cheerful and varied social attractions became altogether superior to those of the old public-house. As I have already said, that seemingly inevitable accompaniment of our social life of the nineteenth century, had virtually ceased to haunt us, at least in any recognizable aspect, ere the twentieth had closed.
The economic marvels of co-operation had not escaped attention in the last half of the nineteenth century; but it was only in the twentieth that the system attained such extension and indeed universality of application, as brought comparative abundance and comfort to even the very poorest classes, and constituted quite a new era, not only in the economies of the production and distribution of society's material wants, but even more strikingly in the social comfort and cheerfulness of the new style of the homes of the great mass of the people.
The cheapness of wholesale dealing was everywhere availed of. The nineteenth century had indeed experienced something of this benefit, in the Civil Service and other "co-operative store-keeping;" but that had been chiefly for the good of classes already comparatively well-off. In the twentieth century, on the other hand, this co-operation had spread its gains and savings to the entire people, including even the very poorest. The revolution thus brought to many vocations, as, for example, the necessary superseding of a vast mass of small shopkeeping, was, in reality, after all, much less rapid, and much less disturbing
