use it is
prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of
indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic
thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the
new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral
menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could
undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader
genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; when
science found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made her
greatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human
soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in
other words, to rummage in the dustbin.

A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke or
expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private house
on a rainy day. A man's definite daily work is generally run with such
rigid convenience of modern science that thrift, the picking up of
potential helps here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. He
comes across it most (as I say) when he is playing some game within four
walls; when in charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a
tea-cozy just do for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timber
and cardboard, and the house has just enough firewood and just enough
bandboxes. This is the man's occasional glimpse and pleasing parody of
thrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day with
ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but on the
contrary, because she is magnanimous; because she wishes her creative
mercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should be
destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void, when she has made the pile
complete.

The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and
other things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet
come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and
liberal also. There is never a war between two sects, but only between
two universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the
collision of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller way it must be
first made clear that this female economic ideal is a part of that
female variety of outlook and all-round art of life which we have
already attributed to the sex: thrift is not a small or timid or
provincial thing; it is part of