she was stinting herself to pay the salary of the Astronomer Royal, or to buy another picture for the National Gallery, she might vote against the Government at the next election for making her do it; but as she does not know, she only grumbles about the high prices of food, and thinks they are all due to bad harvests or hard times or strikes or anything else that must be put up with. She might not grudge what she has to pay for the King and Queen; but if she knew that she was paying the wages of the thousands of charwomen who scrub the stone staircases in the Houses of Parliament and other great public buildings, she would not get much satisfaction out of helping to support them better than she can afford to support herself. We see then that some of the Communism we practise is imposed on us without our consent: we pay for it without knowing what we are doing. But, in the main, Communism deals with things that are either used by all of us or necessary to all of us, whether we are educated enough to understand the necessity or not. Now let us get back to the things as to which tastes differ. We have already seen that Church of England services and beer and wine and spirits and intoxicants of all sorts are considered necessary to life by some people, and pernicious and poisonous by others. We are not agreed even about tea and meat. But there are many things that no one sees any harm in; yet everybody does not want them. Ask a woman what little present she would like; and one woman will choose a pet dog, another a gramophone. A studious girl will ask for a microscope when an active girl will ask for a motor bicycle. Indoor people want books and pictures and pianos: outdoor people want guns and fishing-rods and horses and motor cars. To communize these things in the way that we communize roads and bridges would be ridiculously wasteful. If you made enough gramophones and bred enough pet dogs to supply every woman with both, or enough microscopes and motor bicycles to provide one each for every girl, you would have heaps of them left on your hands by the women and girls who did not want them and would not find house room for them. They could not even sell them, because everybody who wanted one would have one already. They would go into the dustbin.