crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies
are helpful. To supply heat, light, and motive power even to small
households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant, and often inefficient
home-cookery by meals cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the growing
social habit of taking meals in spacious public restaurants, under more
attractive, economical, and wholesome conditions than can usually be
secured within the narrow confines of the home, to contract with specially
trained workers from outside for all those routines of domestic drudgery
which are often so inefficiently and laboriously carried on by the
household-worker, whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetually by
new devices to simplify, which often means to beautify, all the everyday
processes of life--to effect this in any comprehensive degree is to
transform the home from the intolerable burden it is sometimes felt to be
into a possible haven of peace and joy.[15] The trouble in the past, and
even to-day, has been, not in any difficulty in providing the facilities
but in prevailing people to adopt them. Thus in England, even under the
stress of the Great War, there was among the working population a
considerable disinclination--founded on stupid conservatism and a
meaningless pride--to take advantage of National Kitchens and National
Restaurants, notwithstanding the superiority of the meals in quality,
cheapness, and convenience, to the workers' home meals, so that many of
these establishments, even while still fostered by the Government, had
speedily to close their doors. Ancient traditions, that have now become
not only empty but mischievous, in these matters still fetter the wife
even more than the husband. We cannot regulate even the material side of
life without cultivating that intelligence in the development of which
civilisation so largely consists.

[15] This aspect of the future of domesticity was often set forth by
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _The New Horizon in Love and Life_, 1921.