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 egoisme a 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 stands for the whole superstructure of life on the basis of material organisation, for all the finer and higher parts of our nature, for the greater part of civilisation.[16] The elaboration of the mechanical side of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous channels.[17] To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation, is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously to the opposite sex.  It concerns them both equally and can only be carried out by both equally, working side by side in the most intimate spirit of mutual comprehension, confiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

[16] “The growth of the sentiments,” remarks an influential psychologist of our own time (W.  McDougall, Social Psychology, p. 160), “is of the utmost importance for the character and conduct of individuals and of societies; it is the organisation of the affective and conative life.  In the absence of sentiments our emotional life would be a mere chaos, without order, consistency, or continuity of any kind; and all our social relations and conduct, being based on the emotions and their impulses would be correspondingly chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable....  Again, our judgments of value and of merit are rooted in our sentiments; and our moral principles have the same source, for they are formed by our judgments of moral value.”

[17] The destructive effects of the mechanisation of modern life have lately been admirably set forth, and with much precise illustration, by Dr. Austin Freeman, Social Decay and Regeneration.