ployés, who would have no personal relations or contact with the individual proprietors. The remaining one-tenth of domestic service would admit of such selection and improvement of present methods as to get rid of the principal part of the evil. It is much easier to drill and actuate a corps of one hundred operatives in a public service than to direct a single domestic; and the elements of personal collision and suffering self-respect, inseparable from the latter rule, are absent from the former.
The Federative Homesteads, or People's Palaces, would especially need "Building Associations" for their establishment. But these associations would be neither charitable nor speculative; they would be mutual-insurance companies, not for rebuilding houses destroyed by fire, but to build each a palace, as perfect as modern art could make it, for the occupancy of its members, and subsequently to carry on the Palatial Household. The comparison of the Philadelphia system of separate houses, poorly constructed, and purchased by installments from building corporations not always purely mutual, should be made with such collective, self-owned homesteads, not with hired tenements, even should these be on the scale and with the appliances of the Peabody tenement-houses in London, erected by a magnificent charity.
The People's Palace, to replace the people's hovels, is no fanciful project or arbitrary contrivance, but the natural, inevitable form of the household required by our civilization, corresponding strictly with all our improved methods of productive industry; corresponding also with the social instincts and convictions of the time in which we live. Opposed to its practical introduction is the want of intelligence and mutual confidence in the masses, and also a selfish and exclusive spirit, which is short-sighted and defeats its own end. Witness the insecurity and ruinous waste of our separate households, the drudgery of women, and the slavery to servants. In agriculture witness also the loss of at least one-half the natural product by incoherent labor in the fields, and by the isolated farm-house and barn.[1]
I began this presentation of the "People's Palace" with the demand for an architecture and structural law which should throw around each individual and family a fortress of privacy, and which should secure a home-sphere more inviolable than is possible in our isolated houses, invaded daily by a horde of carriers, and pervaded by an alien caste of servants. This largest freedom and independence of the individual and family can only be assured by the perfect organization of the Homestead and Household.
In the vegetable and animal kingdoms the law of organization requires—1. The establishment of each individual molecule or cell in
- ↑ Reference is here due to an American sociological novel, entitled "Papa's Own Girl," by Marie Howland, which furnishes a vivid description of the Familistère at Guise, and its supposed adoption in this country.
