some
philanthropic person, for exhibition and discussion, would certainly
bring about a very extraordinary advance in domestic comfort even in the
immediate future, but the fashions in philanthropy do not trend in such
practical directions; if they did, the philanthropic person would
probably be too amenable to flattery to escape the pushful patentee and
too sensitive to avail himself of criticism (which rarely succeeds in
being both penetrating and polite), and it will probably be many years
before the cautious enterprise of advertising firms approximates to the
economies that are theoretically possible to-day. But certainly the
engineering and medical sorts of person will be best able to appreciate
the possibilities of cutting down the irksome labours of the
contemporary home, and most likely to first demand and secure them.

The wife of this ideal home may probably have a certain distaste for
vicarious labour, that so far as the immediate minimum of duties goes
will probably carry her through them. There will be few servants
obtainable for the small homes of the future, and that may strengthen
her sentiments. Hardly any woman seems to object to a system of things
which provides that another woman should be made rough-handed and kept
rough-minded for her sake, but with the enormous diffusion of levelling
information that is going on, a perfectly valid objection will probably
come from the other side in this transaction. The servants of the past
and the only good servants of to-day are the children of servants or the
children of the old labour base of the social pyramid, until recently a
necessary and self-respecting element in the State. Machinery has
smashed that base and scattered its fragments; the tradition of
self-respecting inferiority is being utterly destroyed in the world. The
contingents of the Abyss, even, will not supply daughters for this
purpose. In the community of the United States no native-born race of
white servants has appeared, and the emancipated young negress
degenerates towards the impossible--which is one of the many stimulants
to small ingenuities that may help very powerfully to give that nation
the industrial leadership of the world. The servant of the future, if
indeed she should still linger in the small household, will be a person
alive to a social injustice and the unsuccessful rival of the wife. Such
servants as wealth will retain will be about as really loyal and servile
as hotel wait