Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III We now come to the consideration of another part of the seventh book of Plato, which is of intense interest to us modern men and women, though it may be somewhat difficult for people obstructed with their preconceived ideas, and stuffed with too much book-learning, to assimilate the problems dealt with. In the thirteenth chapter of this book it is stated that people ought to have common meals. Now, this is most difficult for people in modern times to realize, and it will at once be said that that cannot apply to modern circumstances in the least, nor to the conditions of our present life. But it is known that this question of common meals has actually come, in a way, into American life. And it has come about in America through various causes, chiefly through lack of servants. It is not necessary now to discuss the servant question, but it may be said that, to obviate this difficulty, people live, not in flats, but in blocks of houses, a series of houses made up of twenty or twenty-five of them in one block; and in the underground rooms there will live a caterer, who will cater for thevast number of families in the block, and provide for them all by one cuisine. It is not meant by that that they sit for their meals in one and the same room. Now, this is a caricature of the home life, the same as the boarding-house system is a caricature of the much-vaunted British home life ; similar institutions in France are called pensions, or living en pension, as the French say. These boarding-houses are the nearest approach there is in modern times to the common meals of the ancients, a very caricature of what Plato lays down in his book; and with the twelve thousand boarding-houses in London, and the vast area of " blocks" in America, it is the most drastic refutation of ou...