536 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and a still more indifferent hand at repairs." As a consequence, he 

 says, the English workman has often no alternative but to wear his 

 garments in holes or to replace them by others. Given an equal in- 

 come, there is probably no doubt that a French working-class family 

 will be better fed and better clad than a corresponding English family 

 dealing in the same market, and will lay up a larger stock of the house- 

 hold goods, and especially linen, which are the pride of the French 



The waste resulting from the immoderate use of alcohol and from 

 the widespread habit of betting, serious as it is, need not detain me, 

 as I wish to confine myself more particularly to waste which can hardly 

 be called intentional. It is not suggested that every man should con- 

 fine his expenditure to what is strictly necessary to maintain his social 

 position. The great German writer on finance, Professor Wagner, is 

 accustomed to say that "parsimony is not a principle." It is some- 

 times, indeed, a bad policy and a wasteful policy; and life would be a 

 very dull business if its monotony were not relieved by amusement and 

 variety, even at the occasional expense of thrift. Le Play refers to 

 tobacco as "the most economical of all recreations." How else, he asks, 

 could the Hartz miner "give himself an agreeable sensation" a thousand 

 times in a year at so low a cost as 10 francs? But nobody would wish 

 to see a free man using his tobacco like the Eussian prisoners described 

 to me by Prince Krapotkin, as chewing it, drying and smoking it, and 

 finally snuffing the ashes! Nor should we desire to eradicate from so- 

 ciety the impulses of hospitality, and even of a certain measure of dis- 

 play. An austere and selfish avarice, if generally diffused, may strike 

 at the very existence of a nation. 



Another respect in which French example may be profitable to us 

 is the municipal management of funerals (pompes funebres). Many a 

 struggling family of the working classes has been seriously crippled by 

 launching out into exaggerated expenses at the death of one of its 

 members, and especially of a bread-winner. The French system, while 

 preserving the highest respect for the dead, has some respect for the 

 living, who are frequently unable and unwilling at a time of bereave- 

 ment to resist any suggestion for expensive display, which seems to 

 them a last token of affection as well as a proof of self-respect. 



As regards housing the English cottage or artisan's house is regarded 

 on the Continent rather as a model for imitation than as a subject for 

 criticism; but the pressure of population upon space in our large cities, 

 joined with a love of life in the town, may possibly prove too strong 

 for the individualist's desire for a house to himself. If we should be 

 driven to what Mrs. Leonard Courtney has proposed to call Associated 

 Homes, the famillistere founded by M. Godin at Guise, and rooted in 

 the idea of Fourier's phalanstere will show us what has already been 



