In Shakespear’s famous play, King Lear and his daughters have an argument about this. His idea of enough is having a hundred knights to wait on him. His eldest daughter thinks that fifty would be enough. Her sister does not see what he wants with any knights at all when her servants can do all he needs for him. Lear retorts that if she cuts life down to what cannot be done without, she had better throw away her fine clothes, as she would be warmer in a blanket. And to this she has no answer. Nobody can say what is enough. What is enough for a gipsy is not enough for a lady; and what is enough for one lady leaves another very discontented. When once you get above the poverty line there is no reason why you should stop there. With modern machinery we can produce much more than enough to feed, clothe, and house us decently. There is no end to the number of new things we can get into the habit of using, or to the improvements we can make in the things we already use. Our grandmothers managed to get on without gas cookers, electric light, motor cars, and telephones; but today these things are no longer curiosities and luxuries: they are matter-of-course necessities; and nobody who cannot afford them is considered well-off. In the same way the standard of education and culture has risen. Nowadays a parlormaid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective. As Queen Victoria managed to get on very well in spite of her ignorance it cannot be said that the knowledge in which the parlormaid has the advantage of her is a necessity of civilized life any more than a telephone is; but civilized life and highly civilized life are different: what is enough for one is not enough for the other. Take a half-civilized girl into a house; and though she may be stronger and more willing and goodnatured than many highly civilized girls are, she will smash everything that will not stand the roughest handling. She will be unable to take or send written messages; and as to understanding or using such civilized contrivances as watches, baths, sewing machines, and electric heaters and sweepers, you will be fortunate if you can induce her to turn off a tap instead of leaving the water running. And your civilized maid who can be trusted with all these things would be like a bull in a china shop if she were let loose in the laboratories where highly trained scientific workers use machines and instruments of such delicacy that their movements are as invisible as that of the hour hands of our clocks, handling and controlling poisons and explosives of the most dangerous kind; or in the operating rooms where surgeons have to do things in which a slip of the hand might prove fatal. If every housemaid had the delicacy of touch, the knowledge, and the patience that are needed in the laboratories and operating theatres (where they are unfortunately not always forthcoming), the most wonderful changes