 »Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively cheap
rates, and our cooking at public kitchens. The making and repairing of all we
wear are done outside in public shops. Electricity, of course, takes the place
of all fires and lighting. We choose houses no larger than we need, and furnish
them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order. We have no
use for domestic servants.«
    »The fact,« said Dr. Leete, »that you had in the poorer classes a boundless
supply of serfs on whom you could impose all sorts of painful and disagreeable
tasks, made you indifferent to devices to avoid the necessity for them. But now
that we all have to do in turn whatever work is done for society, every
individual in the nation has the same interest, and a personal one, in devices
for lightening the burden. This fact has given a prodigious impulse to
labor-saving inventions in all sorts of industry, of which the combination of
the maximum of trouble in household arrangements was one of the earliest
results.
    In case of special emergencies in the household,« pursued Dr. Leete, »such
as extensive cleaning or renovation, or sickness in the family, we can always
secure assistance from the industrial force.«
    »But how do you recompense these assistants, since you have no money?«
    »We do not pay them, of course, but the nation 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 coöperation 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.
