^^"'% ^^S "'-^^o^ ^. o V A ^ - ♦ • » < ^^s' .^'"- .*^ .s ,r» -|; !vt INCREASING HOME EFFICIENCY •■rt^^^ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO INCREASING HOME EFFICIENCY BY MARTHA BENSLEY BRUfiRE AND ROBERT W. BRU£RE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1912 All rights reserved ^^^ \^ ^ Copyright, 191 i, bv P. F. Collier & Sons, The Success Company, The Crowell Publishing Company, The Outlook Company. Copyright, 191 2, by The Outlook Company, Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 191 2, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published November, igia. PHCSS or T. MOREY . cr> uo First Aid to the Budget-Maker 83 1 VO V3. ?:; ^ : VO ^; : 1I ^ vo w-i *-n K^. «^ 1^ t^ LT LO ON Vsd 8 4 VO s 0^ q 00 cn eg 1 ll 8 •W5. r) 00 5 8 VO o< 00 J ^ G 8 vF •5. vg^ 00 1-0 8 vd CI 8 06 vq ON vd 1 v^^ Vl VO 00 8 ci 8 CX) VO vo' 00 ^8 < •g c< nty •5 C) V*- ►^ VO i VI 8 CO 1- C/3 vq 00 w 8 R V5l ■55 > ^< cf VI d 1 Vi CO 5^ ^ "2 ^"^ d > 1 Vl a r e .s ^> 00 s .s .s > 84 Increasing Home Efficiency u 00 r< CO vo oo vq oo •»* t^ 4 ci 00 i Q o 00 i-n tn M «-n <-, ^ t^ lO m oq I "-2 i in Cs i ^ vd m 5^ ? IH ^-^ ■to. l>. LO o 6 ^ a R S 8 S S s S- g S o Q o R o X O q. o S P 9. c l.s d^.S 8.S Q o q^ fl tH "^ u^ •" (U M-l Si) *+H 60 *+:< W) *« 60 Mii^ 60 *+:« 60 O rt O rt O rt O rt O cs O rt 2 oj 1" 1 g 11 H H H H H First Aid to the Budget-Maker 85 It must be remembered that the families with a thousand a year or less at the top of this table of budgets are not the immigrant families with the traditionally large number of children and the correspondingly high death rate; they are families that by tradition, feeling, association and intent belong to the middle class. These tables show that the amount spent on food increases from $265.40 a year for incomes of $1,000 or less, to $572.57 for incomes from $4,000 to $5,000, but that the proportion of the income spent on food drops 4^/2 P^r cent for every $1,000 increase in income. The percentage spent for food is highest in the families of mechanics and clergymen, presumably because mechanics need a larger amount of food to replace their physical wear, and because the clergymen are compelled by the tradition of their calling to entertain many guests. It is interesting to find the lowest average for food in cities of from fifty to one hundred thousand inhabitants — that is, in cities large enough to have adequate transportation facilities for bringing in provisions, and not so large as to force up prices through an excessive demand. Food costs most in the smaller cities which are either metropolitan suburbs with transportation charges in addition to city prices, or which are aside from the main lines of transportation and have to pay abnormal freight rates. In other words, the cost of food above the price paid the farmer who raises it and the butcher who slaughters it and the grocer 86* Increasing Home Efficiency who brings it to the door, is the tax paid the railways. The average amounts spent for shelter show that people with incomes under a thousand dollars have got to be content with tenement conditions if they live in the city, or similar inadequate housing in the country, and that such shelter can be had for eleven per cent of their incomes. A sudden jump to twenty per cent takes place with an income between ^i,ooo and $1,200 which is the point of breaking into the middle class, and shows how much the middle class value a decent place to live in. From this twenty per cent there is a drop of three per cent with each thousand dollar increase in income. Clergymen average the lowest for shelter, because a parsonage is often part of their salary, and the small capitalist spends the largest percent- age; but the salaried employe and the struggling professional man spend the next highest, because respectable shelter marks their place in the middle class. The percentage spent for shelter is highest in cities of over one hundred thousand inhabitants, where the high taxes and crowding send up the rents. The cost of clothing shows the most stable per- centage of all the six heads of expenditure. It varies from nine to twelve per cent for all places, incomes, and occupations, with the exception of clergymen and physicians, whose professions re- quire disproportionate expenditure on clothes. The minimum expenditure on clothes In New York City is $100 a year, and this is less than in most First Aid to the Budget-Maker 87 other places. All the accounts we have received from families with incomes of less than ^1,000 a year show less than this health minimum for clothes, the average for this group being ^86.87. It appears that the middle-class standard of living, whether in city or country, in whatever profession, and with whatever income, implies be- tween $200 and ^400 a year spent for the operation of the household. The farm budgets do show a higher expenditure than this, but this is because the cost of farm labor, which should be counted as a business charge, is included under household operation. Though there is a minimum below which the charges for food and shelter and clothes dare not go, operating costs can go down indefi- nitely. But where people have even a little leeway they appear willing to sacrifice a good deal for com- fort and convenience, for light enough, and heat enough, and a chance to substitute the work of the laundry and the bakeshop and the clothing factory for the work of their hands. The amount of the operating costs which goes for personal serv- ice varies from ^22.56 for families with Incomes of $1,000 and under, to $259.09 for families with from $4,000 to $5,000, showing that only after the in- come passes $4,000 does the average family hire an average servant at the average price of $5.00 a week. It is under Advancement^ however, that we get the real significance of an increased income. This rises from $286.06 on a $1,000 Income to $2,683.15 on a $5,000 Income. The curve develops unbroken 88 Increasing Home Efficiency from the low-paid occupations to the higher, ex- cept in the case of educators, who are forced by the necessities of their work to spend a large amount on their own improvement. The expenditure for Incidentals is a question of accurate accounting as much as anything, but the inability of people with less than $i,ooo to live within their Incomes, as shown by their average deficit of nine per cent, and the way this deficit shades to the disappearing point at ^3,000 a year, is a significant answer to those people who Insist that ability to live within one's income is purely a matter of good management, quite unrelated to the size of the income. Is there any reason to believe that men earning more than $3,000 a year are more likely to select wives with reference to their house- keeping ability than those with Incomes under that sum? What other explanation can there be for the fact that ill-paid clergymen In small towns run the highest percentage of deficit, while capitalists, business men, and successful physicians run none at all? But, after all, it is the surplus, — that is, the margin above the decency line, — and not the deficit, that Is Important in these middle-class budgets. Do the various groups give an adequate social return for the extra amount of money they receive ? To mechanics society gives $503 .97 above the minimum for health, and It goes mostly Into better housing, savings, charity, and the church. Their average of two and a half children is high for the middle class, but low for the wage-working First Aid to the Budget-Maker 89 class. The salaried employes have a surplus of $747.63, and they distribute it quite differently from the mechanics. They eat nearly $yo better, they increase their housing cost nearly $100 above the mechanics, they spend more than double what the mechanics do on clothes — the difference be- tween the requirements of shop and office — but they also, like the mechanics, put most of their sur- plus into savings and insurance, even though they run an average deficit of $16.68, — or eight-tenths of one per cent of their average income — to do It. None of their surplus goes into increasing their number of children; on the contrary, they average about a child less to the family than the mechanics. In the professions, where the surplus Is $1,178.98, the average number of children goes up to nearly two In the family, and the bulk of the surplus of the professional group goes Into better clothes — which might be called a professional requisite — and Into savings and charity. In proportion, the professional men are more generous than any other group, although they, too, run an average deficit of $15.41, — seven-tenths of one per cent of their incomes, — and spend only $243.98 for vacations, travel, education, books, and professional Improve- ment — not an excessive amount surely, when one considers how much we need better service in medicine, law, education, and from the clergy. As a sharp contrast to the generosity of the professional men comes the niggardliness of the farmers, who give away less than three per cent of their Incomes, although they average a surplus of go Increasing Home Efficiency $1,012.34. The farmers put $267.38 into savings and insurance, $15.43 '^^^^ health, and $156.88 into books, education, recreation, and travel. Ob- viously the farmers choose money in the bank rather than college for their average of two and three-fourths children; or improvement or pleasure for themselves. The business men have a larger surplus above the demands of decency than any other group of the middle class — $2,251.20. And $1,358.12 goes into advancement, while the remainder is dis- tributed fairly evenly over the general cost of living. Now would it not appear that $1,358.12 worth of advancement is a social gain ^ An analy- sis of this item shows that nearly 38 per cent of it goes for savings and insurance, 16 per cent for church and charity, while only 34 per cent ($570.41) is spent for education, books, and recreation. Business men have the choice between running an automobile and sending a child to college, and they have, on the average, 1.7 children to send. Altogether they have sufficient leeway, so that neither illness nor another mouth to feed need strike them with panic. The small capitalists present an Interesting phenomenon. They seem to be people who have backed out of life — people with small incomes, averaging $2,266.66, derived from Investments, on which they prefer to live without exertion rather than enter any gainful occupation. Certainly they make sacrifices to follow their fancies. They have fewer children than any other group, spend First Aid to the Budget-Maker 91 only ^102.66 a year on service, showing that they either underpay their servants or do without them; they spend four per cent less on advancement than even mechanics and a higher per cent on food and shelter than people who are earning approxi- mately the same incomes; they travel little, en- tertain little, give little; they simply continue to exist. As one of them says: "It has seemed to us that college-bred Ameri- cans of the Eastern States were becoming stand- ardized, were growing into a race of clerks. . . . We honored their sturdy sense of duty, their long-enduring rectitude, the patience with which they carried a heavy load. But we had no wish to be like them. . . . We saw the people of our own age losing health year by year through over-work, under sedentary life and lack of daily exercise. We saw them growing yellow and flabby and unfit, and the spectacle didn't attract us. . . . We have dreaded the tyranny of accus- tomed things, the settling down of habits, the getting rooted in one place so deeply that it would cause pain to shake loose, so at intervals we have flavored life with change. . . . We have waged a running fight on monotony and routine. We dread them more than we dread sin or mistakes of judgment, for we believe that they slay the inner beauty. When they interweave themselves with the human spirit and sap it, they destroy the only living thing within us, the only gift that can create and communicate joy. . . . By knowing many sorts of persons we have hoped that we have cut a 92 Increasing Home Efficiency larger piece out of life than if we had stayed well sheltered in our own environment of family and education. Realization is only for personal ex- perience, and that we were denied because of the fortunate accident of birth." Temperamental no end! But where does it get to ? It might have dropped from the lips of the eloquent vagabond in Galsworthy's "Pigeon," or be heard rising from any benchload of the un- employed in Washington Square. Shall man re- turn to the world the good he gets from it by preserving an attitude of mind.^ There are a few who, writing more in sorrow than in anger, ask how the church and the minis- try are to be supported when people contribute so little to them. It is significant that all but nineteen of these seventy-six budgets class church and char- ity as one, as though they did not give to religion for value received, but as a gratuity to a mendicant. Only six of the families that put the church under a separate heading give to it as much as they do to charity, and three of these six are the families of clergymen. It appears from these average budgets that society is getting a very mixed product from the middle-class homes. There ought to be a valuable contribution from them because most of them have a financial surplus with which to make it. A surprising amount they are putting into sav- ings and insurance — ^300.58 per family per year — equal to almost thirteen per cent of their incomes. The question whether this really represents a First Aid to the Budget-Maker 93 social gain or not can only be answered by an intri- cate balancing of probabilities. The money they save is not idle; it is in the hands of bankers and insurance companies. Are these agents making a better social use of it than the people themselves would if they spent it wisely.^ Could the old age, sickness, and death which this ^300.58 per family per year is designed to meet be provided at a less social cost than the present sacrifices that are being made in order to hoard it.f* Is there a relation between the fact that the middle class contribute less than two children per family and this zeal to save.^ Would they be willing to launch a larger proportion of children into a world that assured them a comfortable old age? Just as the making of an individual budget is indispensable to the efficiency of the individual household, so the collection and interpretation of the budgets of large groups is essential to the dis- covery of our social mistakes and the means of their correction. This is a task for a governmental department, and its social importance is equalled only by the collection and practical use of vitality and morbidity statistics. For society needs a plan as much as the individual household, and perhaps the most important result of all budget-making will prove to be the harmonizing of our individual plans with a program of social welfare. CHAPTER VI Home Administration ALICE Morse Earle quotes from the diary of Abigail Foote who lived in Connecticut L in 1775, as follows: "Fix'd gown for Prude, — Mend Mother's Riding hood, — Spun short thread, — Carded tow, — Worked on Cheese-basket, — Hatchel's flax with Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece, — Pleated and ironed, — Read a Sermon of Doldridge's, — Spooled a piece, — Milked the cows, — Spun linen, did 50 knots, — Made a Broom of Guinea wheat straw, — Spun thread to whiten, — Set a Red dye, — Had two scholars from Mrs. Taylor's, — I carded two pounds of whole wool and felt Nationly, — Spun harness twine, — Scoured the pewter." Besides these chores, Abigail Foote washed, cooked, knitted, weeded the garden, picked the geese, dipped candles in the spring, and made soap and sausages in the autumn. The efficient administration of her home, once required these duties from every American house- wife. In the time when steam was merely a swirl- ing mist out of a tea-kettle, and electricity only a menacing adjunct of thunder storms, before the factory system or public utilities had been dreamed 94 Home Administration 95 of, the burden of manufacture was on the house- keeper, and if she shifted it at all it was to the shoulders of another woman. The servant was her one labor-saving device. The following advertisement appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet of September 23 rd, 1780: "Wanted at a Seat about half a day's journey from Philadelphia a single Woman of unsullied Reputation, an affable, cheerful, active and amiable Disposition; cleanly, industrious, perfectly qualified to direct and manage the female Concerns of country business as raising small stock, dairying, marketing, combing, carding, spinning, knitting, sewing, pickling, preserv- ing, etc. . . . Such a person will be treated with re- spect and esteem, and meet with every encouragement due to such a character." This was the ideal of the servant, — the female Jack-of-All-Trades, the unspecialized factory hand, the only means such a mistress as Abigail Foote could find to lighten her labors. We can find the time when the home was not a manufacturing plant, only by peering up into our family tree to where our arboreal ancestress, dim, brown and hairy, grins back at us from the leafy green. Her refuge of intertwined boughs and branches was really an independent home, and no factory. It passed with her, but it is coming again, — the home which is not the seat of any productive industry. It will not be a self-sufficient home as hers was, — that is gone forever. But it will be as free from the obligation to make the 96 Increasing Home Efficiency things it consumes, as a power machine in a cloth- ing factory is to make its own parts, though, like the power machine, this new home will be driven by the rods and belts of our new social life, and be held firmly in place by our social needs. To run this social machine properly is our present-day problem of home administration. In reality, this non-manufacturing home Is still in the future for most of us, and much further off for some than for others, because our homes are not all at the same stage of civilization, nor are all parts of the same homes at the same stage. What is efficiency for one may be inexcusable slackness for another. Most of our homes are stuck fast in the slough of the manorial tradition, — the pernicious and generally unfounded idea that each family commands a supply of the necessaries of life from its own fields and pastures, and that the way to free itself from the burden of manufacturing these into useful forms is to hire a servant to do it. In pursuance of this superstition, we use the servant as a labor-saving device, quite regardless of the fact that It is not labor-saving in general that she promotes, but merely the saving of her particular mistress. We are not finding, however, that It Is an easy thing to shift the household burden to the servant, for the simple reason that, being human, like our- selves, and having had a taste of education and culture, she declines to receive It. She doesn't have to assume It, and as she doesn't like it any better than her mistress, — she won't. As one Home Administration 97 woman writes from an eastern manufacturing town of eighty thousand Inhabitants: "My problem Is complicated in two ways; the big industrial concerns offer a variety of employ- ment for girls at good wages and short hours, — that Is a holiday on Sunday, and a half holiday on Saturday; and on the other hand, the presence of a large number of salaried officials and engineers, creates a large demand for capable servants, so that a wage for a competent maid, even in a very small family, is forced up to what is in our case prohibitive." This situation exists everywhere. The middle- class servant Is obsolescent, being In the reprehen- sible act of vanishing into her own home, on the one hand, and into the factory, on