to free effort, as at present. If people want to listen to a
certain preacher, they get together and contribute what
they please, and pay for a church and support the preacher,
and then listen to him; I, who do not want to listen to
him, stay away, and it costs me nothing. In the same way
there are magazines about Egyptian coins, and Catholic
saints, and flying machines, and athletic records, and I
know nothing about any of them. On the other hand, if
wage-slavery were abolished, and I could earn some spare
money without paying tribute to an exploiting capitalist,
then there would be a magazine for the purpose of inter~
preting and popularizing the gospel of Friedrich Nietzsche,
the prophet of Evolution, and also of Horace Fletcher, the
inventor of the noble science of clean eating; and inciden~
tally, perhaps, for the discouraging of long skirts, and the
scientific breeding of men and women, and the establishing
of divorce by mutual consent."

Dr. Schliemann paused for a moment. "That was a
lecture," he said with a laugh, "and yet I am only
begun!"

"What else is there?" asked Maynard.

"I have pointed out some of the negative wastes of
competition," answered the other. "I have hardly men~
tioned the positive economies of cooperation. Allowing
five to a family, there are fifteen million families in this
country; and at least ten million of these live separately,
the domestic drudge being either the wife or a wage-slave.
Now set aside the modern system of pneumatic house-clean~
ing, and the economies of cooperative cooking; and con~
sider one single item, the washing of dishes. Surely it is
moderate to say that the dish-washing for a family of five
takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day's work,
it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied persons --
mostly women -- to do the dish-washing of the country.
And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutal~
izing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness,
ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insan~
ity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children -- for
all of which things the community has naturally to pay.

[[407]]

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