t in particular of
the home. Domineering egotism, the assertion of greedy possessive rights,
are out of place in the modern home. They are just as mischievous when
exhibited by the wife as by the husband. We have seen, as we look back,
the futility in the end of the ancient structure of the home, however
reasonable it was at the beginning, under our different modern social
conditions, and for women to attempt nowadays to reintroduce the same
structure, merely reversed would be not only mischievous but silly. That
spirit of narrow exclusiveness and self centred egoism--even if it were
sometimes an _egoisme a deux_--evoked, half a century ago, the scathing
sarcasm of James Hinton, who never wearied of denouncing the "virtuous and
happy homes" which he saw as "floating blotches of verdure on a sea of
filth." Such outbursts seem extravagant, but they were the extravagance of
an idealist at the vision which, as a physician in touch with realities,
he had, seen beneath the surface of the home.

It is well to insist on the organisation of the mechanical and material
side of life. Some leaders of women movements feel this so strongly that
they insist on nothing else. In old days it was conventionally supposed
that women's sphere was that of the feelings; the result has been that
women now often take ostentatious pleasure in washing their hands of
feelings and accusing men of "sentiment." But that wrongly debased word
stands for the whole superstructure of life on the basis of material
organisation, for all the finer and higher parts of our nature, for the
greater part of civilisation.[16] The elaboration of the mechanical side
of life by itself may merely serve to speed up the pace of life instead of
expanding leisure, to pile up the weary burden of luxury, and still
further to dissipate the energy of life in petty or frivolous
channels.[17] To bring order into the region of soulless machinery running
at random, to raise the super-structure of a genuinely human civilisation,
is not a task which either men or women can afford to fling contemptuously
to the opposite sex. It concerns them both equally and can only be carried
out by both equally, working side by side in the most intimate spirit of
mutual comprehension, confiding trust, and the goodwill to conquer the
demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of
keeping it alive.

[16] "The growth of the sentiments," remarks an influential psychologist
of o