the other. It may look as though we were confusing the problem of home administration with the servant problem; but how one shall administer one's home depends largely upon what tools one has, and the servant is a tool, the vanishing of which leaves us in a linger- ing emergency. To be sure, people do not ordina- rily realize that the servant Is a tool. "The scar- city of good servant girls Is breaking up the homes of America," writes a despairing gentleman from Pennsylvania, as though she were corn or meat, water or air. There was probably a time when primitive man cried out that stone axes were vanlshlng,-"and how could civilization go on with- out theml But civilization wasn't parasitic upon the stone ax, any more than the home is parasitic upon the cook. The need was for a new tool to 98 Increasing Home Efficiency take the place of the old one, — a bow and arrows in place of the ax, — ^just as today there is need for mechanical labor-saving devices to replace the maid-of-all-work. A man with an annual income of three thousand writes : "We used to have a woman come in by the day. When she stopped coming, we just purchased a vacuum cleaner for a hundred-and-twenty dol- lars, which the women folk now prefer to outside help. . . . We have also a motor-operated washing machine, two electric sad-irons, and one gas iron." The wife of a New England physician, whose income ranges from three to four thousand dollars a year, says: "In the last year, I have kept no maid, having discharged my last one after nearly six years of service, and have enjoyed the year more than any previous one. I never hesitate to expend money for any labor-saving device. I use a gas range, a fireless cooker, have an excellent vacuum cleaner, and an adequate supply of all kitchen utensils and conveniences. My household expenses have been cut down about five hundred dollars a year, and I know of no easier way of saving that amount than by being free from the care and annoyance of a maid. I am surprised to find how small our total for food has been this last year." "Our house," writes a man with an income of five thousand dollars a year, "is arranged all on one floor, and all unnecessary rooms and partitions Home Administration 99 are eliminated. Our efforts are directed towards keeping down the accumulation of 'things,' so that we will not be crowded, and dusting and clean- ing will be simplified. Electric current costs us twelve cents per kw. hour, and is used rather freely, — as fuel only in the flat iron and a small heater for the dining-room table; for power, in the vacuum cleaner and washer and wringer; and for light. For light and power, we do not find the electric current expensive, but for heating it is very much so. It is not possible to figure how much we save in using electrical energy. We are content to know that there is a saving of labor, which, were we deprived of help, would not make us fare so badly." A well-to-do minister answers our question: "With reference to labor-saving appliances, the vacuum carpet cleaner cost one hundred-and- thirty-five dollars. It costs about two cents an hour for electricity. Eight cents a week will give the house of two halls and nine rooms a thorough sweeping. The electric washer and wringer is sold on the guarantee that it will do the washing for a family of six persons in one hour and a half at three cents for electricity. We bought the ma- chine on that guarantee, and find that it will do the work in the given time at the given cost. Our gas iron cost three dollars and a half, and does not consume any more gas than an ordinary lighting jet. We use about fifteen barrels of water per week in the house. The hot air pump will pump that amount of water in a hundred minutes, using loo Increasing Home Efficiency about as much gas as five or six open gas jets would consume in that time. The engine cost a hundred dollars. In five years I have spent only fifty-five cents on repairs, and that was for new leather valves. The electric heat regulator, which controls the flow of natural gas into the furnace, cost twenty-eight dollars, and is operated by dry batteries which need to be replaced every year at a cost of fifty cents for the two. You will notice that the wages of an ordinary maid, who is willing to do any kind of work about the house, would, in a year and a half, amount to more than the cost and operation of all my labor-saving appliances." In none of these families is it lack of money that has supplanted servants with labor-saving devices; these housekeepers think them better tools with which to run their homes. People write about the care and responsibility of servants as a major reason for using labor-saving appliances in their stead. Women have tacitly accepted the responsibility for the conditions under which their domestics live and work. They no longer question that it is their duty to see that their servants have proper food, a comforta- ble room, and sufficient wages. Mostly house- wives consider that their responsibilities extend beyond these things to the point of seeing that their servants have recreation, opportunities for improvement, and time to rest and see their friends. One of their great objects in substitut- ing mechanical devices for housemaids, is to relieve themselves of this pressing responsibility. Home Administration loi Have they got to consider whether the vacuum cleaner is tired or not? Whether the electric washer and wringer has a headache? If the gas iron desires a day off to visit its aunt? No! They can overwork steel and leather and wood, steam and gas and electricity with a conscience free from concern for anything but their own pocket-books. They can be light-heartedly free from moral re- sponsibility toward the thermostat that controls the furnace, — Its back never aches! But besides being satisfactory substitutes for servants, labor-saving appliances can be so re- duced In cost that people who couldn't possibly afford a servant might well afford them. As Mr. H. F. Stimson, chief engineer of the Universal Audit Company, says: "At present, the amount of physical energy known as a kilowatt hour, which can be purchased In large quantities in the form of electrical mechan- ical energy for two cents, would cost about two dollars and twenty-eight cents If purchased In the form of human physical energy at the rate of twenty cents an hour." According to this, It costs less than one per cent as much to clean house by electricity as it does by hand, — theoretically. Practically, it isn't so cheap as that, because, as one of the householders who has just been quoted says, "electric current costs us twelve cents per kw. hour," which is a wide spread between the wholesale cost and the retail selling price. It is the same with practically every commodity the home administrator uses, from beef I02 Increasing Home Efficiency to biscuits, from gas to denatured alcohol, from de- natured alcohol to electricity. Now if the highest efficiency of the home re- quires the use of electric appliances, and if the cost of them to the retail buyer puts them out of the question, what is the home administrator to do ? Decide to go without them? Never in the world did we get a good thing which we were content to go without. Isn't the Ideal manager of the ideal home going to insist on having this ideal power? But you can't raise a private crop of it in the back yard, you can't get it at wholesale and store it up for future use, you can't discover a mine of it or a place where it grows wild; you can't do any of the things by which you are prone to think you can circumvent high prices. You have to buy it of a corporation. Evidently, the housewife, in trying to make her administration efficient will run head-on into a public service corporation, — a pub- lic utility. Is it true that in order to control her kitchen, she has got to control the public service corporations ? "But aren't you galloping unnecessarily far afield?" cries a perturbed critic, who abhors the notion that women should enter practical politics and who clings with the tenacity of ancestor wor- ship to the superstition that the only proper sphere of woman is inside the walls of a house. "I admit the great value of labor-saving appliances," says this irate gentleman; "now if in addition to using these, housewives could be taught to apply the principles of scientific management to domestic Home Administration 103 processes, wouldn't the problem of wasteful house- hold drudgery be happily solved?" Unfortunately, the moment we resort to motion studies and the other practices of scientific manage- ment, the moment we attempt to apply the same principles to household operations, — cooking, wash- ing, cleaning, serving, — that are being adopted in the modern manufacturing plant, we find ourselves in the position of a man trying to run the village smithy under the spreading chestnut tree as if it were the plant of the United States Steel Corpo- ration. The very nature of the" conditions, — and their apparent inevitableness, — makes any high degree of operating efficiency impossible. In his famous experiment in loading pig iron, Mr. Taylor was careful to select men who were peculiarly fitted for the particular job in hand. He had plenty of men to select from, — he had only to pick and choose. The supply of potential pig iron han- dlers appears to be unlimited. But in the case of domestic servants, the demand is said to exceed the supply by sixty thousand. Selection is prac- tically impossible; the housewife has got to take what she can get. Besides, servants are not a stable group. By the time they have been taught efficient methods of operation, they are gone. The schools of domestic science have failed to reach wage earners in the kitchen effectively. They have only just begun to reach the housewives them- selves. And for an intelligent woman to spend years in learning to save three minutes in boiling an egg or brewing a cup of tea is a good deal like / I04 Increasing Home Efficiency installing a trip-hammer to drive the occasional tack. Moreover, the value of standardized proc- esses depends largely upon uniformity of product, — and how shall the human product of the home be standardized ? But In spite of these considerations, some value there no doubt is In experiments in scientific man- agement In the home, though there Is danger of disillusionment In a faddish exaggeration of it. Professor Charles and Mary Barnard ran a House- keeping Experiment Station at Darien, Connecti- cut, where they showed what can be done In the way of simplification and efficiency in house- hold operations without the modern helps of either gas or electricity. Among other things, they made elaborate studies In motion saving. Take for Instance the cooking of the matutinal ^gg' ... This Is their chart for the cooking of three eggs. In the first case, the eggs were boiled with the com- paratively Inefficient utensils, stove, saucepan, spoon, etc. In the second case they were coddled with the efficient fireless coddler. 1. Place the three eggs in I. With the right hand boiling water. lift the cover from the coddler. 2. Watch the clock. Af- 2. Omit. ter three minutes, 3. Take serving dish in 3. Place cover on table. left, (3 a) spoon in right hand. Home Administration 105 4. Lift one egg out of 4. water. 5. Place In serving dish. 5. 6. Place spoon on stove. 6. 7. Carry service dish to 7 breakfast room. 8. Place egg in cup before 8. Omit right person. 9. Return to stove. 9 10. Place serving dish on 10 stove. 11. Look at clock. After 11 one minute, 12. Lift second egg from 12 water with spoon, with same motions as 3, 4, 5 and 6. 13. Repeat No. 7. 13 14. Repeat No. 8. 14, With left lift kettle of hot water at same time. Lift egg rack from cod- dler with right hand. Pour a little hot water into the coddler. Omit. Omit. Omit. Omit. Rinse out coddler. Pour water in sink. 15. Repeat No. 9. 16. Repeat No. 10. 17. Look at clock. one minute, 18. Repeat 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 19. Repeat No. 8. Return coddler to table. With right hand place eggs in rack. 15. Place rack in coddler. 16. With left hand lift ket- tle. Fill coddler to three-egg mark. After 17. Omit. 18. Place kettle on stove. 19. With right hand put cover on coddler. io6 Increasing Home Efficiency 20. Return to kitchen. 20. Carry coddler to break- fast table. 21. 21. Place before mistress. 22. 22. Return to kitchen. Total motions, 27. Total motions, 15. Trips to breakfast room, 3. Trips to breakfast room, I. Time, six minutes. Time, 50 seconds. This schedule is based upon the requirements of a family of three persons, each of whom wants his eggs cooked with a different degree of hard- ness. Where the efficient coddler is used, the eggs are simply removed from it at the appropriate moment on the table. Now, there is no question that Professor and Mrs. Barnard have worked out an efficient way to cook eggs, nor is there any question that the eggs for six or nine or twelve people could be cooked as well as the eggs for three with only the additional motions of putting more eggs into and taking them out of the coddler, and with no increased equipment either material or intellectual. Mrs Mary Pattison, who has established a Housekeeping Experiment Station at Colonia, New Jersey, with all the facilities of gas and elec- tricity, tested out an electric washer and wringer with which she believes she can do the washing for twelve ordinary families in a day. Of course she does not do the washing for these twelve fam- ilies a day — seventy-two families per week — be- cause she is concerned with the small uneconomic Home Administration 107 unit of the individual home. To do the washing of these seventy-two would require no more equip- ment and only the slight added expense of more electric current to run the machine. As Professor and Mrs. Barnard say: "At the very foundation of the science of domestic admin- istration lies the conservation of human energy." From the standpoint of society as a whole, more energy can be conserved by bunching the home units into larger groups and operating them on the wholesale plan. That money should be con- served is a secondary consideration because money is of less value than human brain or muscle, but it is sufficiently worth while, and it too can more easily be conserved in the larger unit, by co- operative effort — by putting the labor-saving de- vice, the economy of motion, the planning and routing of the work, Into the hands of the willing public utility, whether privately or publicly owned. But it is quite out of the question to coddle eggs for six people when there are only three to eat them. There is no special object In doing the wash- ing for seventy-two families a week in the presence of the obvious fact that there is only the work of one family to be done. Although homes which are detached and isolated have much in common with homes in the close proximity of apartment buildings, hotels or compact city blocks, there are matters in which they cannot be brought on a common footing; but any household function that can be taken outside the four walls of the home, such as the washing and making of clothes, the io8 Increasing Home Efficiency canning and preserving of foods and a hundred other detachable functions, can be solved in the same way for both of them. In the cooperative use of such things as vacuum cleaners by a coun- try neighborhood, the isolated homes are securing the advantages of city life. But our civilization, — as far as we have got with it, — has left a good many functions that must be performed at short range, and in such things as the broiling of beefsteaks and the making of beds, the farm home and the city flat are a whole world apart. These short range problems must be solved in entirely different ways for the two conditions of living. Where the public utility cannot yet step in and become the family servant, the smaller caliber efficiency of simplified living, motion saving, and the labor- saving device, must be used. It is for these fam- ilies that housekeeping experiment stations are run and individual labor-saving devices invented. But it isn't as though each family, having its own set of light-running, labor-saving devices cor- ralled on its own premises, so to speak, had solved the problem of efficient home administration. Be- cause a thing can be done easily and well in the home is no possible reason why it should be done there. In these days of wonders, it is conceivable that a machine might be invented for the home manufacture of shoes, — paper patterns being furnished, and instructions how to feed in a little raw leather, a few buttons, and a bit of thread at one end, turn a crank and take out a pair of shoes at the other. But do we want to bring shoe-making Home Administration log back into the home on that account? No labor- saving device that made this possible would be in the direction of real efficiency. For, after all, the labor-saving device is but a temporary host for the parasitic home. Almost as soon as it has successfully supplanted the servant, it slides away and leaves us grafted upon the pub- lic utility. We've been gradually growing depend- ent upon the public utility ever since we dispensed with the individual cow and the individual pig, and put our trust in consolidated milk companies and the gentlemen's agreement of the beef combine. We don't call them public utilities, of course; we call them Petersen's Butcher Shop and Frank's Grocery Emporium. We think we are "dealing ; with our tradesmen"; but we are no more inde- | pendent of the public utilities that control them than we are of the corporation back of the tele- phone girl. It's a pretty straight road to the pub- lic utility, — the hedges on either side are too high to jump, — and we are rushing along it whenever we f send our wash to the laundry, use electric power, ; or have a caterer when we entertain. A Canadian woman writes of a firm that supplies a vacuum cleaner at a dollar a day, thus saving her the expense of the original Investment and the labor of operating her own. A woman from con- servative Maine says: "I was the first In our city to have an electric iron, but experience has taught me that the best way is to put your whole washing into the laundry to be done. Select the right laundry and manage no Increasing Home Efficiency right, and the clothes are not worn out or lost more than any other way. At the best, a washing in the house is disorganizing, no matter how it is done. I was one of the first to have an electric cleaner in my home, but I think now it is better to have a man come with one, and use it whenever you need, than to put out your own strength to use one." These housewives are by no means exceptional; their experiences show the labor-saving device, modern as it is, in the act of being absorbed into general industry like the maid-of-all-work before it. And they're only doing what the rest of us do whenever we buy a ready-made dress, or a loaf of bread, or for the matter of that, a bound book or a china dish. If for no other reason, this grafting of the home upon the public utility will go on be- cause it pays. It isn't a question of whether we individually can afford the greater expense of home production; it is the community that cannot let any of us waste money or muscle or brain. For whether we intend it or not, whether we see it or not, what one wastes, either in labor or intelligence, is taken from all the rest of us. And though each of the industries has to be packed out of the home separately, there is no manner of use in trying to derail the train that is thundering them to the eager corporation; for they have heard the call of economy and they will go. But if we are forced to let the actual industries on which the home depends become public utilities, we cannot in that way escape from personal re- sponsibility toward those who serve us. The girls Home Administration iii who make our pastry in the bake-shop, the women who wash our clothes in the