In the majority of houses whose cold water systems I have inspected the pipes are nearly always run at the most exposed angle of the containing walls, so that if there is a frost, the frost may have a chance of getting at the pipes and bursting them, and so give the trade a fresh job. Again, every housewife knows that in the ordinary daily conflicts between tea-sets and domestic service more cups get broken than saucers. And I suppose every household in London has got some corner shelf piled with superfluous saucers (useless widowers mourning the departure of their better halves); but it is very exceptional--only in one shop that I know--that one is able to replace the cup (in certain stock patterns) without encumbering oneself with the saucer which one does not want. The saucers continue to be made in wasteful superabundance, because waste of that sort is “good for trade.” I have been assured by an observant housewife that certain articles do now and again appear upon the market specially designed to safeguard by little constructive devices, the main point of wear-and-tear through which they become useless, and that presently these things disappear and are unobtainable, presumably because they prove too lasting, and so are “bad for trade.” And they are allowed to disappear because we, as a community, have not sufficiently set our hearts and minds against waste and uselessness. We buy cheaply because we think cheaply, and because we have lost our sense of honour towards the products of men’s hands, and toward that wonderful instrument itself which we are content to put to such base uses, letting the workers themselves see how much we despise the things they have made. I have seen in London a comic music-hall “turn” in which the comedy largely consisted in a continuous breakage of piles of plates by a burlesque waiter, who, in the course of his duties, either drops them, falls against them, sits on them, or kicks them. During the turn I should say some thirty or forty plates get broken. They were cheap plates, no doubt; but it seems to me that if there is any fun in this monotonous repetition of destruction, then the greater the cost and waste of human labour the more irresistibly comic should the situation appear; and the management which provided Worcester or Dresden china for its low-comedy wits to play upon would have logical grounds for considering that it was thereby supplying its audience with livelier entertainment more satisfying to its taste.[2]