with few exceptions, there is little improvement in appliances. True, there are gas-stoves and new methods of lighting; bath-rooms are more common than they used to be; there are smaller useful devices, such as mechanical carpet-sweepers and egg-whisks. Still, if we imagine a woman of two centuries ago brought to life again and conducted into a modern kitchen, it is clear that she would find most of the appliances and methods tolerably familiar; while if she were taken to a railway station or into a cotton factory, she would find the progress made absolutely marvelous. The new ways, alike in method and in result, would appear to her all but miraculous. In house-management there have been improvements doubtless, but still the systems of cooking and cleaning, of providing warmth and ventilation, are not greatly changed from the methods of earlier generations.

In the second place, there is little division of labor; in the working-class household there is none at all. The wife is expected to be cook, housemaid, nurse and caterer and laundress in addition. If a capable woman, she performs many of these duties creditably, but at the cost of immense labor. Few people lead lives of as wearing and incessant toil as working-men's wives. If they have small children, they practically never have a holiday at all. Those who are not fitted to be housekeepers cannot grapple with their task, live in a perpetual muddle, and perhaps in the end take to drink. Among the servant-keeping class, circumstances are very little better. What sort of person is the maid-of-allwork or plain cook in a middle-class family? Not infrequently she is a raw country girl, and if older, she is often only the more ignorant and opinionated. Rule of thumb, muddle, and absence of dainty cleanliness are conspicuous in the kitchen. Cooking could

be, and indeed sometimes is, an applied art closely allied to chemistry; but the ordinary exponents of it are absolutely untrained save by haphazard experience. One reason for this is that in all households, save those of the very wealthy, there is no proper gradation of work; the same maid washes dishes and cooks, the same scrubs floors and dusts and carries out more elaborate cleaning. But it is wasteful in the extreme to employ trained workers for unskilled work.

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Moreover, there is an absence of skilled supervision and direction. This should be provided, according to our current conceptions, by the wife and mistress. But what preparation has the ordinary bride received for the work of running a household? may have helped her mother a little; perhaps she has attended a course or two of cooking lessons. But in the work of organization she is inevitably unskilled, and her keenest interest is in what one may call the artistic or ornamental side. In relation to food, for instance, she never asks herself what is the healthiest and least costly mode of living; she wants to cook dainty and highly-seasoned dishes for her husband. Does she devote her attention to providing her kitchen with the newest and most efficient tools? Not at all. A newly-wedded wife never takes a pride in her well-fitted-up scullery; she shows you instead her drawing-room or, at best, her linenchest. .She knows little of what should be her special division of the household work, catering and accountkeeping. True, in time she learns by experience. But few women even in years of haphazard housekeeping attain to the businesslike habits which they could learn in a few months of training in an office! Do we not all know women who have no definite time for making household arrangements, and who day after day. when the cook ap

pears with the information that the butcher's man is at the door, are struck afresh with dismay at the necessity of ordering dinner at five minutes' notice?

In short, the modern household is unprovided with proper machinery, is worked by inadequately-trained labor, insufficiently graded, and has no proper supervison or organization. These defects are not without relation to one another-for instance, partly because servants are untrained. The ordinary domestic cannot be trusted with a washing-machine or electric iron. Her carelessness and inefficiency ruin any but the simplest tools. And there is a further difficulty in the servant-keeping establishment. Insistence on class-distinctions is an irk and a hindrance everywhere today, but the difficulty is nowhere more keenly felt than in the close quarters of the household. The middle-class family is perpetually worried by the presence in its midst of strangers with different habits and different ideals of conduct; these strangers are in possession of kitchen and scullery. The position is made even harder by the fact that these strangers are in possession, so to speak, of the household machinery, of the kitchen and scullery; in consequence, even those who wish to serve themselves are forced to ring the bell and allow themselves to be waited on, if they need merely a glass of water or desire to have a speck of mud brushed off a pair of shoes. That on the servants' side the relationship is distasteful is well understood. In spite of good wages and pleasant quarters, it is more and more difficult to obtain proper service, and the need is greatest where it is least well supplied. The widow lady with a grown-up family finds that her two servants stay with her for many years and serve her well; the young doctor's or engineer's wife with a handful of small children is worn and harassed by the search for a reliable nurse

housemaid or cook-general. The atti

tude of mutual irritation that is common in the household is well shown by the use of the pronoun "she." The mistress in the drawing-room, the maid in the kitchen, when constantly speaking of the other simply as "she," indicate how soreness is bred by this overclose relation.

Now all this irritation and inefficiency is due to the fact that the organization of the household has remained behind that of the rest of society. The household is still in the feudal age; and the reason for this is that we confuse the organization of housekeeping with family life. The home is the domestic factory, and each woman by her status of wife or daughter or sister is expected to cook and clean, or at least to organize cooking and cleaning. Hence each family must have its plant and service separately from every other family, and because every woman is expected to cook and clean, women rarely learn how to cook or clean efficiently. Consider what an absurd system this is. If we were to walk down an ordinary street of houses, and investigate what is going on within each, we should find the same operations laboriously performed by hand by solitary women in each house. Each family has its own kitchen, its own backyard, its own system of providing hot water. In each a separate woman with toil pares potatoes by hand for dinner, in each she washes and dries dishes in an antiquated and insanitary manner. Each house has its own narrow staircase up and down which coals, luggage, often enough hot and cold water, must be carried by hand. The system is palpably old-fashioned and absurd, and the obvious remedy is the extension to household affairs of the methods of the large industry. The individual home must cease to be the unit of domestic work; there must be central kitchens

and laundries; houses must be lighted, ventilated, supplied with hot water and perhaps warmed, from plants serving whole districts at a time; cleaning operations must be carried on by properly-trained workers making use of effective machinery.