laundry, the men who work sixteen hours a day at the machine when it is "rush season by ladies cloaks" on the East Side of New York, the mill operatives in France who starve when women choose to reduce the amount of cloth in their gowns by half, are all our domestic servants once removed. Take the family wash. In the days when it was all done at home, the wife had it under short-range control and accepted the responsibility of its being well done under decent conditions. The long- range modern responsibility of having it done in the outside laundry is just as binding and far harder to meet. This new responsibility is of two kinds: that toward the housewife's own family who are consumers of clean clothes and household linen; and that toward the girls who work in the laundry, the producers, the household servants once re- moved. Suppose the housewife lives in New York City, or Chicago, or San Francisco, or Boston, and sends her clothes to some clean and modest little shop with a "Hand Work Only" sign in the window, a realistic clothes-line in the rear, and a genuine shirt ironer before her eyes. It looks all right; but the chances are overwhelmingly in favor of the real washing being done by the "rough drier" whose wagon calls twice a day for the cus- tomers' bundles of soiled clothes and returns them damp and unlroned twenty-four hours later. These "rough-dry" establishments are called the "sweaters" of the trade, and those who patronize 112 * Increasing Home Efficiency them run the risk of all who use sweated goods — uncleanliness. Their particular form of unclean- liness is due to the custom of packing the unwashed clothes from different households into nets to- gether, and washing them in bulk. Where colored clothes are included, sterilizing agents cannot be applied; warm water only is used and the danger of contagion and the spread of vermin is great. Is it efficient housekeeping to allow this ? The recent laundry strike in New York City brought to light the facts that the girls work in in- tensely heated rooms, insufficiently ventilated, artificially lit and for periods reaching as high as seventy-five hours a week in defiance of the New York labor law which then * limited the hours of women's work to sixty a week; and that while a few skilled washers are paid as much as ^30.00 a week, a large proportion of the workers get as little as ^4.00, and this without the board and lodging which adds to the wages of the home laun- dress. From society's point of view, is it efficient house- keeping to allow such conditions to exist.'' The time is not past by any means when it is a personal reproach to the housewife to serve her family unwholesome bread, to let her wash be badly done, to wear shoddy clothes, to starve the people who work for her. These things are and always were a sign of inefficiency, and their char- acter isn't altered because the housewife's servants * A law limiting the hours for women to 54 a week was passed by the N. Y. Legislature in 191 2. Home Administration 113 do their work away from her immediate oversight. We can't bring the prodigal spinning-wheel home again — can we regulate the woolen mill ? It's idle to try and back out of this extended responsibility by saying that every woman ought to do the work of her own household. Suppose she could, (which she can't), and suppose she would, (which she won't), could the community afford to let her? So long as we have got labor- saving devices invented and have developed public utilities, the piece-meal work of the human hand in the home has become wasteful. And in economics, it is affably recognized, though for the most part reluctantly stated, that wasteful work is only a form of idleness, a nervous fluttering of the drone, so to speak. Professor Frank Tracy Carlton, of Albion College, puts it in this way: "When an old art is dying out in consequence of being superseded by a new art, attempts are in- variably made to complicate needlessly the proc- esses of work employed in the old art, — to make work. The efforts of the various housekeeping magazines point to the decline and decay of house- hold industry as a separate and unified form of industry. One of the important functions of these numerous journals is that of earnestly striving to dignify useless work through the introduction of various and sundry complications." We may as well face the fact cheerfully that industry in the home is doomed; that a home ad- ministration that tries to hang on to the coat-tails of home manufacture in a sentimental frenzy to 114 Increasing Home Efficiency ; deter its flight, instead of cheerfully handing out ' its hat and cane and opening the front door, is no efficient administration. All the flutteration to put handsewing, and home-baking, and preserv- i ing, and the making of Christmas mincemeat on I a plane of what might be called moral elegance is i just a bracing back against tomorrow. For right i on the face of it, a home can be inefficient in having I too much muscle and brains put into it in propor- | tion to the output, just as it can be inefficient ! through having too much money put into it. It j is possible to pay too much even for perfection. If i three women can do the work of five households i sufiiciently well, can society afford to take five \ women to do it in a world that still needs so much ' to be done — it being remembered always that the , home is not a thing to be produced regardless of ! cost or consequences, but a means to civilization? , This chapter is not trying to do anything but ; show how the wind blows. It isn't meant to be a , stone sign-post, but a well oiled weather vane. '■ And so it points directly away from the time to i which Charlotte Perkins Gilman referred when she \ said: ! "Six hours a day the woman spends on food, j Six mortal hours! | Till the slow finger of heredity writes on the forehead of each living man, Strive as he may: 'His mother was a cook!'" Home Administration 115 Not a desirable motto for the human brow to bear, and only slightly less distressing than that written all over dyspepsia-ridden frames: "His mother couldn't cook." For the horrid truth is that the majority of women cannot cook. Take Vermont, a nice, backward, domestic state, with no cities of the first-class, and therefore not es- pecially addicted to delicatessen stores or foreign restaurants. Ten and one-tenth per cent of its inhabitants die of digestive troubles! Apparently women will not stand for these six hours a day spent on food, resulting in the death of ten per cent of those fed. Whenever they can, they save themselves by handing the six hours of work over to another woman. But there aren't enough detached women to go around; and any way, hiring a servant isn't labor-saving, but labor- shifting. So housewives are catching at the mod- ern labor-saving device, even when it is not a money-saving device, as it should be. And be- cause the labor of operating labor-saving devices is in itself a thing to be saved, they are reaching out to the corporation which can distribute the cost of these new inventions among a score or a hundred households. The manufacturer of an electric motor for a sewing machine recently wrote a plaintive letter asking why women are so reluctant to buy a device that is so cunningly designed to lighten their labors. It appears that women are not anxious to make sewing easier to do; they want to get rid of it altogether, — to make it an industry and put ii6 Increasing Home EflSciency it out of the house. From all over the country they write : "We buy ready-made clothes because they are cheaper and better." This is right in line with the civic associations which in the South are buying themselves vacuum cleaners to be used by a whole township; with the cooperative laundries in the farmside villages; with the hundred other public utilities that are beginning to do our chores. There is no use getting sentimental when some favorite industry bursts out of the front gate! In Vassar College some fifteen years ago, the girls had a song in which the hero asked his be- loved : "Can you brew, can you bake, Good bread and cake?" Before my love I utter. "Can you sew a seam? Can you churn the cream? And bring the golden butter? What use is refraction, Chemical reaction, biologic protoplasm, Psychologic microcosm? "Would you be my weal. You must cook the meal, — "You shake your head,— You ril not wed, — And so. Farewell!" Home Administration 117 If that song were rewritten and brought up to date, the lover's questions would be much harder to answer, and yet they might not be so disconcert- ing. They would run something like this: "Are you up on the pure food laws affecting the manu- facture of canned soup? "Can you assure me that you know the conditions governing the sanitary production of pastry? "Can you bring enough influence to bear on public opinion so that the family clothing will not have to be made in a sweat-shop? "Do you know how to get honest government in- spectors appointed, to assure me of the purity of the milk and meat and butter you promise to serve me? "What use in your knowing Everything of sewing. All of pickling and preserving, All of washing and of serving? ** Would you be my weal, Do not cook the meal, — "You shake your head, — You I'll not wed, — And so, Farewell!" CHAPTER VII The Home and the Market MRS. FRANK WATROUS is the conserva- tive wife of a high-salaried man living in New Jersey. She is the mother of four, and not socially rebellious. But the other day she cried: "These high prices make me so angry! I can't afford to have anything but the very best for my family — it doesn't pay. Besides, I've a right to the best!" And when asked why she thought she had a right to anything she couldn't pay for, she con- tinued: "I'm not pretending to be able to pay for the best in money, but I'm paying society in four able- bodied, able-brained children, each trained to a useful profession; by keeping Frank in health and temper to do his work; and by what I'm doing on the school committee. I'm furnishing society with the best product in the way of citizens. Don't I need the best raw material to make it with ? Can I make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.^*" Ever since the Children of Israel tried to make bricks without straw, the generations of man have been struggling with that problem — especially in ii8 The Home and the Market 119 the home, where we have been handicapped by the belief that an alchemy in the atmosphere will transform second-rate material into first-rate prod- uct; transmute base metal into gold. It is cer- tainly to the advantage of society that the home should turn out the very best product; why, then, do we continue to buy poor raw materials when we have, as Mrs. Watrous insists, a right to the best? We have asked this question of some scores of men and women living widely apart on the map, and their reasons, differently stated, shake down into three: "There isn't enough of the best to go round." "We don't know the best when we see it." "The best costs so much that we can't afford it." All of them good, truthful reasons for putting up with substitutes! Now of course there have been many thousand generations — all through the time which Professor Simon Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania, describes as the Civilization of a Deficit — when some of us starved because nowhere within reach was there food enough, when some of us froze be- cause there were neither houses nor clothes enough, when we stood for lack of chairs, walked for lack of wagons, and died for lack of medicines; when there was not enough of anything — let alone the best — to go around. But we have reached the Civilization of a Surplus now, and it's only a step farther to where there will not only be enough, but enough of the best, for us all. Already storekeepers, manufacturers, builders, tell us we can have what I20 Increasing Home Efficiency we demand, but that we don't get the best because we don't demand it. Now, not for a moment must we confuse the best with the most expensive — they do not have to be the same, though often they are. "This," said a manufacturer of colored calen- dars, Christmas cards, and valentines, as he held up a scalloped square showing a green and brown castle against a cerise sky and covered with dia- mond dust to represent snow — "this is what sells. I don't make such things for my own pleasure. I make them because people want them. I'm ready to make anything they demand — it costs no more." But cards might perhaps be relegated to the realm of taste, so let's get down to food. We spent a summer in a small village where the vegetable supply ran the appetizing cycle of beets, turnips, carrots, parsnips, onions, and then "repeat" indefinitely. A neighboring hotel absorbed all the lettuce and peas and sweet corn that were raised. "Can't you grow enough salad for the rest of us?" we desperately asked a peddling farmer. "I dunno. Mebbe I might put in more green things if anybody'd buy 'em. They's room enough; mebbe I might. I dunno but what I will." We were looking through some new apartment buildings overlooking the park — large, gaudy, ex- pensive. "Why do you put in such shallow fireplaces.'^" we asked the agent. "They won't draw. And The Home and the Market 121 those ice-boxes will melt the ice almost as fast as one puts it in; and the bathroom door opens the wrong way, — and — " "Well, you see," he mterrupted hastily, ** no- body who comes to rent them knows how they ought to be." Now, if the home-maker who ought to have the best for his home doesn't know what the best is, what is going to be done? The natural answer is that he had better find out. "Let every man be his own expert!" But how would that be wiser than having every man be his own shoemaker.^ "By getting acquainted with the butcher we buy very desirable cuts of meat for from five to ten cents a pound. Any one can do the same who knows the ropes," writes a man from Massachu- setts, under the evident delusion that he has solved the problem of intelligent marketing. This is — let us say it as gently as we can — a sort of gentle graft on the community. Somebody undoubtedly pays the extra price which he is spared. It is like a political "pull," and does not help the rest of us at all. Suppose, as he suggests, that we all knew the ropes, would we all buy butcher's meat at five to ten cents? Suppose our tradesmen are stand- offish and won't get acquainted? Let us be ill fed! Suppose we ourselves are crabbed and unsociable? Let us be ill fed! Suppose we are not sharp, and can't learn the ropes? Let us be ill fed, and our anaemic children after us! 122 Increasing Home Efficiency But still the schools and the cook books and the magazines insist that each buyer shall learn to tell the quality of the thing he buys, and except in a very few of our commodities, such as serums and medicine, where not to be expert may mean sum- mary death, it is taken for granted that if the pur- chaser gets cheated it is nobody's affair but his own. Business cries, ^^ Caveat emptor^ or take the consequences!" That might be all right if we our- selves could take the consequences. Besides, our buying covers so many commodities that it is not in our individual power to be expert about them all. How can we tell all-wool goods except by the label — till afterward.^ How shall we know butter from its substitutes .f* What coloring is used in canned beans? Whether our ginghams are fast colors, or our gas and oil up to standard.^ Only through experts on whose word we can depend, only through a trustworthy guarantee. The pure food laws, the milk inspectors, the city. State, and National laboratories, are cooperative efforts to take from our individual shoulders the onus of knowing the best when we see it. Isn't it a shorter road to home efficiency to have the products guar- anteed at their source, bottled in bond, as it were, so that every home will be insured the best, than it is to produce a generation of amateur experts ? Isn't it possible that efficient marketing includes not necessarily a knowledge of quality, but ability to get an official guarantee that will protect the ig- norant buyer as well as the wise one ? Can we af- ford to have our homes put out an inferior product The Home and the Market 123 either in health, in happiness, in taste or in civic usefulness, just because the buyer of the family doesn't know good from bad? Society is the con- sumer of the products of the home. It suffers if these products are below grade. Hasn't Mrs. Watrous a right to the best, after all? There's another attribute that the best things must have besides their own inherent quality; that is, convenience. It must be possible to buy them conveniently, and they must be convenient to use. We don't usually think of this element of convenience when we consider good marketing because we do not think of our time and trouble as part of the cost of what we buy. But the effi- cient manufacturer or dealer doesn't forget it for a moment. He makes his chief profit by appealing to our convenience. He does crackers up in pack- ages and delivers them at our door at a telephone call, or on the receipt of a postal. He knows that this is far easier for us than to walk a mile, buy them out of a barrel, and escort them home in a paper bag. He makes it easier for us to buy jelly than to make it, to buy our hats than to make them, to get everything as nearly as possible in the form and place where we are going to use it. But things cost so much that way! Of course they do — in money. Says one* Western mother: "If you will consult the items of how I dressed my daughter on fifty dollars a year during her college course, you will find that I had to go bargain-hunting, leave early in the morning and be at the store when it opened. Many a time I 124 Increasing Home Efficiency came home again without having found a bargain, but everything I did buy was a bargain." Was her daughter cheaply dressed in anything but the money cost? And yet this would generally be considered as good, efficient buying. What more is there to it than to get a good thing for as little money as possible.'* Those who do not hold with this bargain-hunting view cry out that we must get rid of the middleman and keep his profits ourselves. Perhaps so. The man who grows a turnip and then eats it himself has eliminated the middleman so far as that turnip is concerned and gets his turnip at the mere cost of his own exertions. If that is a cheap price to pay, let us proceed to the extermination of the middleman. There is a movement in New York City toward efficient housekeeping, whose presi- dent is quoted as saying: "There will be an eifort on the part of house- wives to buy direct from the farmers. It will bene- fit them both. The housewives will revive the public markets. Please be sure of that." Now, these women do not mean a market that is necessarily publicly owned and operated — they mean a place set aside by the community where buyer and producer can come together. There is just one point in favor of such markets — the de- crease in money cost to the consumer. And it's no new thing to try to save money by patronizing them. Away back in the sixteenth century the Bishop of Lincoln advised his widowed kinswoman to save herself of her income by going twice in the The Home and the Market 125 year to the great public fairs to make the chief of her purchases — her wine, her wax, and her ward- robe — because she could get them at a less price than from the traveling peddlars, who were the middlemen of her day. It was good advice — in sixteenth century England, a primitive community. A few weeks ago Mrs. North, the wife of a pro- fessional man in Ontario, wrote us: "We have a large garden, for which the head of the family cares, where we raise all vegetables needed and a number of small fruits. "I believe that the explanation of the cheapness of foods here is that we have an old-fashioned market. