ally waive claim to most of the effects of deceased friends,
reserving only particular objects. The nation takes charge of the
resigned chattels, and turns such as are of value into the common stock
once more."

"You spoke of paying for service to take care of your houses," said I;
"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 house-work, 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 n