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But, all allowances made, it is perfectly clear that the first group of disruptive factors, such as the restaurant dinner, the week-end, the long and frequent holidays, the motor car, the spread of golf, is inimical to the home idea and, therefore, to the house idea. (Home means house, and does not mean flat, for which see further on.) The home idea is complex; it embraces privacy, possession; it implies a place where one can retreat, be master, be powerful in a small sphere, take off one’s boots, be sulky or pleasant, as one likes. It involves, above all, a place where one does not hear the neighbor’s piano, or the neighbor’s baby, or, with luck, the neighbor’s cat; but where, on the other hand, one’s own piano, one’s own baby, and one’s own cat are raised to a high and personal pitch of importance. It involves everything that is individual–one’s own stationery block, one’s crest, or, if one is not so fortunate, one’s monogram upon the plate. If the S.P.C.A. did not intervene, I think one might often see in the front garden a cat branded with a hot iron: “Thomas Jones. His Cat.” It is the rallying-point of domestic virtue, the origin of domestic tyranny. It is the place where public opinion cannot see you and where, therefore, you may behave badly. Most wife beaters live in houses; in flats they would be afraid of the opinion of the hall porter. And yet the home is not without its charm and its nobility, for its bricks and mortar enshrine a spirit that is worshiped and for which much may be sacrificed. Cigars have been given up so that the home might have a new coat of paint; amusements, holidays, food sometimes–all these have been sacrificed so that, well railed off from the outside world by a front garden, if possible by a back garden, too–or, still more delightful, far from the next house–a little social cosmos might be maintained. So far has this gone in the north of England that many people who could well afford servants will not have them because, as they say, they cannot bear strangers in the house. And very desirable houses in the suburbs of London, with old, walled gardens, have been given up because it was unbearable to take tea under the eyes of passengers on the top of the motor busses.

The home spirit, however, is not content merely with coats of paint and doilies; it demands mental as well as material worship. It demands importance; it insists that it is home, sweet home, and that there is no place like it (which is one comfort); that it is the last thought of the drowning sailor; that the trapper, lost in the deepest forests of Canada, sees rising in the smoke of his lonely camp fire a delicious vision of Aunt Maria’s magenta curtains. It lays down that it is wrong to leave it, quite apart from the question of burglars; it has invented scores of phrases to justify otherwise unpleasant husbands who had “given a good home” to their wives; phrases to censure revolting daughters “who had good homes, and what more could they want?” It has frowned upon everything that was outside itself, for it could not see anything that was not itself. It has hated theaters, concerts, dances, lectures, every form of amusement; and, as it has to bear them, likes to refer to them archly as debauches, or going on the razzle-dazzle, or the ran-dan, according to period. It has powerfully allied itself with the pulpit and, in impious circles, with fancy work and crochet; it has enlisted a considerable portion of the Royal Academy to depict it in various scenes for which the recipe is: One tired man with a sunny smile returning to his home; one delighted wife; suitable number of ebullient children and, inevitably, a dog. The dog varies. In England they generally put in a terrier, in war time a bulldog; in Germany it may be a dachshund; and in other countries it is another kind of dog, but it is always the same idea.