The aggregation of population in towns in the first place made the space available for household operations much smaller than was the case when the kitchen was supplemented by rows of outhouses, a green and a garden. In modern conditions, washing at home results in the discomfort of the whole family, whether that family lives in a single room or in a decent middle-class house of ten or twelve rooms. In the second place, the massing into a comparatively small area of a homogeneous population makes it easy to arrange for other methods of cleansing clothes, either in the working-class districts by the provision of municipal washing-houses, or in the more well-to-do suburbs through the appearance of steam laundries. In the same way, when each household possessed a garden it was natural to pick the fruit and make it into jam. It is a different thing to buy fruit specially for the purpose. Many housewives find that when the cost of the fruit, sugar, and extra fuel is calculated, taking into account also the dislocation of the regular routine of the household caused by the extra work, it pays them better to buy the jam ready-made. On the other hand, the use of machinery, the existence of cheap methods of transit, and the multiplication of grocers' shops makes it increasingly possible to produce jam in large quantities actually cheaper than it can be made at home, and to distribute it quickly to the consumer. The same cause, acting within and without the home in different ways, is resulting in a steady transference of these domestic avocations from the household. Moralists often lament this tendency, and attribute it entirely to increased love of ease and leisure among women. But it is no more possible to draw an indictment against a whole sex than against a whole people, and an alteration in custom so widespread as this which we are discussing must have deeper roots than a personal defect of laziness in particular individuals.