oom,
run--and this is very important--_by a committee of tenants_.

That committee will appoint and control cooks and all servants; it will
buy all provisions, and it will buy them cheaply, for it will purchase
by the hundredweight. It will control the central laundry, and a paid
laundry maid will check the lists--there will no longer be, as once upon
a time on Saturday evenings, a hundred persons checking a hundred lists.
It is even quite possible that the central organization may darn socks.
The servants will no longer be slaves, personally attached to a few
persons, their chattel; they will be day workers, laboring eight hours,
without any master save their duty. The whole system of the household
will be grouped for the purpose of buying and distributing everything
that is needed at any hour. There will be no more personal shopping; the
wholesale cleaner will call on certain days without being told to; the
communistic window cleaners will dispose of every window on a given day;
there may even be in the garden a communistic system of dog kennels. I
have no proposal for controlling cats, for I understand that no man can
do that ... but then there will be no mice in those days.

I think I will close upon that phrase: There will be no mice in those
days. For somehow the industrious mouse, scuffling behind the loose
wainscoting over the rotten boards, is to me curiously significant of
the old, hostile order, when every man jealously held what was his own
and determined that it should so remain--dirty, insanitary, tiresome,
labor-making, dull, inexpressibly ugly, inexpressibly inimical to
anything fresh and free, providing that it was wholly and sacredly his
own.

VI

THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY

1

As with the home, so with the family. It would be strange indeed if a
stained shell were to hold a sound nut. All the events of the last
century--the development of the factory system, the Married Women's
Property Act, the birth of Mr. Bernard Shaw, the entry of woman into
professions, the discovery of co-education and of education itself,
eugenics, Christian Science, new music halls and halfpenny papers, the
Russian ballet, cheap travel, woman suffrage, apartment houses--all this
change and stress has lowered the status of one whom Pliny admired--the
father of a family. The family itself tends to disappear, and it is many
years since letters appeared in _The Times_ over the signature, "Mother
of Six." The family