Fire risk rarely enters the head of any builder, and he is content to leave the upper floors to be cut off by the burning of the wooden attic stairs, and allow the occupants to be slowly grilled or suffocated, that is, so far as any means of escape shall have been provided by him. In all high street houses ready access should be made at various points in the attic story to the roof, and iron ladders fixed against the party walls, so as to enable the occupants to get readily away. This has its objections, of course, as enabling thieves to pass from an empty house to any of those in the same block; but good trap-doors, well bolted and lined with iron, would practically keep them out, or at least they would make noise enough in their attempt to open them to make themselves heard when the house was occupied by the family.
Speaking-tubes should be put up in every house, or at all events one communicating on every floor, for it is quite easy to establish a simple code of signals by which one whistle calls the down-stairs servants, and two for those on the nursery-floors. In this manner the constant running up and down stairs to answer bells, and then to bring what is wanted perhaps up many flights of stairs, is avoided.
As Emerson says truly, in one of his essays: "Take off all the roofs from street to street, and we shall seldom find the temple of any higher god than prudence. The progress of domestic living has been in cleanliness, in ventilation, in health, in decorum, in countless means and acts of comfort, in the concentration of all the utilities of every clime in each house. . . . The houses of the rich are confectioners' shops, where we get sweetmeats and wine; the houses of the poor are imitations of these to the extent of their ability." Avoid all such imitations; let our houses be fitted for every-day wants, for every-day requirements; let them above all be clean, be comfortable, be healthy; let there be no unfound skeletons, no tangles that are not unraveled; open up the doors, let light and air in upon the skeletons, search them out; make the houses you live in pure from end to end, and depend upon it you will have less disease of mind or body, less worry, less enervation, unless you agree with the Scriptural statement that "Ahithophel set his house in order and hanged himself." One would have expected him to hang himself because his house was not set in order.
Remember always that the healthiness, the comfort, and the pleasant and artistic arrangement of your houses mean the healthiness, the education, and the bodily and mental soundness of your children.—From a Lecture before the Society of Arts.
