“Oh, come, now!”

“I refer you to your Testament.  In the end, all household property would pass into the hands of the state.”

“Aren’t you getting worse and worse?”

“Oh, I’m not supposing there won’t be a long interval when household property will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and many millionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like you and me, along with the houses we hire of them.  I have no doubt that there will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will extend its relations to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole world into its grasp.  It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall probably groan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our personal ownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of the mothball.  We shall suffer, but—­”

“I see what you mean,” I hastened to interrupt at this point, “but these suggestive remarks of yours are getting beyond—­Do you think you could defer the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?”

“Well, for not more than a week,” said my friend, with an air of discomfort in his arrest.

II.

—­“We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system,” said my friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week.  By this time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on the veranda of a sea-side hotel.  “As for the eternal-womanly, it will be her salvation from herself.  When once she is expropriated from her household effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those of the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back her peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before she began housekeeping.”

“That may all very well be,” I assented, though I did not believe it, and I found something almost too fantastical in my friend’s scheme.  “But when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to become of our tender and sacred associations with them?”

“What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship of ancestors?  Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living, so that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and the ground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be used by their spirits as well as their bodies.  A man could not sell the bones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred.  By-and by, when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service of the gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that the tombs of one’s forefathers could be sold without violence to their spectres.  I dare say it wouldn’t be different in the case of our tender and sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and bedding, pictures and bric-a-brac.  We have only to evolve a little further.  In fact