a cigar with ungainly opulence.

Martin, from his seat by the reading-lamp, began to inform them about
the home. He started philosophically, taking as his text the assertion
that voluntary associations are always preferable to compulsory
grouping and that it should be our object to restrict such compulsion
as far as possible. The home is a compulsory association and its
sphere must be limited. He pointed out that since the whole trend of
industrialism had been to invade the home, to capture the women and to
drag them out to wage-slavery, it was irrational to stop in the present
position. The home must be either a real thing where women were free
from the direct clutches of capitalism and made up for indirect
economic dependence by freedom from drudgery in offices and factories,
or else we must be logical and complete the tendency by industrialising
the home. This process would of course destroy the home as at present
understood. But it would substitute for the present compulsory group a
voluntary association: and this he would welcome because the home of
to-day was not only a compulsory but a fundamentally rotten
institution. (_Loud applause from emancipated young men._)

He didn't care whether women had votes or not: that was inessential.
The great thing was to smash the home by making it a commercial unit.
This, he maintained, could be done by the State endowment of motherhood
and by marriage contracts in which payment for all domestic work should
be made by the husband. There must be honest, open payment; wheedling
and pin-money must go. Probably the best solution would be to insist
on a fixed percentage of the husband's income going to the wife as a
matter of course so long as she lived with him and kept his house.

Even more important was the case of the children. They too must be
economic members of a commercial unit. Of course in early childhood
that was impossible, but as soon as they reached a reasonable age--say
seventeen--they too should have a legal claim to a certain percentage
of the family income, to be continued until they were self-supporting.
In the interest of youth, no one should be compelled to support himself
until the age of twenty-four, for it was wicked to drive people into
offices at eighteen, before they had known freedom of any kind. During
these seven years the child might either take his salary and go or stay
at home as a paying guest. The amount paid for such board would dep