“But how, may I be permitted to ask, is the rest of the housework accomplished, if no servants exist to take charge of so pretty a house as this one?” (The house, my dear Hannevig, was in reality hideous, as bare and as plain as are all the houses here. Each is furnished by state law, exactly alike). “Oh, every thing is done by machinery, as at your hotel. Every thing, the sweeping, bed making, window scrubbing and washing. Each separate department has its various appliances and apparatus. The women of every household are taught the use and management of the various machines, you know, at the expense of the state, during their youth; when they take the management of a house they can run it single-handed. Most of the machinery goes by electricity. A house can be kept in perfect order by two hours’ work daily. The only hard work which we still have to do is dusting. No invention has yet been effected which dusts satisfactorily without breakage to ornaments, which accounts for the fact, also, that the fashion of having odds and ends about a home has gone out. It was voted years ago by the largest women’s vote ever polled, that since men could not invent self-adjusting, non-destructive dusters, their homes must suffer. Women were not to be degraded to hand machines for the sake of ministering to men’s æsthetic tastes. So you see we have only the necessary chairs and tables. If men want to see pictures they can go to the museums.” Perhaps it is this latter fact which accounts for my never being able to find the good citizen A---- at home. He is gone to the public club, or to the bath, or to the Communal Theater, I am told, when I appear again and again. This wonderful community has done much, of that I am convinced, in the development of ideal freedom; but there appears to be a fatal blight somewhere in its principles, a blight which seems to have destroyed all delight in domestic life. In my next I will tell you more and at length, of the peculiar development which the race has attained under these now well-established emancipation doctrines, and of their results on the two sexes. I hope you are not wearying of my somewhat lengthy descriptions, but you yourself are to blame, as you bound me to such rigid promises of detail and accuracy. Farewell, dear companion, would you were here to use your wiser philosopher’s eyes. I am yours, WOLFGANG. IV.