It may seem to some that this new movement of upheaval in the sphere of the Home is merely destructive.  Timid souls have felt the like in every period of transition, and with as little reason.  Just as we realise that the movement now in progress in the world of Labour for a higher standard of life and for, as it has been termed, a larger “leisure-ration,” represents a wholesome revolt against the crushing conditions of prolonged monotonous work—­the most deadening of all work—­and a real advance towards those ideals of democracy which are still so remote, so it is with the movement in the Home.  That also is the claim for a new and fairer allotment of responsibility, of larger opportunities for freedom and leisure.  If in the home the husband is still to be regarded as the capitalist and the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature.  Just as the readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long recognised ideals of marriage.

How in practice, one may finally ask, is this readjustment of the home likely to be carried out?

In the first place we are justified in believing that in the future home men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the past.  This change is indeed already coming about.  It is an inestimable benefit throughout life for a man to have been forcibly lifted out of the routine comforts and feminine services of the old-fashioned home and to be thrown into an alien and solitary environment, face to face with Nature and the essential domestic human needs (in my own case I owe an inestimable debt to the chance that thus flung me into the Australian bush in early life), and one may note that the Great War has had, directly and indirectly, a remarkable influence in this direction, for it not only compelled women to exercise many enlarging and fortifying functions commonly counted as pertaining to men, it also compelled men, deprived of accustomed feminine services, to develop a new independent ability for organising domesticity, and that ability, even though it is not permanently exercised in rendering domestic services, must yet always make clear the nature of domestic problems and tend to prevent the demand for unnecessary domestic services.

But there is another quite different and more general line along which we may expect this problem to be largely solved.  That is by the simplification and organisation of domestic life.  If that process were carried to the full extent that is now becoming possible a large part of the problem before us would be at once solved.  A great promise for the future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption