Page:Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922).djvu/102

 problem before us would be at once solved. A great promise for the future of domestic life is held out by the growing adoption of birth-control, by which the wife and mother is relieved from that burden of unduly frequent and unwanted maternity which in the past so often crushed her vitality and destroyed her freshness. But many minor agencies are helpful. To supply heat, light, and motive power even to small households, to replace the wasteful, extravagant, and often inefficient home-cookery by meals cooked outside, as well as to facilitate the growing social habit of taking meals in spacious public restaurants, under more attractive, economical, and wholesome conditions than can usually be secured within the narrow confines of the home, to contract with specially trained workers from outside for all those routines of domestic drudgery which are often so inefficiently and laboriously carried on by the household-worker, whether mistress or servant, and to seek perpetually by new devices to simplify, which often means to beautify, all the everyday processes of life—to effect this in any comprehensive degree is to transform the home from the intolerable burden it is sometimes felt to be into a possible haven of peace and joy. The trouble in the past,