necessary thing.

If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the
whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men
can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick.
Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings
covering certain streets from particular showers. But there is nothing
but nonsense in the notion of swinging a communal stick; it is as if one
spoke of twirling a communal mustache. It will be said that this is a
frank fantasia and that no sociologists suggest such follies. Pardon me
if they do. I will give a precise parallel to the case of confusion
of sticks and umbrellas, a parallel from a perpetually reiterated
suggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when
they have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to speak of
common kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the
fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods
that go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washhouses
are both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul and
function of the two things are utterly opposite. There is only one way
of washing a shirt; that is, there is only one right way. There is no
taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody says, "Tompkins likes five
holes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the good old four holes."
Nobody says, "This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now
if there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up." The
ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by no
means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked.
Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for
the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be
perverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common
sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages
fried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled to
rags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of high
importance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to
them. What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of their
existence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly
public thing with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to accept
communal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should accept
communal cat'