--for a little private _imperium_ such as a house or cottage "in
its own grounds" affords; and from that we pass on to the intense desire
so many women feel--and just the women, too, who will mother the
future--their almost instinctive demand, indeed, for a household, a
separate sacred and distinctive household, built and ordered after their
own hearts, such as in its fulness only the country-side permits. Add to
these things the healthfulness of the country for young children, and
the wholesome isolation that is possible from much that irritates,
stimulates prematurely, and corrupts in crowded centres, and the chief
positive centrifugal inducements are stated, inducements that no
progress of inventions, at any rate, can ever seriously weaken. What now
are the centripetal forces against which these inducements contend?

In the first place, there are a group of forces that will diminish in
strength. There is at present the greater convenience of "shopping"
within a short radius of the centre of the great city, a very important
consideration indeed to many wives and mothers. All the inner and many
of the outer suburbs of London obtain an enormous proportion of the
ordinary household goods from half a dozen huge furniture, grocery, and
drapery firms, each of which has been enabled by the dearness and
inefficiency of the parcels distribution of the post-office and railways
to elaborate a now very efficient private system of taking orders and
delivering goods. Collectively these great businesses have been able to
establish a sort of monopoly of suburban trade, to overwhelm the small
suburban general tradesman (a fate that was inevitable for him in some
way or other), and--which is a positive world-wide misfortune--to
overwhelm also many highly specialized shops and dealers of the central
district. Suburban people nowadays get their wine and their novels,
their clothes and their amusements, their furniture and their food, from
some one vast indiscriminate shop or "store" full of respectable
mediocre goods, as excellent a thing for housekeeping as it is
disastrous to taste and individuality.[18] But it is doubtful if the
delivery organization of these great stores is any more permanent than
the token coinage of the tradespeople of the last century. Just as it
was with that interesting development, so now it is with parcels
distribution: private enterprise supplies in a partial manner a public
need, and with the organization of