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Satur- day farmers from miles around drive into the city to market. The market-house is reserved for dealers in butter, eggs and poultry, cream and cheese. We have splendid displays of each com- modity. The middlemen are absent altogether. My lady and my lord as well as those of humbler origin wend their way to market, and on Saturday mornings especially there are great crowds of buyers and sellers. Meat is sold in stalls around the market square, and some people buy by the quarter. In this climate It is possible to buy In large quantities if desired. Everywhere you look you will see people carrying fowls by the legs, and no one scorns to carry a market-basket." Mrs. North is taking the best way in a primitive community in Ontario which she says is "seventy miles from a trolley car." If we reduce time to terms of industrial progress, most of us look back 126 Increasing Home Eflfieiency as far to Mrs. North living in Ontario today as we do to the Bishop of Lincoln, dead four hundred years. But only in buying green vegetables, dairy products, and fruit grown in the neighborhood can Mrs. North use the public market. She cannot buy her summer dresses direct from the cotton- growers of Texas, her crackers from the wheat farms of Dakota, her shoes from the ranchmen of Arizona, or her books from either the men that gather the stuff that makes paper or from us who write. The reductio ad absurdum is easy. Of course it might be worth while reviving the public market just for the sale of provisions if the saving were great enough, but the money saving has got to be balanced against the cost in conven- ience and labor. Dubuque, Iowa, has a much talked of pubHc market. On every Saturday from three hundred to four hundred teams bring produce into the city and a space of six linear blocks is given up to the sale of it. On Saturday, September i6th, 191 1, Apples sold at 25 to 35 cents per bushel. Butter at 27>^ cents per pound. Sweetcorn at 10 cents per dozen ears. Dressed chickens at 90 cents to $1.00 a pair. Small cucumbers for pickHng at 75 to 90 cents a bushel. Eggs at 20 cents per dozen. Grapes at 2 cents per pound. New potatoes at 60 cents per bushel. Tomatoes at 35 cents per bushel. The Home and the Market 127 But the other side of this pleasing picture comes from a woman in a similar part of the country. "I should like to give you the country woman's view of the public market and the problem of sup- plying *Mrs. Watrous' with food," she writes. "I should like to relieve my mind. No doubt you have seen laudatory articles on the Des Moines Public Market and how they are slaughtering high prices. My father owns a farm about twelve miles south of Des Moines which he rents. Last summer there were some fine apples going to waste in the orchard, and our tenant thought he would sell them in the much advertised public market. He and his wife and four children worked a day, hand- picking the apples and loading them. He started for Des Moines at one o'clock in the morning so as to be there when the market opened at 6.00 a. m. He sat in the broiling sun, dickering out apples a peck at a time. Every woman who came to buy took all the time she wanted to pick out her ap- ples and beat him down in the price. When the market closed at 4:30 p. m., his load was not half sold and he had taken in but $2.30, small change. Not even a day's wages for himself and team, be- sides his night travel and the work of his wife and children! The Commission Houses would not bother with half a load of apples. He was utterly disgusted. He drove out of the city, backed his wagon down a ditch by the roadside, dumped his apples into it and drove home. You may be sure that neither he nor his neighbors will ever take anything to the market again. Whatever the 128 Increasing Home Efficiency citizens of Des Moines may think, the wide awake Iowa farmer, — the kind who plows with a six- horse team or a gas engine, — has not time to bother with it." If the time the farmer takes to sell his stuff, and the time the buyer takes to select and dicker for the goods, is of no value, then a public market may be a community economy. But in a developed society in which labor is specialized, the time of a trained truck gardener or agriculturist is too pre- cious to be taken from his job, and the time of the amateur buyer might be better spent at his pro- fession or trade. With our growing specialization of labor, time has become too precious for such primitive traffic. When people deplore the passing of this form of public market, they act as though it had gone through somebody's fault. But nobody can forci- bly amputate an industrial institution from so- ciety as though it were an arm or a leg; such in- stitutions disappear, like our ancestral gill-slits and swimming-bladders, because they have be- come useless. Nobody went out and feloniously slaughtered the unprotected public market; civil- ization simply stole away and left it to starve, as is the inhuman habit of advancement gen- erally. Of course we do still have a kind of public market even in some of our great cities, like Baltimore and Washington and New York, but they are not haunts of the producer by any means; they shelter the middleman just as truly as the great wholesale The Home and the Market 129 grocery does, and yet, even so, they are sometimes an economy — in money. "We save a good deal of money by buying our meats, fish, eggs, butter, and vegetables in Wash- ington Market" (a public market in lower Man- hattan), writes a Brooklyn gentleman. "We there get the benefit of cash purchases, but, as they do not deliver, we are obliged to carry our purchases home ourselves. I generally meet my wife after office hours for this purpose. How much we save was shown the other day when we had unexpected company to dinner. I was sent to the nearest butcher for eight lamb chops. They cost eighty- three cents. We could have bought them for half that in Washington Market." This Brooklyn gentleman and his wife must spend at least twenty cents carfare each time they go to Washington Market, probably twice that, unless they are good walkers; they must spend an hour apiece, at a minimum, and they must carry their stuff home. All these are part of the cost of their purchases. They have eliminated the cost of delivery boys, and telephones, by becoming delivery boys themselves. If the time of the delivery boy is more valuable than their own, then they are buying economically. Baltimore is trying to get rid of its public mar- ket, and Washington ought to, because they are unsanitary. The horses that bring in the produce to be sold and wait in the neighborhood to haul the profits home provide meanwhile the best breed- ing-ground for the "typhoid fly," which crawls 130^ Increasing Home EflSeiency delightedly over the food exposed for our buying; waste accumulates, and perfect cleaning is diffi- cult. It is significant that the typhoid prevalence and death rates of Baltimore and Washington have been and are exceptionally high, and that the re- cent investigations of the United States Hygienic Laboratory into the Origin and Prevalence of Typhoid Fever in the District of Columbia trace the source of typhoid not primarily to the water supply, but to food stuffs, — milk, green vege- tables and shell fish, — that are exposed to con- tamination through excessive human contact and excessive exposure to the typhoid fly. Mr. Paul C. Wilson of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research has made a special investiga- tion of the public markets of New York City. He says that five of them were abolished in 1903 by a resolution of the Board of Aldermen because the Health Department reported their condition as unsanitary, the Borough President reported that they needed large expenditures for repairs, and the Comptroller reported that they were being run at a considerable deficit. Of the six that re- main he says: "The great bulk of the business in these public markets is wholesale in character, therefore they afford only slight convenience or economic advan- tage to the consumer. While two of the six appeal to patrons who are not compelled to practice economy, the other four are devoted practically exclusively to wholesale trade in so far as they sell food stuffs at all. The consumer is prevented or The Home and the Market 131 discouraged from purchasing. A large number of stalls are rented by the large packing interests for the preparation and distribution of meat to retail butchers. Last summer the so-called poul- try trust rented five stalls in West Washington Market which it actually did not use for business purposes other than to prevent the use of that space by its competitors. The stalls were rented from the city, paid for by the poultry trust and left locked, vacant and unused." These public markets, like our public utilities generally, — gas, oil, electricity, transportation, — have been used not to the advantage of the con- sumer, but by the large business organizations against the consumer and for their own extortion- ate profit. The net annual average deficit in the city treasury for these markets in the ten years preceding 1910 was ^92,569.09. In considering the question whether markets could be established in New York where the farmers and consumers would really deal directly with each other, Mr. Wilson says : *It seems doubtful whether the farmer would willingly lose the additional time required In mak- ing sales to the consumer when he can sell his en- tire daily produce to a wholesaler. Likewise it is doubtful whether large numbers of the consumers in New York City would frequent such markets at the expense of personal inconvenience and loss of time." In view of this expert opinion, it is evident that even if we did buy cheaply at the public market, 132 Increasing Home Efficiency it would be at the cost of cleanliness and conven- ience, the things for which we pay the private dealer; that we do not get rid, either of the middle- man or the controlling trusts, but only of the delivery boy; and that we are individually profit- ing by a big deficit in the city treasury. To have the cities maintain public markets in order to bring the middlemen together for the sake of substituting our time and labor and that of the farmer for that of the delivery boy is a doubtful social economy. Rather we want the grocer and butcher in our block, so that the man of the house can leave the order on his way to work, or so that the tradesman can still further save our time by sending his boy for orders. There7 fore, small stores multiply, even though we pay an excessive price for their convenience. We pay the small grocer excessively for the excessive risk he takes, for his ignorance of the best methods of handling (because he is not always' an expert), and for the cost of his competition with the next grocer up the street. Let us show how great this excess is by compar- ing what * Mrs. North, of Ontario, spends to feed her family, with what Mr. Calvert, of Pittsburg, pays to feed his. Both Mr. North and Mr. Cal- vert are professional men. Their families do not differ materially in their ideals of comfort or pleasure or clothes. Both use vacuum cleaners and electric irons, both have dispensed with a resident maid and depend on outside help, and * See page 125. The Home and the Market 133 yet, In spite of these similarities, one family spends $900 a year for food and the other $240. This is at the rate of nearly seventy-five cents a day for an adult man in one case, and less than twenty- six cents in the other. Mrs. North raises part of her food and buys the rest at the public market, without paying big or little middleman's profits for most of it. "Anything free in Pittsburg?" writes Mr. Cal- vert. "No. It takes hard cash in every case to get what we want. Nine hundred dollars seems a lot for food, but wife Is saving. Nothing is wasted. We procure the best the market affords, but do not entertain much, and are as plain in our eating as in our dress." Now, Mr. Calvert would find it neither possible nor profitable to follow Mrs. North's example. Even if he could buy direct from the producer — which he can't — it would cost more inconvenience, time, and labor than he could afford to pay. How many million years a day would be wasted if we all went to market and brought home our purchases! Next to buying direct from the producer, the favorite road to economy seems to be to buy every- thing at wholesale — nothing in small quantities. A good many people advocate this course. They say: "Flour should be bought by the barrel and kept in a warm, dry place" (or a cool, dry place — opin- ions differ). "Buy your soap by the box and stand the bars on the shelf to harden." 134 Increasing Home Efficiency "Buy your winter supply of potatoes in the fall and store them in a cool, dark cellar." "I find it economical to buy coffee in twenty- four-pound boxes; keep it dry and warm, and grind it as needed." "By buying the muslin for underwear by the piece, I save many yards in the bolt." "Several barrels of apples should be bought in the late summer and kept in the fruit cellar till wanted." "Keep your carrots, turnips, and other winter vegetables under a light layer of earth in the cel- lar." (In New York earth even for flowers costs fifty cents a bucket, and cellars are rented by the square foot for sleeping purposes.) "Store your old pieces of carpet in the attic. When you have a quantity on hand, they may be woven into presentable rag rugs." "I have found that I save money by putting down several cases of eggs in water glass for winter use. By buying them last summer we have had eggs all winter at twenty-three cents a dozen, while other people have been paying twice that much." A cellar, an attic, cool fruit closets, warm store- rooms, barrels of apples and of flour, of sugar and potatoes, shelves full of breakfast food and soap and sheeting, boxes of coffee, crates of fruit, cases of eggs, gallons of oil — in a modern flat where would the people stay.^ What this limitation of space means to the city buyer we know from experience. We lived for a The Home and the Market 135 year on the fourth floor of a tenement in the crowded East Side of New York. Our only source of heat was a coal stove. We had to choose be- tween the laundry tub and the bathtub for a coal- bin. Necessarily we had to buy it by the sack, which, elevated to our flat by foot power, cost us eighteen dollars a ton for the same quality that the dealers were selling at six dollars and seventy- five cents. We had the wide choice between pay- ing this price and going without heat. Of course part of the trouble was that a flat with no store- room was allowed to be built. We were up against the city building laws, and there was no way of efficiently buying coal in that place without chang- ing them. But of course not everybody lives in flats. Lack of space ought not to prevent the thousands of middle-class housewives, especially in the suburbs or country, from buying at wholesale. It doesn't — they have other dragons to fight. A Stamford, Connecticut, woman, very anxious to make her housekeeping a smooth-running machine, said to us: "I've tried out this buying in quantity idea. I estimated how much breakfast food and flour and sugar and canned goods and dried fruits and winter vegetables we would need, mentally fitted them into our cellar and storeroom, took a day to go to New York and order them from a wholesale place. They came, and of course we had to pay the freight charges to Stamford, which were high. As they couldn't walk up from the depot them- 136 Increasing Home Eflficiency selves, we had to pay express charges, which were higher yet. But even after I had spent a day get- ting them stored safely away, I figured out that I had saved a good sum of money on the deal. But who shall guarantee the staying power of a beet! Things spoiled if I kept the cellar too warm, and froze if I let it get cold — you know we have real weather in Stamford! Mice appeared in the house, and the paper wrappers around cereals were just appetizers to them, and what the mice didn't spoil the mildew did. A musty taste came into the flour, and something happened to the sugar. Only the things in cans kept. By spring I had thrown away so much that what we had actually eaten had cost far more than as if we had bought it in the highest market." "Perhaps you didn't take proper care of the things?" we suggested. "Obviously!" she answered, with a magnificent scorn born of money loss. We talked with a man who once lived in a big country house with ample cellars and attics. "You used to buy your vegetables and fruits in large quantities. Did it pay?" "Well," he said, doubtfully, "it paid, because there wasn't anything else to do. The markets were some distance away, and not very good at that. But we had to go through the cellar occa- sionally and pick out the things that were rotting. There were a good many of them, and we seemed to be always eating specked apples to save them." When you buy from the retail grocer, you don't The Home and the Market 137 have to take specked apples, nor moldy cereal, nor damaged flour. You can demand and get supplies in good condition. The labor of storing things properly and the risk of deterioration are upon him. You pay him for this in profits instead of standing the risk yourself. And from the stand- point of the community, isn't it a saving of work to let him as an expert (which he should be, though he often isn't) do well what you as an ill-equipped amateur would probably do badly .^ From the facts, not the theories, which we have come at, it appears that wholesale buying by the individual home is not an economy where it can be avoided; that it is easier to let the grocery be our storeroom once removed; the butcher shop, the refrigerator of a neighborhood; the department store, our well- ordered cellar and attic combined. From every standpoint but that of money saving, it is the eificient thing to do, and most of us are doing it. Convenience calls so loudly! But in the matter of convenience, just as in the matter of quality, we run head-on into the matter of price. The best and most convenient things cost more than we can afford. How is the efficient buyer going to climb the money wall.