If assistance to those who need it is the object of domestic service, it is striking to note that on the money basis, generally speaking, the wrong people are served. Who in the community most require and should specially have the help of servants? The old and infirm, the weak and ill, the very young and the hard-worked. Service under such conditions raises itself to the level of one of the highest occupations that can be imagined. But this is not our system. A man or woman may be ill, old or over-worked, without being able to get the assistance of a single soul. Another man or woman may be young and healthy and have at his or her command a retinue of thirty servants or more, solely because they have money and servants are forced, by economic pressure, to devote their lives to the menial task of furbishing up the endless and complicated appanage of wealth. Now let us turn to the inanimate luxuries, taking into account only indisputable luxuries--that is to say, articles of high price which have no special artistic value, to which much labour has been devoted and which are not produced to serve any legitimately useful purpose. Luxury has been well defined as “that which creates imaginary needs, exaggerates real wants, diverts them from their true end, establishes a habit of prodigality in Society, and offers through the senses a satisfaction of self-love which puffs up but does not nourish the heart and which presents to others the picture of happiness they can never attain.” Bond Street catalogues abound with any quantity of examples. Furs at one thousand guineas, fifty-guinea dressing-bags, twenty-guinea hats, thousand-guinea tiaras, fruit and vegetables out of season, cigars at three shillings apiece, ruinously expensive wines, and fantastic foods of all descriptions. There is no need to exaggerate, for all those articles can be bought for much higher prices than those quoted. A great amount of skilled labour of a high order goes to the production of these luxuries, and a great amount of labour of the lowest and most cruelly sweated description is also enlisted for their production, and incredible as it may seem, it is on the ground that they give employment that these luxuries are defended. It was calculated in 1884[5] that, even giving a liberal extension of meaning to the term “necessaries” and “comforts” of life, over six millions of manual labourers, who with their families constitute thirteen millions of the population, were engaged in producing what, in contradistinction to the above, must be classified as luxuries. A prominent statesman,[6] expressing the views of his class, said a few years ago: “The more human wants are stimulated and multiplied, the more widespread will be the inducement to hire. Therefore all outcries and prejudices against the progress of wealth and what is called luxury are nothing but outcries of prejudice against the very sources and fountains of all employment.”