Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
The wife of this ideal home may probably have a certain distaste for
vicarious labour, that so far as the immediate minimum of duties goes
will probably carry her through them. There will be few servants
obtainable for the small homes of the future, and that may strengthen
her sentiments. Hardly any woman seems to object to a system of things
which provides that another woman should be made rough-handed and kept
rough-minded for her sake, but with the enormous diffusion of levelling
information that is going on, a perfectly valid objection will probably
come from the other side in this transaction. The servants of the past
and the only good servants of to-day are the children of servants or the
children of the old labour base of the social pyramid, until recently a
necessary and self-respecting element in the State. Machinery has
smashed that base and scattered its fragments; the tradition of
self-respecting inferiority is being utterly destroyed in the world. The
contingents of the Abyss, even, will not supply daughters for this
purpose. In the community of the United States no native-born race of
white servants has appeared, and the emancipated young negress
degenerates towards the impossible--which is one of the many stimulants
to small ingenuities that may help very powerfully to give that nation
the industrial leadership of the world. The servant of the future, if
indeed she should still linger in the small household, will be a person
alive to a social injustice and the unsuccessful rival of the wife. Such
servants as wealth will retain will be about as really loyal and servile
as hotel waiters, and on the same terms. For the middling sort of
people in the future maintaining a separate _menage_ there is nothing
for it but the practically automatic house or flat, supplemented,
perhaps, by the restaurant or the hotel.
Almost certainly, for reasons detailed in the second chapter of these
Anticipations, this household, if it is an ideal type, will be situated
away from the central "Town" nucleus and in pleasant surroundings. And I
imagine that the sort of woman who would be mother and mistress of such
a home would not be perfectly content unless there were a garden about
the house. On account of the servant difficulty, again, this garden
would probably be less laboriously neat than many of our gardens
to-day--no "bedding-out," for example, and a certain parsimony of mown
lawn....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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