^ We sent out a little Noah's dove of a question- naire, and it brought back (besides accounts of wholesale buying) the meat boycott, the sales- man's suggestion of something just as good as the genuine, the simple old-fashioned device of going without, and some experiments in cooperation. Why do we think of cooperation as something we 138 Increasing Home Efficiency are not already practicing? Why do we seem to regard it as the social equivalent of a bomb ? The only difference between a cooperative buying plant and an ordinary store is that in one case some man or company says: "Go to; let me establish the Great A. B. C. Emporium. I will furnish the neighborhood with supplies and repay myself with profits." And in the other case the neighborhood says: "Go to; let us establish the Great A. B. C. Emporium. We will furnish ourselves with sup- plies and pay a man wages to run it for us." From almost every State come accounts of these cooperative buying clubs. Now they deal in farm implements, now in eggs, now in dry goods and general merchandise. The little towns of Michigan and Minnesota and Kansas and Oregon are leaving provincial New York City behind. "As to cooperation," writes a Minnesota wo- man, "the farmers in the State frequently form corporations under the State laws to own stores. It takes from four to five years to make these enterprises pay, but most of them do pay eventu- ally, and the middleman's profit is cut out. I know of two cooperative stores. The farmers who own them aim to keep everything needed on a farm, not dealing in the finer kinds of dry goods, shoes, etc. They are general or department stores, and are well patronized not only by the stock- holders who own them, but by their friends and neighbors." The English cooperatives pay, and the Belgian, The Home and the Market 139 and so do many more, and for the simple reason that the middleman is made a household steward, once removed, and put on wages. He manages the cooperative at a fixed rate, which is sometimes less than the profits he was getting, sometimes more, but in either case he has the advantage of certainty. Is the cooperative buying club, then, the solu- tion of efficient marketing? In Panama they have worked out a step beyond it. In 1894 the high officials of the Panama Railroad organized a cooperative buying club, because the Panama merchants not only charged exorbitant prices, but did not carry such things as were wanted. There were twenty families in the orig- inal undertaking. It succeeded, and was bought by the United States Government ten years later with the Panama Railroad and put under the Com- missary Department. The annual report of the Canal Commission for 1907 says: "Supplies are furnished to the hotels, messes, kitchens, and employes by the Commissary De- partment, which has developed into a modern de- partment store." The report for the next year says : "Through thirteen branch stores along the line of work the Commissary supplies ice, meats, bread, pies, cakes, ice-cream, and groceries of all kinds, as well as laundry service." Mr. Albert Edwards, who has recently lived in Panama, writes: "In one respect the Commissary is not like a I40 Increasing Home EflSciency department store. It does not sell shoddy cloth nor adulterated food." No need in Panama for every woman to be her own expert! "This does not sound like good business," he continues. "Nevertheless, the price of beefsteaks has gone steadily down — and other things in pro- portion — just at the time when the cost of living has been aeroplaning most dizzily in the States." In 1910 the "Canal Record" said: "In the United States at present the average price of live cattle is higher than at any time since 1882, and the average price of hogs is higher than at any time since the Civil War. The reduction of the price of meat in the face of these high prices in the States is possible because of economies that have been effected in running the Commissary system. The reduction in the price of meat has been gradual but constant during the past year. On January 17, 1909, porterhouse steak cost twenty-nine cents a pound at the Commissary; on February first the price was reduced to twenty- seven cents; on May 30, it was selling at twenty- five cents a pound, but as soon as the new meat contract went into effect the price was reduced to twenty-two cents, and it remained at twenty-two cents till February i, 1910, when it was reduced to twenty-one cents." "Despite the hoary tradition of our political economy," says Mr. Edwards, "hardly a month passes when the 'Canal Record' does not note some new economy which has been developed — The Home and the Market 141 "some new nail driven into the coffin of middle- men's profits." This is probably the only instance where a co- operative marketing association is being run by the American Government. Some of the army officers are organizing such an association in New York State, but only as members of any other pro- fession might do it. The significant thing is that the government-operated market of Panama is giving the whole community a combination of quality, convenience, and cheapness that so far we have been unable to get in any other way. And the people of the United States are doing this be- cause they have recognized that this great social enterprise, the Panama Canal, cannot be carried through unless the best is brought within the reach of every worker — the best^ as Mrs. Watrous insists, is his right and our advantage. The function of the home marketer Is a much bigger one than just to go out and buy things. It isn't to get something better than somebody else because you know quality, to get something cheaper than somebody else because you have a pull, to buy a poorer quality than somebody else because you can make it do. What Is it, then.? Obviously, to get the best thing because nothing else will do, and to get it for the least outlay of brains and muscle and money, and to get it not only for yourself but for all the community. Not to go without, not to substitute Inferior quality for good, not to step back Into individual produc- 142 Increasing Home Efficiency tion or in any way substitute the work of the hand for the work of the brain and dollar; but through the most convenient channels to get the things we need, in order that we may give to society the best possible output in manhood and womanhood from all our homes. CHAPTER VIII A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts ON the 15th of May, 191 1, Ellis Howe, our next door neighbor, came swinging down the road from the station with a smile that looked as if the company had doubled his salary. "Well, it's out, and they've soaked 'em!" he shouted to his wife as soon as he got within ear-shot of the veranda. " Out ? What's out ? " she called back pleasantly. "Why, the oil decision, of course; the govern- ment won, the trust is dissolved, we'll get our chance yet!" Ellis Howe was much excited. We knew that there was an old feud between his family and the oil trust which had got away with his father's wells some twenty years before, and now as his voice boomed across the lawn that separated our houses, we realized that this oil decision was a personal matter with him. The Supreme Court had smitten Ellis Howe's enemy hip and thigh, and might de- liver his father's oil wells into his hand. "Isn't it great!" he cried, holding up the big black headlines for his wife to see. But Mrs. Howe met her husband's enthusiasm calmly. We knew that her father had been a 143 144 Increasing Home EflBcieney dashing speculator and had made and lost a dozen fortunes. She was used to big expectations and small returns, and didn't think them a fair ex- change for a steady salary when there was a young family to consider. Also, she had ideas of her own. "What do you think this decision will do?" she asked rather vaguely. "Do?" he repeated with surprise. "Do? Why, it'll do a whole lot! It isn't the oil trust only; it's the meat trust, and the wool trust, and the steel trust, and the lumber and sugar trusts, and the whole leechy lot of them! They'll all be busted! Trade'll be free again, we'll have competition, and prices will get down where they belong. It ought to cut the cost of living in half. Do? It'll do everything!" About a month later we ran into the Howes' for an after-dinner cup of coffee. Things had been moving fast in the world. The Sherman law, people said, was making good. Another Supreme Court decision had been handed down, the steel and sugar trusts had been under the probe of a Congressional committee, and Judge Gary had startled business with his famous suggestion for the government regulation of industrial monop- olies. Ellis Howe was sitting under an electric lamp, reading the Tobacco Decision as though it were a new novel. "This," said he, slapping the document ap- provingly, "is the greatest thing since the Emanci- pation Proclamation! It means the liberation of A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 145 the entire community from economic slavery. It means the return of prosperity. It means — " But Mrs. Howe, who had paused at her desk where our practiced and shrinking eyes discerned a pile of household bills, checked what promised to be a splendid flight of his oratorical aeroplane. "Ellis," she said, "I wish you could manage to have a date fixed when we might expect the prom- ised benefits of restored competition to flood In upon us. I have failed to observe any of them In active operation." Howe looked at his wife as one floundering after an unexpected descent. "My dear, you don't seem to understand," he said patronizingly. "The courts — " "I understand these! ^^ She flourished aloft a handful of bills. "There's no drop In the price of provisions visible to the naked eye. Kerosene flows tranquilly on at thirteen cents a gallon, the grocer's bill, the butcher's bill, and the dry-goods bill grow like Jack's bean stalk, and the milk has got elephantiasis, though I understand that the milk trust was * busted' fifteen years ago. Be- sides," she added somewhat Irrelevantly, "haven't I heard you say, time and time again, that the big modern business combinations could give us better and cheaper things than the small dealers.^ I certainly get better dress goods at the big stores than at Miss Wade's Notion Bazaar. If it's the trusts that do this, why bust them.^" Howe looked at his wife In despair. "My dear," he said, "you're a wonder! Where 146 Increasing Home Efficiency would the small business man come in if all the business worth doing were monopolized. Can't you see that it's a plain business proposition?" "Business proposition! Well, what is business for, then?" came the feminine question. "Is it just to keep the world occupied doing and undoing things as I used to keep Clara quiet stringing beads ? Or is it to get the world's larder into shape so that the children of men may have food and clothing and shelter in the easiest and most scientific way? I don't really see that it's to the advantage of any one but the small business man himself to keep him going. Why even the New York Times lifts its cherubic voice to heaven one day In praise of the * trust-busting' decisions that have * brought back competition' and saved the country, and the next day informs us that we needn't expect any reduction in prices. Now can you tell me what good it does to 'bust trusts' If we've got to spend as much to live afterward as we did before?" We found ourselves laughing. "Do you mean, Mrs. Howe," one of us asked, "that we have these 'trust-busting' campaigns to distract people just as the Romans used to have gladiatorial contests to take people's minds off the high price of bread?" "Exactly! And we can't afford such expensive amusements as that. What's the use of having these two telephone bills, for Instance?" shaking them wrathfully. "It's a lot of bother to find out which line anybody's on, and an extra check to A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 147 write! Oh, Vm not for having these combinations broken up — not at all! Why, when the street car lines in New York were all in one company, I could transfer almost anywhere and ride all over the city for five cents, but now that they've got separated into their original companies again, I have to pay several fares instead of one. You men may fight the trusts as though you thought they were orig- inal sin, but I find it very inconvenient and ex- pensive to have them busted. If it's only a ques- tion of their making too much money, why not keep them working and pay them less.'^" "Now listen to that!" laughed Ellis Howe. "You talk as if the trusts were your washwoman and you could put them on wages. Do you think they'd stand for it.^" "The New York Gas Company had to," replied his wife. "I know about that fight, because I was doing settlement work down on the East Side when it was on." And she told how the gas combine had actually charged more than the trafiic would bear; how in spite of the new meters, where they could buy gas by dropping a quarter in the slot, instead of mak- ing a five dollar deposit, the people who had to use gas for fuel because their flats were too small to have storage room for coal, simply got to the point where they neither could nor would pay a dollar a thousand feet for gas. "They made eighty-cent gas a political slogan," said she. "I used to lean out of my window on Rivington Street, and listen night after night to 148 Increasing Home EflSciency men speaking from soap boxes on the corner. Whenever they said 'eighty-cent gas,' the crowd cheered. There may have been other political issues in other parts of the city — I don't know. But down there in the Ghetto nobody seemed to care who the various candidates were, or what they promised; all they wanted was eighty-cent gas, and they would have it." Everybody knows now how the people got what they wanted. They put through a law fixing the price at eighty cents, and the Consolidated Gas Company, which was a legalized combination of six smaller companies, immediately began to fight. They claimed that they could not manufacture and sell gas at eighty cents, and that a law re- quiring them to do so was confiscatory, and there- fore unconstitutional. The case turned on the point of just what part of their capitalization was water and what was legitimate investment. In the process of squeezing out the water, the Su- preme Court disposed of eight million dollars' worth of good-will and twelve million dollars' worth of franchise. Yet after leaving in gift franchises as worth $7,781,000 — because in 1884, when the consolidation was made, watered stock was legally issued to that amount and the holders of this stock were entitled to legal protection — the United States Supreme Court found that eighty-cent gas would yield just about a six per cent return and that under the circumstances six per cent was not confiscatory. "The really important thing about that deci- A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 149 slon," one of us ventured, "isn't the fact that the people got eighty-cent gas, nor even the precedent of judicially squeezing the water out of over- capitalized corporations, but the thing on which the court didn't lay any particular stress — the establishment of the right of the people to limit the profits of public service corporations to so modest a rate as six per cent." "Just what I said," cried Mrs. Howe triumph- antly. "Pay the monopolies, put them on a basis of six per cent, or four! The New York people didn't try to 'bust' the gas company into its orig- inal companies, they didn't want a lot of little firms to furnish gas, any more than I want a lot of little stoves instead of one big furnace to heat my house. They simply reduced the wages of their servant, the gas monopoly. I say let's keep the trusts; treat them as literal servants of the people. Don't just regulate them; put them on a Maxi- mum Wage! And if that won't work, let's own them." The more we reflected upon the matter, the more Mrs. Howe's housekeeper's view of the problem appealed to us. "What is business for anyway," we found ourselves asking, "except to feed and clothe and house the human race.^ How shall the real worth of industry be judged except as it aids or hinders human conservation.^ What other standard of value can there be than human life?" To take a concrete example: What is the human significance of nine-cent-a-quart milk in New York City and the hundred and twenty per cent dividend 150 Increasing Home Efficiency recently earned by a member of the milk combine? Of course, theoretically, the milk combine is "busted," and the troubles of the city are due to the greed of the farmer and the eccentricities of the cow. Theoretically! For in November, 1909, the milk dealers of New York, obeying some mysterious common impulse, raised the price of milk from eight to nine cents a quart. New York uses two million quarts a day, so that the one cent increase footed up to about twenty thousand dollars a day for the dealers. This happened just after the autumn rains with plenty of grass in the pastures; but when the people raised a howl, the dealers put all the blame on the cow. They said that they had been compelled to raise the price because there was a shortage in the supply. The State's Attorney- General decided to have a look-in on this alleged queer conduct of our bovine working class. So he appointed Mr. John B. Coleman, as his special deputy, to call witnesses and to take testimony. As the investigation opened, the dealers with- drew their little joke about the cows, and shifted the blame to the farmers. They said that they had been compelled to raise the price because the farmers had caught the American habit of extrava- gance and were asking unreasonable prices for their milk. Later they shifted the blame again, this time to the consumer. They said that the people were demanding such high class service, and the cost of handling had consequently so increased, that A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 151 there was nothing in it for them at eight cents a quart. They had been philanthropists long enough and now they simply had to increase the price or go out of business. Familiar story! We've heard it each time we've had to go deeper into our pockets for oil, or meat, or woolen socks, or any of the other things we absolutely need to keep alive. Now check off the facts. Expert evidence showed that the average price paid by the dealers to the farmers during the year immediately preceding the raise in price was ac- tually a little under the price they had paid the year before, and that for two years the farmers had been getting on an average from three and a third to three and a half cents a quart for their milk, whereas it had actually cost them from three and a fifth to four cents to produce it. The farmers had kept on selling to the milk combine, because they had no other market. And the luxurious consumers.