ation for them. Their services
can be obtained by application at the proper bureau, and their value is
pricked off the credit card of the applicant."

"What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!" I exclaimed. "In
my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise their
possessors from household cares, while the women of the merely
well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to them."

"Yes," said Mrs. Leete, "I have read something of that; enough to
convince me that, badly off as the men, too, were in your day, they
were more fortunate than their mothers and wives."

"The broad shoulders of the nation," said Dr. Leete, "bear now like a
feather the burden that broke the backs of the women of your day. Their
misery came, with all your other miseries, from that incapacity for
cooperation which followed from the individualism on which your social
system was founded, from your inability to perceive that you could make
ten times more profit out of your fellow men by uniting with them than
by contending with them. The wonder is, not that you did not live more
comfortably, but that you were able to live together at all, who were
all confessedly bent on making one another your servants, and securing
possession of one another's goods.

"There, there, father, if you are so vehement, Mr. West will think you
are scolding him," laughingly interposed Edith.

"When you want a doctor," I asked, "do you simply apply to the proper
bureau and take any one that may be sent?"

"That rule would not work well in the case of physicians," replied Dr.
Leete. "The good a physician can do a patient depends largely on his
acquaintance with his constitutional tendencies and condition. The
patient must be able, therefore, to call in a particular doctor, and he
does so just as patients did in your day. The only difference is that,
instead of collecting his fee for himself, the doctor collects it for
the nation by pricking off the amount, according to a regular scale for
medical attendance, from the patient's credit card."

"I can imagine," I said, "that if the fee is always the same, and a
doctor may not turn away patients, as I suppose he may not, the good
doctors are called constantly and the poor doctors left in idleness."

"In the first place, if you will overlook the apparent conceit of the
remark from a retired physician," replied Dr. Leete, with a smile, "we
have no poor doctors. Anybody who pleases to get