The second great distinction is that while any other business may expand to meet the demands of a growing market, and as a result of the increasing competency of its organiser and work-people, the household is definitely limited in scope by the numbers of the family included within it. Biscuit-makers or jam-makers, to put the matter concretely, may succeed by skilful management in enlarging their businesses until they supply their goods to hundreds of thousands of people, and earn a large profit by doing so. But the most efficient housekeeper continues all her life to organise and cater for the same number of people, and her reward for her good management does not consist in a raised salary or increased profits. It is, in fact, not pecuniary at all, but is the increased well-being of those whom she serves. Important consequences follow from these two distinctions, some of them desirable, others the reverse. The household is preserved, as it were, as a little oasis in the midst of the surrounding commercialism. There at least exists no temptation to adulteration or sophistication, or to shoddy work intended to sell but not to last. No housewife would be such a fool as to put alum in the bread baked at home, to use decaying fruit in the tarts, or questionable meat in her pies. She can have no object save to provide the best she can for her family with the means at her disposal. This is an enormous advantage, the value of which it is hardly possible to overrate. But the absence of profit-making has certain disadvantages. It means that while other economic organisations are being constantly spurred to increasing efficiency by the stimulus of competition, the household remains backward. A manufacturer knows to-day that he must use the most up-to-date machinery and employ the most skilled management or be beaten in the race for commercial supremacy. But housekeepers may continue (and do continue) to use old-fashioned ranges or antiquated systems of hot-water heating without any reference to the proceedings of their neighbours. Without doubt it results that new inventions make their way much more slowly in housekeeping than in profit-making industry. How rare, for instance, it is to find properly constructed grates outside very wealthy households. How badly the kitchen, larder, and scullery are planned in relation to one another. In how few cases is any attempt made to utilise electricity for cooking or removing dust, for both of which purposes admirable machines are already on the market.