we are familiar with a word which describes a multitude “arrayed in white garments.” The innovation established a point of contact between urban cleanliness and holiness; and it is within this cycle of social judgment that the waste occupations should be placed. We should then take more kindly to the only equitable solution of the problem presented by this class of work, namely that it should be shared out and that all the members of the community should be liable to be called out in companies, as they are now for jury service, to do their part of this indispensable work. This brings the waste occupations into the same category as the productive trades; in point of fact, it is there they really belong. There can be no intrinsic difference of worth between the work of providing for the needs of society and the work of disposing of its waste. For without either of these, society cannot live. The only class for which there should be no room in a healthy social order is the social parasite. It is to this class that the “idle rich” belong, the people who neither toil nor spin yet fare sumptuously every day at the expense of the labour of others. To this class also belongs the large “flunkey” class—butlers, footmen, door-openers, and other uniformed persons who are arrayed in fine apparel doing little things for us that we ought to do for ourselves. It is just neither to these persons nor to society that they should be allowed to continue in careers of such complete uselessness. So far as Europe is concerned this class has already largely disappeared, for the Army or industry has swallowed it up; and it is not likely ever to re-emerge on the pre-war scale. We must add also to this parasitic class those who are engaged in luxury trades—with the _caveat_ that it is exceedingly difficult to draw a strict frontier line between necessity and luxury on the one hand, and on the other, between luxury and the thing that may minister to the legitimate comfort, the health, the beauty and the general enrichment of life. But there are some things so palpably on the wrong side of the line that there should be no difficulty in identifying them. It is a subject worth some reflection here that the war is teaching us to do without many things which we had come to regard as necessities. It is a sad commentary upon the civilisation we had produced, that it left us with a hunger which we endeavoured to appease by an elaboration of the fringes of life. We had gradually accumulated a range of comforts and conveniences, and not a few superfluities, which had come to be regarded as indispensable. But the war has taught us how few things are after all needful. We have all the materials of joyful life when we have food to eat, a home to live in, freedom and congenial work, comradeship and love. And unless these become more and more the sure possession of all, our social progress is no more than a laborious sham.