The remedy is obvious, and yet it I will be received with cries of horror. "What! Break up the privacy of the home! Force us all to live in public! Deprive the wife and mother of her supreme privilege of creating a warm and congenial home atmosphere!" We know these cries of protest, and may as well admit at once that there is much justification for them. There is a need of privacy and of a place wherein to rest and be quiet; a method of housekeeping that would supply us with material comfort to the highest possible degree would not compensate for the irk of a life lived perpetually in public. A quiet dwelling-place for each family, wherein the individuality of husband and wife can freely express itself is a prime necessity of life. But is it beyond the power of the human intellect to think out a system that shall satisfy both demands, the demand for greater efficiency in mechanical arrangements and service, and for proper privacy for each family? To some extent these two needs are already met in certain somewhat expensive systems of flats; but flats are unhealthy in many ways, and are not suitable for the up-bringing of children. Indeed, in many flats children and dogs are forbidden, and even in the experiment in co-operative housing shortly to be carried out at Letchworth, there is a suggestion that tenants with families should not be received. But the people on whom the housekeeping problem presses most hardly are the women who are just on the verge of the servant-keeping classwomen whose husbands' incomes range from £150 to £400 a year-and who are the mothers of small children. They

do not wish to live in flats in town, and certainly should not do so; they should occupy cottages in the country where the children can play in the garden and grow strong in the fresh air. Therefore, what is needed is a garden suburb, or village. It should be carefully planned from the beginning, and should consist of separate or perhaps semi-detached cottages with private gardens behind and facing on to a central park or green. From a central power-house, each house should be heated and ventilated, provided with electric light and power, and a constant supply of hot water. This is not a wild suggestion; the writer has seen it already in operation in Bryn Mawr College, U.S.A., where five halls of residence, accommodating about 400 students, are heated, lighted and furnished with hot water, as suggested, from one central plant. Near the entrance of the proposed village, there should be a club-house in connection with the central kitchens. Here should be restaurant, reading-rooms, possibly a small concert hall, and a suite of rooms that could be hired at reasonable terms for entertainments, meetings of societies, etc. Here, too, should be the general office or administrative buildings. Part of the central green should be laid out for games, and a special portion should be provided for the riotous play of children. So much for the communal arrangements. Each cottage should be complete in itself, and so planned that the rooms at side and back and the garden behind should be as free as possible from observation by neighbors. It should be fitted with a small pantry, where afternoon tea and simple lunches and breakfasts could be prepared. In it electricity could probably be used. If the community, as suggested, manufactures its own electricity, it would be found profitable to supply electric power during the day at a very cheap rate. The pantry could contain an

electric kettle and frying-pan at all events, and that most useful of implements, an electric iron. It should be very daintily fitted up, with a white tiled washing-up sink and plated or aluminium electric utensils. Near to it could be a lavatory and cloak-room for minor toilet operations, and above would be the bath-room. A woman living in a house of this description could easily do her own daily housework without undue fatigue, especially if the members of her family were trained to wait upon themselves to some extent. If desired the office would supply skilled charwomen at so much an hour, and one might come in early in the morning, prepare breakfast, dust and sweep the sitting-rooms, clean boots, etc. But the mistress and her daughters could themselves perform these duties without much difficulty. With energy, if the members of the family used the bathroom for washing operations, each cleaned his or her own boots (as is the custom in America) and made his or her own bed, the house could be in thorough order fairly early in the morning.

A simple lunch and tea could easily be prepared in the pantry, and dinner could either be sent in or actually eaten in the restaurant. The washing would be sent out; probably the management would run a laundry in connection with the power-house. But lace, blouses, collars, d'oyleys, tray-cloths, etc., could be washed and ironed in the home pantry.

Thorough cleaning, whether fortnightly or of that severer order that occurs in springtime, would be undertaken by skilled workers provided and supervised by the central office. Three or four energetic young men or women clad in white overalls or pinafores would appear on the appointed day, the mistress having warned all the members of the family to be as little at home as possible. They would use

an electric cleaning machine,' running easily on wheels from house to house; they would clean every window, polish every piece of furniture, and depart at evening leaving the house absolutely fresh and sweet. The mistress would visit each room as they left it, restoring ornaments to their places, and giving the personal touches that create the right atmosphere. In country air, a very little dusting and sweeping-especially if the furniture were solid and simple-would keep the house in order between each visit of the cleaners.

In carrying out this scheme, we should avail ourselves of two tendencies in modern life which are really complementary, though often thought of as contrasted. We want in its place the use of efficient machinery under the charge of trained workers. This is a factor that must have further development in many directions. But side by side with it should go greater simplicity in personal habits; simpler food, simpler clothing, simpler furniture, would make it possible for each family to do much of its own work. For instance, instead of employing washerwomen or laundresses in the house, the large and complicated articles of clothing should be sent out to be washed in a steam laundry; but in a house provided, as suggested, with a pantry fitted with a well-designed sink and an electric iron, handkerchiefs, lace collars, and other small articles could with ease and indeed pleasure be done up at home. The same policy should be followed in relation to cooking: the important meals of the day should be prepared by skilled hands under scientific supervision and with the help of elaborate appliances; on the other hand, every individual should be able and

The best of these is the "aspirator," but this machine when worked by electricity costs £18. It is impossible for the single middle-class family to afford a machine at such a price. Its cost would be a bagatelle to the management of a colony of the kind suggested.