A contemporary, quoted by the Times of Thursday, has taken
up its parable for hotel life as against domestic life, on the ground that both the cost and the petty responsibilities of a house of your own are so far less distinctly measurable,":and4consist of so many and such complicated elements, over which you have no clear con- trol, while at an hotel you know exactly what your expenses are, and are relieved of all the responsibilities ofjdomestic superintendence. All this, no doubt, is perfectly true, so far] as it goes. The in- cidental expenses of a house, on which no one ever calculates, are always a fresh surprise ; and the difficulty of getting good servants, and of managing them even when you have got them, is daily increasing, and likely to increase. But to substitute hotel for domestic life is a remedy vastly worse than the evil for which it is prescribed. A family which grows up in:an hotel is hardly a family in the English sense at all ; it is only,an unusually permanent element of a changing crowd. As the large cities in the United States show, the moral dangers of such a life are peculiar and great, and there are no moral advantages to set against them. Besides, to turn a rapid river of perpetual novelty through your home is to make novelty itself vapid, by making you a ;stranger to yourself and to your own people. The life offarnilies in an hotel is some- thing of a parasitic life; they are living on a foreign organism, and are quite sure to assimilate many of the qualities of that organism for which they have no liking or respect. Some gar- dener has recently found out that he can:make all sorts of gourds of different orders and species grow together in a hybrid mass by a little grafting. That is a type of the family life of hotels.
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