A CONDITION TRUE IN THE WEST.
AN inestimable advantage in the moral and physical life of the United States as compared with England ten years ago was the cheapness with which our people could get modest homes. That advantage does not now exist. In spite of higher labor cost, an American frame cottage could in 1893 be erected for less money than the brick or stone cottage to which the building rules of many English parishes practically limited their people. More elastic regulations are now being adopted in England. The importance of healthful separate homes is preached, and a permanent exhibition has just been opened near London to show how in iron and wood, in cement, concrete, artificial stone, steel and plaster, or in expanded metal, cottages can be and have been built at a cost of $750 each, and are rented with a tiny garden for $6.25 a month. Not much of a cottage could be built in the suburbs of New York for $750. The cost of frame construction has here almost doubled in fifteen years, partly because of higher wages, but mainly from the operations of trusts within the tariff to advance prices. The Brick Trust, the Wire-Nail Trust, the Glass Trust, the Lumber Trusts, the combinations of makers of builders' hardware and plumbers' supplies, have raised the old rough-and-ready estimate of $4.00 or $5.00 dollars a square foot for building frame cottages to $8.00 or $10.00. Dear materials and the righteous demand for cheap houses compel flimsy building. The disappearance of the honest chimney is one of the worst results in its effects upon health. No better ventilating device is known than the open grate, yet even pretentious houses are now built with a single chimney as small as possible. What professes to be a fireplace has often no flue; the gas-log it contains simply discharges used-up air into the stuffy room. The recent plea of Mr. Leubuscher before the convention of Co-operative Building-Loan Associations for the lightening of the tariff tax on homes strikes at more than a political issue. The cost of homes is a grave national concern.—N. Y. World.