530 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



while authority fights without ceasing against frauds in weights and 

 measures, and adulteration. Free libraries, museums, picture galleries, 

 parks, public gardens and promenades have multiplied, and it is almost 

 sufficient to observe that no one seems to be too poor to command the 

 use of a bicycle. But with all this progress it is to be feared that house- 

 keeping is no better understood than it was two centuries ago — perhaps 

 not even so well. In the interval it has become enormously simplified. 

 The complete housewife is no longer a brewer, a baker, a dyer, a tailor 

 and a host of other specialists rolled into one. But among the work- 

 ing classes the advent of the factory system has increased the employ- 

 ment of women and girls away from home to such an extent that many 

 of them now marry with a minimum of domestic experience, and are 

 with the best intentions the innocent agents of inefficiency and waste, 

 even in this simplified household. 



If we were suddenly swallowed up by the ocean, it appears probable 

 that the foreign student would find it easier to describe from existing 

 documents the life and home of the British craftsman in the middle 

 ages than of his descendant of to-day. In part, no doubt, our fiscal 

 system, with its few taxes upon articles of food and its light pressure 

 on the working classes, is responsible for this neglect. During the 

 Napoleonic war Pitt sent for Arthur Young to ask him what were the 

 ordinary and necessary expenses of a workman's family, and the ques- 

 tion would again become one of practical politics if any large addition 

 were required in the proceeds of indirect taxation. Taxation has the 

 one advantage of providing us with statistics. We know tolerably 

 well the facts in the mass about the consumption of tea and coffee, 

 dried fruits and tobacco, and of alcohol, while the income tax (aided in 

 the near future by returns of the death duties) may give us some idea 

 of the stratification of the wealthier classes. But the details of con- 

 sumption are still obscure. It has already been suggested that some 

 restraint may arise from the sentiment that individuals are likely to 

 resent what they may regard as a prying into their affairs. But when 

 we travel abroad we are curious to notice, and do notice without giving 

 offence, the dress, the habits and the food of peasants and workmen; 

 and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that we are less observant at 

 home because these common and trivial details appear to us unworthy 

 of attention. In his 'Principles of Economics' Professor Marshall says: 

 "Perhaps £100,000,000 annually are spent, even by the working classes, 

 and £400,000,000 by the rest of the population of England, in ways 

 that do little or nothing towards making life nobler or truly happier." 

 And, again, speaking before the Eoyal Statistical Society in 1893: 

 "Something like the whole imperial revenue, say 100 millions a year, 

 might be saved if a sufficient number of able women went about the 

 country and induced the other women to manage their households as 



