Intelligence, and even something more than intelligence, is needed along
the third line of progress towards the modernised home. Simplification and
organisation can effect nothing in the desired transformation if they
merely end in themselves. They are only helpful in so far as they
economise energy, offer a more ample leisure, and extend the opportunities
for that play of the intellect, that liberation of the emotions with
accompanying discipline of the primitive instincts, which are needed not
only for the development of civilisation in general, but in particular of
the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights,
are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when
exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back,
the futility in the end of the ancient structure of the home, however
reasonable it was at the beginning, under our different modern social
conditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to reintroduce the same
structure, merely reversed would be not only mischievous but silly. That
spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred egoism--even if it were
sometimes an _égoisme à deux_--evoked, half a century ago, the scathing
sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied of denouncing the "virtuous and
happy homes" which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on a sea of
filth." Such outbursts seem extravagant, but they were the extravagance of
an idealist at the vision which, as a physician in touch with realities,
he had, seen beneath the surface of the home.

It is well to insist on the organisation of the mechanical and material
side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that
they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed
that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that
women now often take ostentatious pleasure in washing their hands of
feelings and accusing men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased word