e fixed, that
poverty had less of humiliation and blocked desire than it has at
present. That society of all grades is restless with the desire for
luxury seems without doubt. How profoundly the psychology of the masses
is being altered by education, by the newspaper, the magazine, the
movie, the automobile, the fashion changes that make a dress obsolete in
a season and above all the department store and the alluring
advertisement, no one can hope to even estimate. Modern capitalism reaps
great wealth by developing the luxurious, the spendthrift tastes of the
poor. It would be a peculiar poetic justice that will make that
development into the basis of revolution.

The women of the poor are perhaps even more restless than the men. In
fact, it is the women that set the pace in these matters. This is
because to woman has fallen the spending of the family funds, a fact of
great importance in bringing about discord in the house. As the shopper
the poor woman now sees the beautiful things that her ancestors knew
nothing of, since there were no department stores in those days. To-day
desires are awakened that cannot be fulfilled; she sees other women
buying what she can only long for, and an active discontent with her lot
appears.

Unphilosophical this, and severely to be deprecated as unworthy of
woman. This has been done so often and so effectively(?) by divines,
reformers, press, that a mere physician begs leave to remark that it is
a natural sequence of the publicity luxury to-day has. _The most
successful commercial minds of America are in a conspiracy against the
poor Housewife to make her discontented with her lot by increasing her
desires_; they are on the job day and night and invade every corner of
her world; well, they have succeeded. The divines, etc., who thunder
against luxury have no word to say against the department store and the
advertising manager.

CHAPTER VII

THE HOUSEWIFE AND HER HUSBAND

The husband differs from the wife in this fundamental,--that essentially
he is not a house man as she is a house woman. For the man the home is
the place where he houses his family and where he rests at night. Here
also he spends his leisure time in amount varying with his domesticity.
Man writes songs and books about the home, but the woman lives there.
Perhaps that is why women have not written sentimental verse about it.

Marriage is variously regarded. "It is a sacrament, a religious
sanction, and no