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Otago Daily Times, Issue 18952, 28 August 1923, Page 8

Not long ago a party was being shown over one of the most splendid of the old French palaces, when one of them, an Englishwoman, remarked, “I haven’t seen any bathrooms.” Somehow the comment seems to have a certain pertinence to the .discussion in Standing Committee on the real function of baths. Are baths a necessity or a luxury? Are baths a credential of respectability Is there a real demand for baths? There seems to have been some difference of opinion in the matter, as there has been in all ages. Many eminent men, Dr Johnson and Charles Fox, tor instance, had no special affection for soap and water, writes the Manchester Guardian. There was, in our past history, no class distinction between those who took baths and those who did not. unless we are to deduce anything from that malicious story about Lord Curzon’s reputed surprise' when seeing soldiers bathing in France, that ‘‘the common people had skins so white,” The theory underlying this invention may have been that centuries of bathlessness in the lower orders should have involved a certain darkness of texture*