10 AMERICAN HOMES 
AND GARDENS January, 1906 
Monthly Comment 
causes which are particularly active in 
forwarding the suburban movement are the 
increased facilities now available for living 
in the suburbs and in the country and the 
increased prices being demanded for rents 
within city limits. The facilities for living 
in the country, which characterize many regions of a de- 
cidedly rural character, as well as those situated compara- 
tively near the city boundaries, include transportation, lights 
and living services of every sort. All these matters are much 
more abundant than they were five or ten years earlier, and 
their tendency to become more ample and more complete is 
so marked that the next ten years must find the suburbanite 
very much more conveniently situated than he at present has 
any true realization of. Many people no doubt regard these 
increased facilities as the most important item in the present 
suburban movement, which has assumed such colossal propor- 
tions, and to a certain extent this is unquestionably true. But 
the pressure put upon the rent-paying population by the ne- 
cessities of the landlords is in many cases even more potent 
in its effect than any attractions offered by the ease of coun- 
try living. The demands for increased rentals are by no 
means occasioned necessarily by the rapaciousness of land- 
lords, but have been brought about by the absolute necessity 
of asking larger prices in order to meet the larger demands 
made upon capital by the erection of new structures, which 
are themselves determined by the necessity of getting as much 
rent out of a given area of land as it is possible to do. This 
phenomenon is especially observable in the regions in and 
around New York city. Land in Manhattan is necessarily 
held at very high figures, and the many costly structures that 
have been built within the last two years have demanded 
much larger rentals than it was possible to obtain from 
structures that they replaced. ‘This has meant that the 
persons previously living on such land are no longer able to 
afford the high prices demanded for the new buildings, and 
not being able to find other suitable quarters within similar 
limits they have been compelled to find habitations in less 
thickly populated regions, where both land and buildings are 
held at lower figures. In many cases such persons have found 
it possible to build homes for themselves at comparatively 
small cost, which has added greatly to the attractiveness of 
suburban localities. 
THE privacy of the home life is rapidly becoming one of 
the fictions of modern times. The man of affairs, the great 
lady active in society, find their doings paraded daily in the 
public press. And the same is true of many less notable 
folk. So marked has this tendency become, that many per- 
sonal matters of no public interest whatsoever are daily re- 
corded in the public press as matters presumably of great 
public concern. ‘That this tendency is often pushed beyond 
the widest possible limit has been established again and 
again by criminals old and young, men and women, who have 
found compensation for their crimes or misdeeds by the 
notoriety that has been given them by newspaper notice. It 
is an unfortunate fact that much of the contents of our 
daily papers is given up to chronicling the doings, especially 
the bad doings, of persons of no consequence whatsoever. 
The number of things that actually happen in any one day, 
notwithstanding the vast number of human beings that are 
alive on any day, that are really worthy of being made known 
to persons not concerned with the person responsible for 
them, or events directly connected with them, is astonish- 
ingly few, But the personal element of modern journalism 
has become so very pronounced that the privacy of the home 
has been all but destroyed. It is truly a strange sign of 
progress that in order to live a good and upright life one’s 
deeds must be blazoned upon the pages of the daily press, 
one’s unimportant doings recorded as matters of public 
moment, one’s dinner parties elevated into the nature of 
public functions, the weddings in one’s family brought so 
vehemently before the public that the adjacent streets will 
be crowded with an excited mob, or that one may not be 
buried without the painful addition of the idle and the 
curious. All this may be modern, and very characteristic 
of our time and people, but it certainly is no index to a 
high civilization, and, quite as certainly, it is no indication of 
good manners or good times. 
Ir is a very safe rule in house buying or in house building 
not to undertake the acquisition of a house too large for the 
uses that will be demanded of it. A large house is apt to 
become a wearisome vexation to its owner and its occupants. 
It requires a great deal of furniture, it demands a great deal 
of care, it needs a great deal of attention, it means more re- 
pairs and more of everything, including a greater first cost. 
The latter may, indeed, be met and doubtless will be gladly 
assumed; but it is the after-time that counts, the after-work, 
the after-effort and the constant effort that goes to the keep- 
ing up of a great house. These are matters that many house- 
keepers will find wearisome and irksome in a painful degree. 
The large house, unless numerously occupied, becomes an 
empty void. Great rooms require large numbers of people 
in order to give reason for their size. Many rooms require 
to be filled by many persons for the same reason. Even if 
one can maintain the army of servants that may be required 
for the proper conduct of huge dwellings, the very size will 
appal one, and the great house in which so much pleasure was 
once taken becomes irksome and a bore. Any one about to 
build, or about to buy a house, will find that in the end a 
house not too large will give greater satisfaction than one 
whose chief quality is that of its immense dimensions. 
Tue building of good houses as a preventive to crime is 
probably a novel argument for the erection of better build- 
ings, yet it unquestionably tends to this result. The relation- 
ship between crime and buildings of a poor sort is no fiction 
of a novelist, but is an actual fact that can be observed 
wherever crime flourishes and wherever poor buildings 
abound. It is a significant circumstance, that whenever a new, 
good building is built on a site previously occupied by a bad 
building the tenants of the new structure are invariably of a 
better class than those who had previously resided. there. 
It is, perhaps, an interesting speculation to inquire what 
would happen were a city or town to have only buildings of 
a good sort.. Would crime then disappear from municipal 
limits? Possibly not. But it would doubtless assume a dif- 
ferent character from that which had flourished in the old 
buildings of a bad type. The influence of good buildings in 
attracting a better class of tenants is so marked that it may 
at least be hoped that the good work of their erection will 
be continued so long that crime may finally be divorced from 
direct association with buildings of any one type. There is 
perhaps an advantage in being able to locate the vicious 
characters of any community by the mere appearance of the 
dwellings in which they live, but if such dwellings are es- 
sential to their evil deeds it is possible that a genuine refor- 
mation will be effected when the customary habitations are no 
longer available. 
