It would be easy enough, like the
writer in the _Outlook_, to enjoy the pleasures and deny the perils. Oh
what a happy place England would be to live in if only one did not love
it!
WOMAN
A correspondent has written me an able and interesting letter in the
matter of some allusions of mine to the subject of communal kitchens. He
defends communal kitchens very lucidly from the standpoint of the
calculating collectivist; but, like many of his school, he cannot
apparently grasp that there is another test of the whole matter, with
which such calculation has nothing at all to do. He knows it would be
cheaper if a number of us ate at the same time, so as to use the same
table. So it would. It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at
different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers. But the
question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we buying?
It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a slave.
My correspondent also says that the habit of dining out in restaurants,
etc., is growing. So, I believe, is the habit of committing suicide. I
do not desire to connect the two facts together. It seems fairly clear
that a man could not dine at a restaurant because he had just committed
suicide; and it would be extreme, perhaps, to suggest that he commits
suicide because he has just dined at a restaurant.
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