In short, since communistic expenditure is compulsory expenditure, enforced on everybody alike, it cannot be kept within everybody’s means unless everybody has the same income. But the remedy is, not to abolish the parks and the cream-colored ponies, and to tell the Prince of Wales that he cannot have more than one suit of clothes until every poor woman’s son has two, all of which is not only impossible but envious and curmudgeonish, but to equalize incomes. In the meantime we must pay our rates and taxes with the best grace we can, knowing that if we tried to drag down public expenditure to the level of the worst private poverty our lives would be unendurable even by savages. This, however, does not apply to certain ways in which the ratepayer is “exploited”. To exploit a person is to make money out of her without giving her an equivalent return. Now practically all private employers exploit the ratepayer more or less in a way that she never notices unless she has studied the subject as we are studying it at present. And the way they do it is this. A woman who employs domestic servants gives regular employment to most of them; but to some she gives only casual employment. The housemaid and cook are in regular employment; the nurse is in temporary employment; and the charwoman is in casual employment: that is, she is taken on for a few hours or for a day, and then cast off to shift for herself as best she can until she gets another equally short job. If she is ill, none of her occasional employers need concern herself: and when rich people die and make provision for their servants in their wills, they never think of including a legacy for the charwoman. Now no doubt it is very convenient to be able to pick up a woman like a taxi for an hour or so, and then get rid of her without any further responsibility by paying her a few shillings and turning her into the street. But it means that when the charwoman is ill or out of employment or getting so old that younger and stronger women are preferred to her, somebody has to provide for her. And that somebody is the ratepayer, who provides the outdoor relief and the workhouse, besides, as taxpayer, the old age pension and part of the dole. If the ratepayer did not do this the householder would have either to do without the charwoman or pay her more. Even regular servants could not, as at present, be discharged without pensions when they are worn out, if the ratepayers made no provision for them. Thus the householder is making the other ratepayers, many of whom do not employ charwomen, pay part of the cost of her domestic service.