4.—Transformation of Domestic Life.

As the kitchen, so our entire domestic life will be revolutionized, and countless tasks that must be performed to-day will become superfluous. As the central kitchen will do away with the private kitchen, so central heating and electric lighting plants will do away with all the trouble connected with stoves and lamps. Warm and cold water supply will enable all to enjoy daily baths. Central laundries and drying-rooms will assume the washing and drying of clothes; central cleaning establishments, the cleaning of carpets and clothes. In Chicago carpet-cleaning machines were exhibited that cleaned carpets in an incredibly short time, calling forth the wonder and admiration of the ladies who visited the exposition. The electric door opens at a slight pressure of the finger and shuts off itself. Electric contrivances carry letters and newspapers to every floor of the houses, and electric elevators save one the trouble of climbing stairs. The interior furnishing of the houses, the coverings of walls, floors, furniture, etc., will be so arranged as to make house-cleaning easy and to avoid the gathering of dust and germs. Garbage and all kinds of offal will be carried out of the houses by waste-pipes like the water that has been used. In the United States, and in some European cities, for instance, in Zurich, Berlin and its suburbs, London, Vienna, Munich, we already find wonderfully equipped houses, in which well-to-do families—others could not meet the expense—reside and enjoy a great many of the advantages described above.[270]

Here again we have an illustration of how bourgeois society paves the way for the revolutionizing of domestic life, though only for its chosen few. But when domestic life will be generally transformed in the manner we have pointed out, then the domestic servant, this “slave to all whims of the mistress,” will disappear. But the “lady of the house” will disappear also. “Without servants, no civilization,” Mr. v. Treitschke exclaims, horror-stricken, with an amusing pathos. He can picture society without servants as little as Aristotle could picture it without slaves. It comes as a surprise to us, though, that Mr. v. Treitschke regards our servants as the “standard-bearers of our civilization.” Treitschke, like Eugen Richter, is also worried over the shining of shoes and the cleaning of clothes, which people cannot possibly attend to themselves. As a matter of fact, nine-tenths of the people do polish their own shoes and clean their own clothes to-day, or women do it for their husbands, or daughters or sons do it for the family, and we could answer that what has been done so far by the nine-tenths might as well be done by the remaining tenth, also. There might be still another way. Why should not, in future, young persons, regardless of sex, be called upon to perform such and similar necessary tasks? Work is no disgrace, not even when it consists of shining shoes. That has been experienced by many an officer of noble birth who had to make his escape to the United States on account of debts, and there became a porter or a boot-black. In one of his pamphlets, Mr. Eugen Richter even has the shoe-polishing problem cause the downfall of the “Socialist chancellor” and the disruption of the “Socialist state.” For the “Socialist chancellor” refuses to polish his own shoes, and that is his great misfortune. Our opponents have enjoyed this description hugely and have thereby only proved that their demands on a criticism of Socialism are exceedingly modest. Mr. Eugen Richter lived to experience the great grief that a member of his own party, in Nuremberg, invented a shoe-polishing machine, shortly after the publication of his pamphlet, and that, at the World’s Fair, at Chicago, an electric shoe-polishing machine was exhibited that performed the task to perfection. So Richter’s and Treitschke’s main argument against Socialistic society has been shattered by an invention made within bourgeois society itself.

The revolutionary transformation that is changing all human relations completely, especially the position of women, is being consummated under our very eyes. It is only a question of time when society will take up this transformation on a large scale, will hasten and generalize the process, and will thereby enable all to participate in its countless and multiform advantages.