^ An examination of the dealers' books by a certified public account- ant showed that one company, whose total capital stock in 1909 was twenty-five million dollars, of which over fifteen millions had been issued against trade-marks, patents, and good-will (pure water the experts declared) — showed total net profits for the year of ^2,617,029.40 representing an earning of nearly twenty-eight per cent on the total invested capital, water excluded. An- other of the dealers, who said he would have to go out of business if the price continued at eight cents, 152 Increasing Home Efficiency had his company capitalized at five hundred thou- sand dollars, of which two hundred thousand dol- lars had been issued for tangible assets, three hun- dred thousand dollars representing water. This company showed net earnings for the eight months immediately preceding the raise to nine cents of ^257,923.47, which was over one hundred and twenty per cent in eight months on the original investment. When these facts came out in the newspapers, the dealers put the price back to eight cents, joy- ously proclaiming with one accord that, though the month was February, the cows of New York and vicinity had got back on their jobs and were running a flush of milk. But as soon as the public excitement died down and the investigation was over, in July, when there is usually an abundance of milk, the combine brought out the old joke about a shortage and raised the price to nine cents again, where it has remained ever since. A word of history. The New York milk com- bination was organized in 1882. It was "busted" under the New York anti-monopoly law in the year 1895, after four years of costly litigation. Like the Standard Oil and American Tobacco Companies, it reorganized so as to be in harmony with the law. Says Deputy Coleman in his report to the Attorney-General : " It is well-nigh impossi- ble for any law against combinations, no matter how stringent, to reach the 'gentlemen's agree- ment.' It is practically impossible for a prosecut- ing officer to prove such an agreement. The A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 153 evidence taken In this investigation shows that the consumer (like the farmer) is at i\e mercy of the dealers; he must buy milk at their price or go with- outy And what is true of milk is true of most other commodities, — of oil and meat, cotton and lumber and express service, to mention only a few, — as any one may learn by consulting the reports of the United States Bureau of Corporations or the findings of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Now for the human significance of this situation. That year more than sixteen thousand children less than one year of age died in New York City, at least one-half of them from preventable causes. Experts showed that one of the chief causes of this terrible waste of human life was the economic in- ability of the mothers to get enough pure milk to feed themselves and their babies properly. Surely where a combination exists that can dictate terms to the producer and the consumer, and for the sake of unreasonable profits becomes a party to the sacrifice of eight thousand lives a year, the public has an interest in that combination. Said Judge Waite of the United States Supreme Court : *' Prop- erty does become clothed with a public Interest when used In a manner to make it of public con- sequence, and affect the community at large. When one devotes his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he grants to the public an interest In that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good." The milk combine is just as much a monoply as though it were legalized by statute, and just as 154 Increasing Home Efficiency much a public service corporation as though it held a franchise to pipe milk through the streets. Suppose, now, that the people as a first step toward the control of the milk monopoly should push the price back to eight cents a quart, what possible amount of human conservation would the; saved twenty thousand dollars a day represent? Twenty thousand a day is seven million three hun- dred thousand dollars a year. The New York Milk Committee has carried on experiments that indicate that by the expenditure of only three hun- dred thousand dollars a year for doctors, nurses and pure milk, practically all of the eight thousand babies that now die preventable deaths might be saved. But suppose this done; there remain seven million dollars a year to be applied to human con- servation. This at the same per-capita rate required to save the New York babies would go far to save all of the one hundred and thirty-seven thou- sand five hundred babies that now die every year from preventable economic and social causes in the country, — a terrible commentary upon the ineffi- ciency of our American homes, this needless waste of our most valuable product! And this calculation still allows the companies their earnings of from twenty-eight to one hundred and twenty pe^^cent on their actual investments. The facts have never been brought together that would enable us to establish so intimate a con- nection between the waste of human life and the steel monopoly, the sugar monopoly, or even the meat monopoly that has been revealed between A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 155 the milk monopolies, in the various cities, and the infant death rate. But who that has followed the history of these monopolies, both in their relation to the consumer and to the wage-workers on farm or in factory can doubt that there is such a connec- tion between their arbitrary control of the funda- mental necessaries in the interest of unreasonable profits and the statement of the National Conserva- tion Commission that one-half of the three million persons who are always on the sick list in the United States are needlessly sick and that the pre- ventable deaths each year in this country foot up to the astonishing total of six hundred and thirty thousand? This is the greatest fact before the nation today — the enormous waste of human life that results from tyrannical private monopoly. For the first time in the history of the world science has given us the certainty of plenty; the development of business organization on a vast scale has enor- mously cheapened the necessary cost of production and distribution. Famine and the fear of famine, have disappeared. Yet while the coal yards are always filled with coal, the price we have to pay for coal is outrageous. The cold-storage houses are packed with meat to their doors, and scientific cattlemen keep a steady tramp of square-rumped cattle rattling up the runways of the Chicago abattoirs; but the price of meat soars beyond all reason. Last autumn a school boy in Georgia raised more than two hundred bushels of corn on an acre where it used to be said that no corn would 156 Increasing Home Efficiency- grow; but the price of a package of breakfast food remains ever the same, while the size of the pack- age diminishes. The certainty of plenty, steadi- ness of supply, the mastery of the technique of distribution so that as a race we need never again fear starvation — these are the great gifts that have come to us from the evolution of competition into monopoly. And yet one is inclined to repeat Mrs. Howe's question: "What is business for when six hundred and thirty thousand lives are wasted every year?" And when one stops to think of it, is there any- thing so very wild or impracticable in her sugges- tion of a maximum wage for corporations? We have some mighty good experience to back it. While New York was howling for eighty-cent gas, Boston adopted its "sliding scale," fixing the dividend its gas monopoly might pay. The people up there said to their trust: "We'll agree to make ninety cents the standard price of gas, and seven per cent the standard rate you may pay on your legitimate investment. But, to encourage you to do your level best, we'll allow you an increase of one per cent on your dividends for every five cents reduction in the price." In less than two years they had eighty-cent gas and a good deal more. Louis Brandeis, who had a hand in draft- ing the law, says that the officers and employes of the company now devote themselves strictly to the business of making and distributing gas, in- stead of playing the market with their securities and working the pork barrel at the State House to A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 157 get special privileges from the legislature. With the question of price settled, and dividends meas- ured by service, the trust is keeping out of politi- cal scandals. And in Cleveland they've gone Boston one bet- ter. They have a sort of sliding scale there, too, but the slide is all on the side of the people. They've arranged a scale of street car fares running from four cents cash fare, seven tickets for twenty- five cents, and one cent for a transfer, down to a straight two-cent fare. Then they have limited the earning power of the company to a flat six per cent on authorized issues of stock. Whenever the company accumulates a surplus above five hundred thousand dollars by the amount of two hundred thousand dollars, the rate of fare drops automatically one notch in the scale. They are down to a three-cent fare in Cleveland now. We dropped these facts into the discussion. "Of course," Mr. Howe came back at us, "the people have a right to establish a maximum wage, as you call it, for such corporations, because they operate on franchises that give them the right to use public property. Of course you've a right to limit their wages, or settle their rates, or make them all wear pink hair-ribbons or fleece-lined galoshes or anything the courts will allow to be reasonable. But have you given any franchise to the oil trust, or the sugar trust, or the tin-plate trust, or the rubber trust, or the beef trust, or the bread trust .^ Of course not! They're not public service corporations; they're private business, and 158 Increasing Home Efficiency you have no more right to say what profits they shall make under the Constitution than you have to tell me how I shall brush my hair. Such inter- ference would destroy initiative. That's the great difference between strictly private business and public service." Ellis Howe went up in a pinwheel splutter about competition. It was evident that he didn't really expect to rival the busted Standard Oil Company even if he did miraculously recover his ancestral wells; but he somehow seemed to have a supersti- tious feeling that anything that struck at the roots of free competition struck at the roots of the na- tional life. Mrs. Howe, on the other hand, was not inter- ested in judicial precedent, economic tradition, or legislative theory. She wanted her house run well, and her family well fed and clothed, and if the organization of Big Business could serve her better, than competition, she had no theoretic or senti- mental scruples against it. At the same time, she was equally free from theoretic scruples about the sacredness of private ownership in Business, Big or Little. She was one of those quiet, keen-witted women who have their mental eyes perpetually open, so that one is always being surprised by the things they have seen and know. She was familiar with the Wis- consin plan of physical valuation and the limitation of profits under state commission control; she had studied the Socialist arguments for public owner- ship and the abolition of profits; she was even A Housekeeper's Defense of the Trusts 159 familiar with the theories of the French and Italian Syndicalists who hold that it would be socially advantageous to intrust the industries to the workers who operate them. Indeed, she startled us by quoting a French authority to prove that the late strike of the French postal clerks had been mainly a strike for efficiency directed against the red tape and amateurish bungling of their un- trained political superiors. But she had looked into all these matters purely because she had the intelligence to see their bearing upon the everyday problems of feeding and clothing and educating her family. "You know, Ellis," she said reflectively, "your pugnacious talk about competition and * busting' the trusts makes me realize what a crime of omis- sion we women have been guilty of ever since the spinning-wheel slipped away and left us sitting here in semi-idleness. Trusts, and common car- riers and public utilities, — what are they all but our old household arts grown large ? By them our children are clothed and fed, and if our children sufl'er, it is because we housewives are not attend- ing to our jobs. The great trouble to day is that we have too much masculine pugnacity in business and too little of it in the home, too much feminin- ity in the home and too little of the women's point of view in business. We've got to strike a new balance, — put business efficiency into the home and socialize business by charging it with the spirit of equal justice that women have learned in dealing with their children. i6o Increasing Home Efficiency "I doubt whether you will hasten justice or pro- mote the common good by merely 'busting' the trusts. We need a far more scientific readjust- ment than that, — and it is largely up to us women to get it." CHAPTER IX How Shall We Learn to Keep House? DO you think people should be taught to keep house? And if so, who and how and where?" The young Chicago stock-broker looked up from his breakfast cereal in mild surprise. "All women, of course, by their mothers in the kitchen," he said. It was an inherited answer. He made it just as automatically as he digested his food — and just as inevitably. It was the companion piece to the idea that all men should be taught a trade by their fathers in the shop — only it had survived its twin by two generations. The stock-broker had still in his mind the old apprentice system of women's industry, modified by the masculine misapprehen- sion that housekeeping takes place in the kitchen. In reality there seem to be four ways to learn the business of housekeeping; at home from " mother," at school from " teacher," at college from "professor," and after marriage through university work, extension classes, correspondence schools, and the work offered by the government through the Agricultural Department. No, there is another way! One built on Original Research and Divine Inspiration! This composite method is based on the theory that housekeeping i6i i62 Increasing Home Efficiency is in the class with aeronautics, a new science In which the worker has no accumulated information to draw on, and that women, just by virtue of be- ing women, will know it any way. "I don't believe," said one of these original investigators of the science of housekeeping, "that there is any way to learn to keep house but just by doing the work. Everybody is so different, they've got to learn it their own way." And then she excused herself long enough to telephone to the plumber because the kitchen sink was stopped up with grease and she had never "originally researched" out the effect of boiling water and lye on a grease-stopped pipe. Of course, she might get to that In time, but why should she go through the whole of the race history for herself to do it.^* Even the moderate use of the needle that all housekeepers need to know is no instinctive or inherited feminine function. A Hull House club was preparing to give a Shakespearean play. From motives of economy they planned to make the costumes themselves, but when the members had all assembled with shears and needles and thread it developed that not one of the girls could so much as baste two straight edges together. Some of the boys could sew; they were working in the garment trades; but the girls were bookkeepers and clerks, and able to do the work for which they had been trained. They were part of the industrial organization, not housekeepers. Undoubtedly when they married How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 163 they would be no more inspired by cook-stove and broom than they were now by needle and thread. Obviously, that sort of ignorance does not dispose women to marriage, solve the servant problem, reduce the cost of living, or increase the birth-rate. In every other line of work, from wireless teleg- raphy to spelling, we have turned our backs on intuition and placed our faith in ordered knowl- edge, scientifically imparted. And even in house- keeping, the Original Research-Divine Inspira- tion school is falling into innocuous desuetude. The apprentice system, however, in which "mother" teaches "daughter," survives in every part of the country and in every class of society. It is sanctioned by precedent and tradition, but it is no longer in good working order. This is partly because "mother" is not always a good teacher. She neither knows her subject in the best or most modern way, nor has she the pedagogical ability to teach what she does know. A woman from Wigham, Minnesota, writes how she trained her second daughter by this old apprentice system. Her schedule of work includes turning the feather beds, hemming sheets and pil- low cases, putting up mincemeat, and various other traditional diversions. Incidentally she remarks with sorrow that her son died of typhoid and her eldest daughter went to work in a Minneapolis store. We asked about the drainage system of her town, trying to account for the typhoid, but she didn't know anything about It; and when we asked what her daughter could have found to do 164 Increasing Home Efficiency if she had staid in Wigham, she said that her hus- band was perfectly able to support his family and that she believed in girls staying at home. A mother whose mental equipment was coeval with her feather beds! Isn't it almost inevitable that if "mother" learned the methods of her own youth, they, and the equipment on which they depend, must be antiquated and out of date? That "mother" sticks to the methods of mother, — not to say grandmother — and will tend to perpetuate ways and customs merely because she is used to them? Moreover she labors under the disadvan- tage of doing her teaching without ordered lessons or systematic research. We have just been talking with the married daughter of an able housekeeper who prides her- self on the "practical" training she gives her chil- dren. "You see 1 don't know how to keep house very well," said the bride. "At home mother always / did the hard parts. She couldn't bear to see us spoil things." But even this apprentice system can be modified Into something modern and useful. In Savoy, a tiny town In central Illinois, there Is a rural school which Is fortunate enough to have Mrs. Nora B. Dunlap, President of the Department of House- hold Science of the Farmers' Institute, on Its Board of Directors. Mrs. Dunlap has succeeded in putting the apprentice system under the direc- tion of the school. For housekeeping work done at home she has Introduced weekly record cards How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 165 which include cleaning the rooms, making the beds, setting the table, washing the dishes, laundry work, sewing, mending, darning and other things a child might do at home. The instruction in the best way to do these things is not given by mother in the home, but by the trained teacher in the school, who follows her students into the home. The actual work is done at home, and school credit is given for it when the weekly record is signed by the parents. This is a new way of recognizing the educational value of housework, and of putting the apprentice system into the hands of the school teacher. Theoretically it should conserve the good points of both systems. For, after all, there is a lot to be said for the ap- prentice system in housekeeping. "My brother's wife," said a lady from Bosky- dale, Wisconsin, "well, she teaches her two daugh- ters herself right in her own kitchen. They're in the university in the winter, but in the vacation one week one of them is cook and the other cham- bermaid, and the next week they change around. The girls don't always like it very much, I guess, but they've got to do it. And of course my brother doesn't have to hire any help when they're at home." The work necessary to learning housekeeping has a money value, and with the apprentice system . scientifically conducted, you can earn while you learn if need be. Besides it is a practical training that develops manual skill through doing real things. These home-trained girls would never 1 66 Increasing Home Efficiency come to their mother and say as a girl did to one of the Chicago principals: "I cooked the dinner at home last night, Miss Lane, — and do you know I had to make seven omelettes! Why, papa ate three himself I" Her mind had not bridged the gap between the practice omelette of the school made with one egg and the omelette of domesticity made with many eggs. , Miss Mary S. Snow, head of the Domestic Science Department in the Chicago Public Schools, would like to bridge this gap by using the German system. In this system the students are taught to do their work on the basis of five people, the number in the average family; the stove they use is family size, the marketing is family marketing, the utensils are the regulation store-bought sort. A real table is set with a meal calculated to feed five people, and the service is the sort a family having no servant could command. There is just one reason why this system is not installed in the Chicago Public Schools,— it costs fifteen cents per child per day. At present the school board has only advanced to the point of spending a cent and a half per child per day for domestic science equipment. But when we remember with what travail that Board was prevailed upon to permit the nose of the Domestic Science camel under the flap of the Pub- lic Education tent, we can hardly believe that even so much of the good beast is already inside. That camel's nose was disguised as ^instruction in How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 167 cooking"; but it was trained and fed and urged forward by women with sufficient brains to see that housekeeping is a public concern, and of suffi- cient social and financial position to get what they wanted — the women of the Chicago Woman's Club. "You see," said a little lady who had been a member of the first Domestic Science Committee, "we knew, or we thought we did, that children needed to know something more than reading, writing and arithmetic, more even than German, drawing and music, something that ought to be very common indeed, but wasn't — how to keep house.