"that suggests a question I have several times been on the point of
asking. How have you disposed of the problem of domestic service? Who
are willing to be domestic servants in a community where all are
social equals? Our ladies found it hard enough to find such even when
there was little pretense of social equality."

"It is precisely because we are all social equals whose equality
nothing can compromise, and because service is honorable, in a society
whose fundamental principle is that all in turn shall serve the rest,
that we could easily provide a corps of domestic servants such as you
never dreamed of, if we needed them," replied Dr. Leete. "But we do
not need them."

"Who does your housework, then?" I asked.

"There is none to do," said Mrs. Leete, to whom I had addressed this
question. "Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively
cheap rates, and our cooking at public kitchens The making and
repairing of all we wear are done outside in public shops.
Electricity, of course, takes the place of all fires and lighting. We
choose houses no larger than we need, and furnish them so as to
involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order. We have no use
for domestic servants."

"The fact," said Dr. Leete, "that you had in the poorer classes a
boundless supply of serfs on whom you could impose all sorts of
painful and disagreeable tasks, made you indifferent to devices to
avoid the necessity for them. But now that we all have to do in turn
whatever work is done for society, every individual in the nation has
the same interest, and a personal one, in devices for lightening the
burden. This fact has given a prodigious impulse to labor-saving
inventions in all sorts of industry, of which the combination of the
maximum of comfort and minimum of trouble in household arrangements
was one of the earliest results.

"In case of special emergencies in the household," pursued Dr. Leete,
"such as extensive cleaning or renovation, or sickness in the family,
we can always secure assistance from the industrial force."

"But how do you recompense these assistants, since you have no money?"

"We do not pay them, of course, but the nation for them. Their
services can be obtained by application at the proper bureau, and
their value is pricked off the credit card of the applicant."

"What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!" I exclaimed.
"In my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchi