The stamina of the women of the idle class was formerly maintained by their work in childbearing and family housekeeping. But at present many of them resort to contraception (called birth control) not to regulate the number of their children and the time of their birth, but to avoid bearing any children at all. Hotel life, or life in service flats, or the delegation of household management to professional ladies who are practically private hotel managers, is more and more substituted for old-fashioned domestic housekeeping. If this were an ordinary division of labor to enable a woman to devote herself entirely to a professional career of some sort, it would be defensible; for many women, as you must often have noticed, have no aptitude for domestic work, and are as much out of place in the kitchen and nursery as all men are conventionally supposed to be; but when you have women with unearned and excessive incomes its possibility involves an equal possibility of complete uselessness and self-indulgence, of which many rich women, knowing no better, take the fullest advantage. There are always a few cases in which exceptional men and women with sufficient unearned income to maintain them handsomely without a stroke of work are found working harder than most of those who have to do it for a living, and spending most of their money on attempts to better the world. Florence Nightingale organized the hospital work of the Crimean war, including the knocking of some sense into the heads of the army medical staff, and much disgusting and dangerous drudgery in the wards, when she had the means to live comfortably at home doing nothing. John Ruskin published accounts of how he had spent his comfortable income and what work he had done, to shew that he, at least, was an honest worker and a faithful administrator of the part of the national income that had fallen to his lot. This was so little understood that people concluded that he must have gone out of his mind; and as he afterwards did, like Dean Swift, succumb to the melancholia and exasperation induced by the wickedness and stupidity of capitalistic civilization, they joyfully persuaded themselves that they had been quite right about him.