girls flirting with the servants of rival butchers and dairymen. The common nursery will especially relieve the mother and lower the death-rate. The State will one day have an interest in seeing that each babe ushered into the world, at such pain and sacrifice, becomes a useful citizen. If any mothers care to entrust the child more fully to it, the State will find it profitable to respond. These things can be arranged without more detriment to parental affection than there is in the case of women—often women who write beautiful things in defence of the old tradition—who have nurses for the child and send it later to a distant school for the greater part of the year.
Reforms of this kind will enormously relieve the home life and enable even mothers to earn, if they wish, quite as much as the State would ever be able to award them. The work will be better done, by trained workers, at less cost. People do not reflect that this change has been proceeding for centuries. Once the wife brewed the ale, and baked the bread, and spun the linen: later she entrusted these things to experts working for the community, and reserved for herself the making of preserves, pickles, underclothing, and antimacassars: now these things have gone to the expert, and the wife confines her amateur efforts to scolding children and cooking refractory joints. She will be relieved when it is all over, and we shall have no more of the “beautiful doll” or the domestic drudge. The independent position and greater leisure and broader interest in life will
