the wife as the labourer, then at all events it has to be
recognised that he owes her not only the satisfaction of her physical
needs of food and shelter and clothing, but the opportunity to satisfy the
personal spontaneous claims of her own individual nature. Just as the
readjustment of Labour is really only an approach to the long recognised
ideals of Democracy, so the readjustment of the Home, far from being
subversive or revolutionary, is merely an approximation to the long
recognised ideals of marriage.

How in practice, one may finally ask, is this readjustment of the home
likely to be carried out?

In the first place we are justified in believing that in the future home
men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the
past. This change is indeed already coming about. It is an inestimable
benefit throughout life for a man to have been forcibly lifted out of the
routine comforts and feminine services of the old-fashioned home and to be
thrown into an alien and solitary environment, face to face with Nature
and the essential domestic human needs (in my own case I owe an
inestimable debt to the chance that thus flung me into the Australian bush
in early life), and one may note that the Great War has had, directly and
indirectly, a remarkable influence in this direction, for it not only
compelled women to exercise many enlarging and fortifying functions
commonly counted as pertaining to men, it also compelled men, deprived of
accustomed feminine services, to develop a new independent ability for
organising domesticity, and that ability, even though it is not
permanently exercised in rendering domestic services, must yet always make
clear the nature of domestic problems and tend to prevent the demand for
unnecessary domestic services.

But there is another quite different and more general line along which we
may expect this problem to be largely solved. That is by the
simplification and organisation of domestic life. If that process were
carried to the full extent that is now becoming possible a large part of
the problem before us would be at once solved. A great promise for the
future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption of
birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden
of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often
crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies
are helpful. To supply heat, light, and m