of birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often 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.

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