The idea of coöperation in domestic industry has been well worked out in theory—notably in Mrs. Gilman’s book “The Home.” The first attempt to realise it in practice, so far as I know, is the Helicon Home Colony. The plan was broached in an article which I published in _The Independent_, in June of 1906. In the course of the article, I outlined the situation as follows: Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived—like a cave man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and dependants to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades: the trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the trade of washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat, of churning butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house, of decorating rooms, of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and clashing with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labour. It takes a hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly, while twenty cooks could prepare one meal for a hundred families, and do it perfectly. It costs a hundred thousand dollars to build and equip a hundred kitchens; it would cost only five thousand dollars to build one kitchen! But, of course, if you have large-scale cooking at present, you can only have it under capitalist auspices; and so it is associated in your minds with uncleanness, and bad service, and high prices. It takes a hundred churns and a hundred aching backs to make a thousand pounds of butter; it would take only one machine and a man to tend it to make the same thousand pounds, and the cost of making it would be cut ninety-five per cent. But of course you cannot have large-scale butter-making except it is done for profit—and that means adulteration and poisoning! It takes a hundred ignorant nursemaids to take care of the children of a hundred families, and develop every kind of ugliness and badness in them; it would take only twenty or thirty trained nurses and kindergarten teachers to take care of them coöperatively, and bring them up according to the teachings of science.