^^ She picked up from an old inlaid table the blanket she was knitting for a recent grandson. "We started in with the cooking. We were will- ing (the Woman's Club, you know) to pay for everything, but we had to beg and beg and Beg before the School Board would give the children a chance." She slid out one needle and began to knit the great white stitches back onto it again. "At last they gave us the use of one bare room in one school to start with. My son here designed the cooking tables, we bought the stoves and dishes, paid for the food, hired the teacher and started in to teach." She slipped a few stitches along the ivory needles in silence. "Oh, yes, we met obstacles," she went on. "Mostly from the people in Kenwood, who were a little toppy at that time, you remember. They sent word now and again that the cooking in their homes was done by servants and they didn't care to have their 1 68 Increasing Home Efficiency daughters learn it." She pushed a little further back into the Empire chair that was part of her inheritance. "They seemed to think, — some of them, — that their social position would be en- dangered if their daughters knew how to cook." She laid her hands in her silken lap to gain em- phasis, and her black eyes had the determination of those of her pre-Revolutionary ancestor on the canvas above. "But, in spite of them," shaking a small finger, "we have got Household Economics into practically every school in Chicago!" And it is true that every girl in Chicago can now learn housekeeping in the public schools, and housekeeping as interpreted by Miss Snow covers a multitude of things. For is it not part of the work to know how to buy so as to get full value for a cent.^ Is not the canning of fruit, the hem- ming of table-cloths, the trimming of hats, as much a part of it as the baking of bread and the broiling of chops? That Domestic Science camel has got so far in that the girls learn how to select a flat or house with reference to the needs of any given family, they learn what is and is not ade- quate plumbing, something of interior decoration and furnishing, of public as well as domestic sanitation, and are even beginning to take up budget-making and the apportionment of the in- come. There is a Chicago school where the normal students practice under the supervision of the regular teachers — the practical training of experts by experts. This particular school draws its pupils How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 169 from two distinct social classes. From west of State Street, on the one hand, come the daughters of Jewish, Polish and Greek immigrants and of colored people; from Englewood and Hyde Park come the daughters of the well-to-do. Below the girls' uniform cooking aprons one sometimes sees silk stockings and custom-made pumps, some- times darned cotton stockings with dollar shoes down at the heel. These girls cooked and served a luncheon to six children of the school. The menu was: Goldenrod Eggs on Toast. Corn-bread Cakes. Milk. Cornstarch Pudding. Sugar Cookies. One of the two girls who were told to set the table was a little Russian Jewess. Her fingers were all thumbs and she didn't know what dishes the different things required. The other girl was a brisk little American, who corrected the other's mistakes. "The table looks crowded to me," said the Jew- ish girl to the American girl. "It looks all right to me," the American girl answered. "No wonder she thinks there is too much on the table," the teacher whispered. "Sophie's people practically never sit down to a meal. They are just on the edge of destitution and eat whenever and wherever they can get the food." lyo Increasing Home Efficiency For Sophie, the simple school lunch established a standard of luxury. To establish home standards is the most important work the Public School can do, and these standards can be most directly and most unconsciously established through the study of housekeeping. For instance, the girls of this school had been asked to cook a meal at home dur- ing the spring vacation and bring an account of it to the class. A little Greek girl wrote: "I made a dinner for five people 1. French fried potatoes. 2. Bread. 3. Baking-powder biscuits. 4. Cake. 5. Cocoa. 6. Custard." and then with a diiferent pencil, straggling hastily into the center of the page: iC 7. Sirloin Steak." "That means," said the teacher, pointing, "that she didn't really have the steak. I had them read their menus to the class, and when she heard that every one else had meat, she wrote that in. Her family are too poor to have much meat at any time, or sirloin steak ever." How long a step is it from surreptitiously writ- ing "sirloin steak" into a meatless dinner, to in- sisting loudly that sirloin steak or its equivalent shall be possible for all dinners .^^ There are inter- esting social suggestions in these cooking lessons! How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 171 Besides the standards of food and service, the standards of equipment are established in the public schools. These girls are not taught to use the cheap and laborious coal range, but the expen- sive and convenient gas stove. They are educated to labor saving; and Miss Snow has her eyes set on getting electric equipment into the public school kitchens. "We needs must love the highest when we see it" — even in cook-stoves, and it ought to be worth a good deal to create a demand for the best in labor-saving devices as well as in grammar. Certainly if we know what we ought to have, we have a better chance of getting it than if we don't. The syllabus of Domestic Science and Domes- tic Art which the Illinois State University has just prepared for the high schools that are to carry on this grade work of establishing standards contains such significant topics as: the fruit industry; the cost of fruits; fraudulent and harmful preserva- tives; adulteration of confectionery; the sugar industry; factors in the cost of milk; inspection of dairies and milk wagons; cost of meat and danger from stale meat poisoning; food requirements for people of different ages and occupations; exercise in planning meals for 10, 20, 30 and 40 cents a day, with special reference to economy of time, labor and fuel; relation of consumer and dealer to the pure food laws; house-planning to show conven- ience, cost, and efficiency; relation of exercise, fresh air, sleep, diet, and cleanliness to health; relation of personal hygiene to the public; impor- tance of leisure; effect of carelessness and bad 172 Increasing Home Efficiency management at home upon the community; in- fluence of the community upon the home; sanitary conditions of clothing factories; laws regulating child labor and the sweat-shops. These are only a part of the things that go into the housekeeping courses in the high schools of Illinois, — the things that are offered all the girls at public expense. How long will it be, one wonders, before that Domestic Science camel draws in the last tip of his tail; how long before the children who have learned what they ought to have in shelter, and food, and clothing, will protest because they cannot have them.^ To balance the undoubted good that the teach- ing of this larger housekeeping brings with it, there is the shadow of a minor evil. If you train all girls for a housekeeping that implies marriage as the sole channel through which to practice it, are you not dangling the wedding ring too insis- tently before their eyes? Are you not giving new life to Jane Austen's statement: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Do we want to fit all women for matrimony as if it were certain, and so make it the duty of all parents to see that their daughters are married as a preface to their life's business? But on the other hand, is it good economics to have a large number of women avoid marriage because they don't understand the business side of it? Or carry on that business badly after they How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 173 have entered marriage or inadvertently dropped into it? The absolutely undomesticated woman is difficult to fit into the sort of civilization we have worked out, for the reason that housekeeping is the back-bone of it. The solution of the problem seems to be to make housekeeping a cultural study and teach it to everybody. Why is it not as good a training for the mind as mathematics or geography or civil government? Not that it need take the place of any of these, but that it should be made a setting for them all. In the School of Education of the University of Chicago they are teaching the ele- ments of housekeeping as well as of agriculture and the manual arts, to all the students, boys and girls alike. This course aims to do exactly what Miss Snow is trying to do for the girls in the Chicago Public Schools, not to make them full-fledged, efficient housekeepers, but to give them the prin- ciples of Domestic Science. They do go out of school and into industry, they enter a trade or profession and earn money for themselves; per- haps there is a ten-year interval between the time they study Domestic Science and the time they take up their own skillets in their own matri- monially acquired four-rooms-and-a-bath; but no girl who has once made an omelette can ever be afraid of an egg. She can look any cook-stove straight in the eye. She may make mistakes, but she is apt to substitute the use of the brain for the use of the tear-ducts in emergencies. She 174 Increasing Home Efficiency has a different attitude of mind toward the whole problem of housekeeping, views marriage with more confidence and is less likely to fail in her share of it through ignorance of the duties involved. She may forget the things she learned; but she re- tains the principles, the knowledge of the point of attack. And with this underpinning scientifically im- parted to all children between the ages of eleven and fourteen, the specific training that every one needs who practices housekeeping will not be so hard to acquire. There are a good many ways and places where It may be had. At Columbia University we found housekeepers studying new methods of laundry work so that their clothes could be perfectly washed; studying scientific house-planning and dietetics and decora- tion. One woman was there learning to do per- sonally what she expects her servants to do as a first aid In solving the servant problem. "I see now how difficult It Is to make rolls," she said, "and I think I know why Mary makes them so badly. I know too just hov/ a room ought to be cleaned and what I have a right to require of my housemaids." Of course, only a small proportion of house- keepers can study In a school. Instruction must be taken to them by either correspondence schools or traveling demonstration teachers. Mr. Hatch, head of the extension work of the Agricultural Department of the University of Wisconsin, has planned a car, fitted as a model house, to be How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 175 dropped at town after town through the State, with instructors to teach the women who gather around it. There is no place where this extension work is more needed or where it receives heartier welcome than in the isolated homes in the country. Judging from the seventy-five thousand women who were reached by the demonstration cars in California, and the twenty thousand reached in Oklahoma last year, this sort of a traveling school of housekeeping should be effective. The house- keeping departments of the Farmers' Institutes are crowded, and one of the housekeeping cor- respondence schools has reached ten thousand women. Professor Martha Van Rensselaer, in charge of the Department of Home Economics in the New York State College of Agriculture, is con- ducting a most successful campaign for modern home-making among the farmers' wives of her State. In many States of the Union and in the provinces of Canada this extension work is under way. It might be better if we could adopt the method introduced by the late Dr. Seaman A. Knapp Into the Department of Agriculture, which sends teachers straight to the farms to teach boys and girls and parents how to handle their home and agricultural problems under normal conditions. But these demonstratiqn cars and correspondence courses are a good beginning. It may seem strange that we have put the graded schools ahead of the secondary schools and colleges, which have such excellent courses in home economics, in this consideration of the places where 176 Increasing Home Efficiency one may learn to keep house. The reason is that these higher schools are not primarily training housekeepers. Teachers' College, Simmons Col- lege, the Universities of Wisconsin and Illinois, teach housekeeping primarily as a profession, first for teachers of domestic science, but beyond that for twenty other professions. Professor Abby L. Marlatt, head of the Department of Home Economics in the University of Wisconsin, has given us the following list of professions, with the demand for workers in each of them and the pay the workers may expect. Public lecturers and demonstrators for clubs; commercial demonstrators for gas and food and utensil companies; newspaper writers for special women's columns; dietitians in sanitaria, hospitals, clubs and dormitories; managers of cafeterias, tea-rooms, and school lunch-rooms; sanitary in- spectors; tenement-house supervisors, directors, and rent-collectors; managers of bakeries; writers of recipe books for food manufacturing companies; experts on the utilization of food wasted in fac- tories; managers of laundries; superintendents of household aid societies; professional marketers, house-cleaners, etc.; candy, preserve, and pickle- makers; modistes and dressmakers; managers of day nurseries; managers of factories and in- stitutions; superintendents of nurses; and social workers. A list of the graduates of the Department of Household Science of the University of Illinois from 1903 to 1910 shows that less than 16 per How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 177 cent are married, less than 25 per cent are at home; all the rest are teachers or professional workers. On the surface it looks as though the college courses in housekeeping were merely for the training of teachers, but when one studies the various catalogues and alumnae reports one finds that a very large proportion of the domestic science teachers do marry later and begin prac- ticing their professions on their own families, while the students they have trained go on train- ing others in turn. One of these ex-domestic science teachers has given us her story. She had four years of special training, followed by five years of teaching, and now her seven-room servantless house and her two small daughters are no weight on her spirits. Food comes and goes on her table without anxi- ety, a vegetable garden seems automatically to produce green things, and it is as though the house cleaned itself. The work of housekeeping is well subordinated to the business of living. It is a desirable condition, based on knowledge of housekeeping — ordered knowledge gained from experts in school, and in startling contrast to the wisdom of "mother," who was equipped for the business of teaching with nothing better than tradition, devotion to her home, humility as to what she had a right to demand in the way of mechanical assistance or financial compensation, and especially with a firm and disastrous convic- tion that her own experience, however limited, was an infallible guide. There is no denying that, 178 Increasing Home Efficiency under these circumstances, "mother" did not produce a valuable science of housekeeping. But how could she, since ability to keep house is no part of the inherited maternal instinct, of marital affection, respectable conduct, a cultivated mind, moral grandeur, or any other quality supposed to be inherent in the human female ? A knowledge of housekeeping is not a matter of sex, but of science; and, since it is something that we all ought to know, men and women alike, isn't the public school, which we are all forced to attend, the proper place to learn it? We are all forced to learn the measurements of land and the principles of surveying, though few indeed of us ever own a foot of our own land. We must study longitude and time, though we are content to set our own watches by the factory whistle, not by the stars. Why should we not all learn the principles of housekeeping, on which we depend three hundred and sixty-five days in the year.^ Ought they not to be a part of our race knowledge? And, in addition to this general knowledge for us all, should we not insist on a special trade training for all who are actually engaged in house- keeping? If we are able to work out a system of public education that reaches all the children, surely we can stretch it to include that fraction of the grown-ups who are housekeepers. For we do need the two kinds of education — the general principles for us all, and the special instruction for those who practice the profession. "I think there is danger of carrying this rage How Shall We Learn to Keep House? 179 for domestic science too far," cried the dean of a woman's college. *'We let it get in the way of culture." On the contrary! The whole development of domestic science is to the one end that housekeep- ing may get out of the way of culture. We study it in order to prevent the work of housekeeping, which, however we may hate to admit it, is the basis of our civilization, from blighting the things that are the flower of our civilization. We prefer the attitude of Virginia's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Mr. Joseph D. Eggleston. "No man believes in cultural education more than I do," he writes, "or believes more in the vital necessity of continuing this cultural education in order to preserve that fine spirit and vision with- out which we perish. But I take no stock whatever in that false culture which thinks it degrading to work with the hands. It is the doing of everyday y work in a shiftless manner that is degrading and destructive of culture." CHAPTER X Training the Consumer FROM one of the universities which offers special courses in Domestic Art and House- hold Science, we got a pamphlet on The Principles of Jelly Making. It is an admirable pamphlet. It covers the subject thoroughly, and lays out a straight road to the production from a given amount of fruit of the most jelly of the best quality at the lowest cost. Besides definite direc- tions for the making of particular jellies, it gives a resume of the principles that underlie all jelly mak- ing, so that one who reads is richer in general cul- ture as well as specific information. It is a valuable pamphlet in its place, but its most serviceable place is not in the training of the housekeeper. To be of most benefit to her, it would be primarily a pam- phlet on the Principles of Jelly Eating. For the modern housekeeper is in the throes of metamor- phosis from producer to consumer, and the most im- portant function of real education is to fit her not for the state she is leaving, but for the state she is entering into. To make jelly is ceasing to be an important part of housekeeping — to eat jelly is, let us hope, the unending privilege of us all. Now, it has been taken for granted through the i8o Training the Consumer 18 1 generations that, since we all do consume things from the moment we are born until we die, con- sumption must be instinctive, no more needing to be taught than breathing. We see, dimly, that modern housekeeping has let go of production and concentrated on consumption, but we are, most of us, a little loath to admit that an education in housekeeping must be almost entirely an educa- tion in consumption. This was not true in the past, it may not be true in the coming ages, but in the present and the immediate future it is not to be questioned; for as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards said, "home economics must stand for the ideal home life of today unhampered by the traditions of the past." Time was when the woman who kept house was expected to be the high priestess of that dire goddess How-to-Save-Money, but her metamor- phosis from producer to consumer has shifted her worship to the new deity How-to-Spend. From an all-round producer the American woman has become the greatest consumer in the world. Of the ten billion dollars spent annually in the United States for home maintenance, food, shelter and clothing, fully ninety per cent is spent by women. Isn't the science of consumption, then, worthy of special emphasis in the training for home effi- ciency.