rant contradiction of all
trade-union ideals. The poor thing is slaving all the time! What she
needs--what she longs for--is just a little break or change now and
again, an opportunity to get her mind off her work and its worries. If
her husband's hours are reduced to eight, well that gives her a chance,
doesn't it? The home and the children are, after all, as much his as
hers. With his enlarged leisure he will now be able to take a fair share
in home duties. I suggest that they take it turn and turn about--one
night he goes out and she looks after the house and the children; the
next night she goes out and he takes charge of things at home. She can
sometimes go to the cinema, sometimes call on friends. Then, say once a
week, they can both go out together, taking the children with them. That
will be a little change and treat for everybody."

It is not to be supposed that in this presentation of the situation in the
home, as it is to-day visible to those who are privileged to see beneath
the surface, any accusation is brought against the husband. He is no more
guilty of an unreasonable conservatism than the wife is guilty of an
unreasonable radicalism. Each of them is the outcome of a tradition. The
point is that the events of the past hundred years have produced a
discrepancy in the two lines of tradition, with a resultant lack of
harmony, independent of the goodwill of either husband or wife.

Olive Schreiner, in her _Woman and Labour_, has eloquently set forth the
tendency to parasitism which civilisation produces in women; they no
longer exercise the arts and industries which were theirs in former ages,
and so they become economically dependent on men, losing their energies
and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull parasitic animals which live
as blood-suckers of their host. That picture, which was of course never
true of all women, is now ceasing to be true of any but a negligible
minority; it presents, moreover, a parasitism limited to the economic side
of life. For if the wife has often been a lazy gold-sucking parasite on
her husband in the world, the husband has yet oftener been a helpless
service-absorbing parasite on his wife in the home. There is, that is to
say, not only an economic parasitism, with no adequate return for
financial support, but a still more prevalent domestic parasitism, with an
absorption of services for which no return would be adequate. There are
many helpful husbands in the home, but t