what is this or that demand for service or labour doing to other souls? What conditions does it lay upon them? You may boast that you have simplified your life—rid yourself, for instance, of domestic service by getting rid of cook and housemaid. You have not. The bread, the meat, even the ground flour that comes into your house is all provided by a domestic service which takes place outside your door and which you do not see. And you are as morally concerned for the conditions of that labour as if you yourself supervised it. You need it and use it as much; it is only done for you at a further remove—out of sight and out of mind—so that it is much easier (but not more justifiable), to be callous as to the conditions of those who render it. And if upon those material lines of comfort and luxury you extend your demands, you are also extending your claim over the lives of others—and your responsibility for those lives, if they go lacking where you go fed.
Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict obligation to render service in return—equal to that which you claim. And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of them as they could make), those material possessions should be a weight upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted. Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your own
