Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/763

Rh the solitary houses. A finely-appointed kitchen, laundry, heating, lighting, and elevating apparatus, with telegraphic and other means of communication, sufficient for the wants of a hundred families, would replace one hundred sets of inferior work-rooms and apparatus in the separate houses. But one or more work-rooms would be provided in each domicile for minor or exceptional use.

The cost of carrying on the People's Household, including warming, lighting, water and food supply, cooking, and the laundry, with superintendence and general service, would not be more than two-thirds the cost of living in separate houses of the same class, all purchases being made at wholesale, and the work being performed by organized labor, using the best machinery. Each individual or family would be charged (perhaps against a monthly advance) for precisely what they consumed. The difference of cost between meals served in family alcoves of a great hall, or by dumbwaiter, or equivalent machinery, in each domicile, would be small, and, like all other arrangements, at the option of each proprietor. In previous experiments of this general character, it has not been found that any family would long prefer the more costly and inferior method of private purchase and labor in the departments of cooking and washing, although provision could easily be made for a limited use of the public machinery by individuals having such preference.

This estimate leaves to the women of each family the greater part of their time. Here is one of the greatest existing wastes of labor. The separate house necessarily and permanently dooms woman to drudgery. Under the present system she necessarily carries on a hundred trades every day by hand-work, as wasteful of productive force as the old spinning-wheel. The labor of women, saved in this way, would find new channels. The steam-power in the unitary building, in constant use for elevators, pumping, washing, cooking, heating, lighting, would always furnish a surplus of motive power for sewing-machines and small industries which would naturally grow up. In the People's Palace a Kindergarten for the youngest children, and schools more or less industrial and technical for those older, would have a natural and inevitable place. While this would still further relieve the mothers, it would also be a field for the occupation of women and men living in the Homestead who were specially gifted in these directions. Other collective work of the People's Home would give occupation to some of the inmates. Halls for lectures and social purposes, a library and reading-room, would also be among the endowments of every People's Palace.

Rising higher in the social scale, the question of domestic service, now so difficult of solution, would be summarily settled. In palatial buildings, occupying with inclosed and surrounding gardens a whole city square, erected with the wealth of a hundred rich families, nine-tenths of all the work would be done by the collective labor of