous ambition of the American citizen could be given than this: that he places his all to secure for his children a home that is reasonably protected; that offers opportunities for cleanliness and privacy. Renting a room to a lodger will sometimes make less demands on a father's wages for rent; sometimes the rent is assumed in the hope of securing lodgers, and then the struggle is pathetic, but borne because the children must not grow up in a less desirable neighborhood. If one were asked for the standard by which to measure the civilization of each family in the wage-earning world, the reply would have to be, "Rent." It at once makes the most and the least return; it is the tyrant which makes or mars the home life. When a family of eight, having a combined income of thirty-six dollars a week, are content to live in three rooms, one knows about what to expect in social standards, and how many generations it will take to raise the home level. When a family of six--five wage-earners--who began life at almost the homeless level, gradually come into a combined income of two thousand dollars a year, it is not to be expected that its standards of needs will be those of a college graduate on the same income. Often no member of the family can read readily. School life was, especially for the elder children, an intermittent one, and truth did not regulate the beginning of wage-earning of any of the children. The younger children probably warred against school long before fourteen years of life gave them freedom. There is natural intelligence, a certain manner acquired through observation, but no standard of intellectual life. Their very intelligence makes such families conscious of their shortcomings, and it is this consciousness that leads to the aggressiveness of manner that is so offensive, so often mistakenly called the American manner. It is the manner that is due to awakened consciousness which in the next generation will know when to wear evening dress, if not how.