^ Not many schools of Home Economics have grasped the fact that they should be per se trainers of consumers. They still tend to over-emphasize home production; but the best of them are very 1 82 Increasing Home Efficiency generally swinging toward the first and most im- portant work of training the consumer — they are beginning to establish standards. "I am conscious of a standard," writes a pupil of a correspondence school from southern Illinois. "I see it in the way I manage my household, in my expenditure, my work. I think a change in' my standards is now going on under the influence of my household studies. The change will, I sus- pect, consist largely in a shifting of emphasis, in delivering me from certain traditional ideas." The standard of this lady was the inherited housekeeping standard, the standard which our ancestors established through the long ages when they were building up the home as a factory. Take the matter of food. It is undoubtedly for the advantage of the community that every in- dividual stomach should have enough and not too much inside it. The old standard was to distend its walls by mere bulk; the new school-set standard is to furnish it some 2,000 to 3,000 food units daily. The schools have worked out this stand- ard of consumption through the study of protein and starches and fats; of calories and muscle builders and heat producers, till they have found the amount and kind of fuel the human machine needs for the various kinds of work it must do. To build these standards is a question of labora- tories and applied mathematics not within the com- mand of any middle-class home. If all of us are to have the benefit of them, they must be brought to us by the universities and the public school Training the Consumer 183 We met a Pratt Institute graduate on the Chicago train and led her gently to tell us how much of her domestic science she found useful in her housekeeping. "Well," she confessed, "when the baby is teething and the cook has left and there is com- pany to dinner, I don't think much about calories or a balanced ration, but somehow IVe got the theory so well digested that I put the right things together without thinking about it." Her food standard has become a part of her unconscious mental furniture, like the gauge by which we measure the length of our steps and the focus of our eyes. We looked over some papers on Housing written by pupils of the American School of Home Eco- nomics. Says one of the students who lives in the country: "In the matter of house sanitation, the important point is to know exactly what you have to deal with. There is no use in taking country plumbing for granted. You have got to get away not only from the traditional ideas of the man who built the house, but from your own old ideas as well." These old ideas from which she is being freed by new school-set standards taught that a coun- try house did not need an indoor bathroom, that the parlor was a jewel-casket to be opened only on rare occasions, that the children should be "bunched" several In a room, that running water on the second floor was a luxury, that the sanitary garbage disposal was optional with the individual. 184 Increasing Home Efficiency Under the influence of her new standard she has found out where every one of the pipes in her house are located, what they are for and how they attend to their job. She has worked out for herself a system of out-of-the-house drainage, a new water system, and a method of scientific ventilation. As a consumer of housing, she has put her training into practice. Now, the basis of all these standards must be the ability to recognize quality when we see it. This is so important and so difficult that the gov- ernment tries to make it unnecessary. To estab- lish standards — minimum standards to be sure — has come to be the work of sanitary inspectors, tenement-house imspectors, clean milk commis- sions, pure food and drug experts, departments of street cleaning, and a hundred more. Theoreti- cally, it would be well for the government to es- tablish standards for the consumption of all things and so save the schools from the onerous duty of inculcating them, and the pupils from the travail of assimilation. But how shall a government that can reasonably say: "Potatoes below a certain grade shall not be used for human food," regulate the number of up-to-grade potatoes a man shall eat.^ How shall a government that can and does keep printed matter below a certain grade out of the mails, say to the voracious consumer of stori- ettes: "Thus far and no further!".-^ Besides, an efficient government without effi- cient citizens is not a democracy; we don't want to revert to a benevolent autocracy or even an Training the Consumer 185 apron-string bureaucracy. The setting and main- tenance of standards is a two-handed business, — the establishment of standards by the government and the testing and use of these standards by an enHghtened citizenship. And in matters where the government has not yet established standards of quality, the initiative must come from the con- sumer. Consider the consumption of textiles, — a job we have been at ever since we progressed beyond the wearing of raw skins. But the quality of textiles is still one of the unguarded frontiers of knowledge. In fact, the general knowledge of quality in textiles is decreasing, for though the specialists have grown wiser, the consumers who used to know a good deal about cloth they themselves spun and wove, have grown more ignorant. Have we not, all of us, seen our mothers place a wet finger under the table-cloths they were buying to see if they were pure linen.'' That is a perfectly good test with hand-spun linen, but it is a dull manufacturer who can't circumvent a wet finger. We need both the training of the schools and the government guar- antee to buy cloth wisely. The University of Wisconsin is giving a course for consumers of textiles at the same time that members of its faculty are working to get through a law on the standardization of cloth. The stu- dents study wool from sheep to broadcloth; silk, from worm to ribbon, and are required to do one piece of weaving on the hand loom, not for manual skill, but to make them understand the tests of 1 86 Increasing Home EflBciency quality. They are not expected to become weavers but consumers of clothes. With this same end in view they are taught the processes of dyeing and the durability of colors, and they study especially the adulteration of fabrics. We were shown card after card of cloth sold for all wool which when tested by the students proved to be practically all cotton. But it is no longer enough that cloth should be all wool and a yard wide — that means little. These consumers must learn that even pure wool when it is short and stiff or soft and weak is a poor pur- chase; that there are qualities of cloth in which the warp and weft are so uneven in weight that the heavy threads pull the light ones and the cloth wears itself out; that there are weaves in which certain threads are so exposed that they break and leave a rough surface. All tests of "pure wool" cloth! But even this is only a small part of the study of woolen fabrics, only a preliminary to establishing the standards of quality and price for the benefit of the consumer. Into these standards enter con- ditions of cloth production in the factory, wages paid operatives, taxes paid the government, "Schedule K," freight rates, and the costs of sell- ing the finished product. This training In textiles is not limited to general principles. It applies itself to such definite things as blue serge and black broadcloth, and other standard products. These classes of consumers have determined that under existing conditions of wool production, price of Training the Consumer 187 labor and tariff, the lowest cost for blue serge, fifty-four inches wide and of efficient quality, is a dollar and a half a yard, and that the lowest cost of a similar quality of black broadcloth is nearly three dollars. Will not the trained consumer who has thoroughly assimilated these facts realize that when either blue serge or black broadcloth is offered for a less price, they are not all wool, or wool of poor quality, or damaged, or "mill ends" or remnants? Of course they recognize that both good and inferior cloths have their legitimate uses if the consumer is neither deceived as to their quality nor overcharged. There is no reason why the law should prohibit their manufacture as it may well prohibit the manufacture of adulterated foods and drugs. All the consumer needs is to be protected by an honest label. How could the world get along without "shoddy" for instance, a cloth made from odds and ends of wool fibre, usually fibre that has been used before, when the present production of new wool is not nearly equal to the demand? But the student has got to be taught that even these standards of quality are not absolute things. The perfect buttonhole may be produced at such a cost of time and labor that it is for the general advantage to use the commonplace hook and eye. It is not a question whether we can individually afford to pay in money for hand-made lingerie, but whether the community can afford the expenditure of so much eyesight and time and thought to make what is perhaps a superior product, but for which 1 88 Increasing Home Efficiency there is an approximate substitute; for are not things expensive to the community even when we make them ourselves? Besides knowing what it is for the advantage of the community and being able to recognize quality when one sees it, it is the work of the consumer to see that what the community needs is produced. Can one eat eggs, however wholesome, in a land where no hens are? We listened to one domestic science teacher who seemed to set us right between the covers of Mutual Friend, where Dickens tells how "Mrs. John Rokesmith who had never been wont to do too much as Miss Bella Wilfer was under the constant necessity of referring for advice and support to a sage volume entitled *The Com- plete British Family Housewife.' But there was a coolness on the part of the British Housewife that Mrs. J. R. found highly exasperating. She would say *take a salamander,' or casually issue the order *throw in a handful of — something entirely un- attainable. In these, the Housewife's glaring moments of unreason, Bella would shut her up and knock her on the table, apostrophizing her with the compliment, 'Oh, you are a stupid old Donkey! Where am I to get it, do you think?'" A good many instructors — far be it from us to call them what "Bella" did — entirely ignore the difficulties of getting the "salamander"! That is one place where Teachers' College in New York City is strong — it teaches the prospective consumer how to get the "salamander." Now we know that it is to the advantage of Training the Consumer 189 society that we should all have clean clothes and house linen, and we are fairly able to recognize cleanliness when we see it. But to produce this cleanliness under modern conditions is quite an- other matter. We have, thank Heaven, passed, mentally at least, beyond the stage of mother-at- the-washtub. We are passing rapidly beyond the stage of anybody at the washtub anywhere, and at Teachers' College, the consumers of clean clothes, prospective and actual, are being taught how under actual conditions clean clothes can be produced. "How people can accept clothes blued with the old liquid indigo I don't seel" exclaimed an in- structor at the college. "Why not?" we inquired, all blueing being more or less alike to us. "Why not.^ Don't you know that it makes rust spots?" And then and there she took us Into a class that was making a special study of blueings and we learned how much waste there was in block and ball blueings and that the proper thing to use was a specially prepared analine dye of the proper shade. We were shown how our Intelligent demand for clean clothes could be satisfied, how the thing we wanted could be produced. As part of this education, the girls at Teachers' College also test out washing machines and mangles. Irons, and soaps, bought In the open market, with reference to their effect on the things washed, their cost to buy and operate, and the skill, time and strength I go Increasing Home Efficiency their use Involves. The college does not, however, lay down any fiat on blueing, nor on washing ma- chines, nor on any other laundry appliance; for may not far better things be Invented In the fu- ture? It teaches the points In the production of clean clothes as it might teach the points In judging fox terriers, — not whether any specific flat Iron or small dog is good or bad. Inextricably mixed up with learning how to get produced the things one wants Is learning how to secure them after they are produced. The con- sumer must be trained to remove the obstacles between himself and the thing he needs. These obstacles are usually matters of cost — cost and its contributing causes, transportation, the exploita- tion of public utilities, the smothering of useful patents and the arbitrary limiting of useful manu- facture. From all over the country come letters full of the same things that are in the contributors' columns of the papers and magazines. "Eggs cost 60 cents a dozen, so we use rice instead." "Electric current for heating Is so expensive that we still burn coal." "I would like to send Harold to college but it costs so much that I cannot afford to." "Do not use butter in making pastry, for though the flavor Is better, the cost Is very much more." The consumer and those who advise him take prices as final things, as representing the true cost plus a fair profit, whereas In reality — Now the trained consumer knows that there is no fuel like electricity, so clean, so reliable, so Training the Consumer 191 easily controlled, but the better trained she is, the more certainly she knows that she is as much cut off from using it as though it were ambergris. Why? Because it varies in price from 10 to 19 cents a kilowatt hour. We have just called up the contract department of the Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago, and found that the net rate for family use is 10 cents, exactly the same as in New York City. But the people of the region have taxed themselves to build a drainage canal, a property now belonging to the people, which has developed 125,000 horse power, about 100,000 horse power of which is available. This, in the form of electric current at the very lowest estimate, is worth about $2,000,000 a year. Some experts reckon it to be worth ten times that. A small thing but their own, and what could it not do if turned into the kitchens of Chicago at cost.^ Does that 10 cents a kilowatt hour rate have to stand? Is it wise to teach the consumers that it is a heaven- fixed obstacle to good housekeeping? They broke down the $1.00 per 1,000 feet gas limit in New York City, the carfare rate in Cleveland, and the freight rate limits in Wisconsin. We were talking with a woman from Sun Prairie, a small Wisconsin town in the midst of a dairy district. "Oh yes, I cook with electricity," she said. "It does cost a good deal now, because you see the plant is just new and we haven't paid for it yet." "Paid for it?" 192 Increasing Home Eflficiency She looked at us for a moment in uncomprehend- ing surprise, then smiled her amusement. "Oh, it belongs to the town, you know. We pay a good price for the current now, almost as much as they do in a city; but as soon as we have paid for our plant, we shall get it at cost and then it'll be the cheapest thing we could use." This of course is on the basis of a municipally owned plant — a small one that is supposed to be more costly to run than a larger one. The University of Illinois, in a pamphlet written by Mrs. E. Davenport, has worked out the cost of equipping a single country house — one that can be sufficiently lit by thirty tungsten burners — with an electric plant of its own. The cost of buying and installing this plant is ap- proximately ^600, the cost of maintenance from $S to ^10 a year, and the cost of the electricity so produced is 5 cents a kilowatt hour. This is on a scale so small that it is theoretically very ex- pensive to run! Now of course Mrs. Davenport's plan involves electricity at a low voltage to be used for lighting only; but the country consumer who has refused to consider the kerosene lamp as final may well refuse to limit herself by the coal range either. Aren't the problems of electric light and electric heat Siamese twins ^ Certainly it is part of the consumer's job to perform an economic steeple-chase over the fences and the ditches and hedges that are between her and the things that it is for the advantage of the community that she should have, and it should be Training the Consumer 193 part of her education to practice her in economic hurdle jumping. We have been talking with Miss Snow, head of Domestic Science in the Chicago Public Schools. "If this instruction in housekeeping/' said she, "were nothing but teaching the children to cook and clean and wash and do all the other things that are done in the home, I shouldn't be very much interested in it. As I see it, Domestic Science is a training in relations. It takes up gov- ernment, and politics, and business, and health, and capital, and labor and the social setting of them all. It is really training the consumer to /zW." And to live is to consume! In the Public Schools, where the courses are comparatively elementary, the relations between life and the specific studies are not difficult to establish, but when the general principles cover themselves with a mass of detail as they do in the more elaborate courses of the universities, it takes a conscious binding together of the threads to bring them into relation in the students' minds. This is not very often done for the reason that few members of the faculties understand it themselves. "What is the object of all this Home Economics work.^" we asked the head of a department in a great State University. "You're supported by the State funds, what are you giving back to the people in return.^" She looked a little vague, and then said, bright- ening: "We've five thousand students." 194 Increasing Home Efficiency "I suppose you're taking such courses as this one in sewing, on through the commercial produc- tion of clothes, through factory legislation, and wages and hours?" "Oh, we couldn't go into that!" she cried. The detailed study in that University was good, but a course in textiles naturally gets itself a long way from the piece of cloth boiling in caustic potash to see if it is all wool or not, and a cooking course a long way from how to make muffins, and a sewing course from how to make buttonholes, and all the other courses in a Home Economic department sprangle away from the ostensible starting points. It takes not only a big under- lying idea, but a forceful personality to do the new work of correlating these things, and feeding them predigested to the consumer in training. Both the idea and the personalities they have at the University of Wisconsin. As Mr. Hatch, head of the Extension Work of the Agricultural College told us: "You eastern people who are used to endowed institutions may not understand it, but the object of this university that the people have made, is to be serviceable to the people." And Professor Abby L. Marlatt, head of the Department of Home Economics, has had the force to draw all these diverse activities into a course in what she has called "Humanics," planned to link the theories of the class-room to the reali- ties of life. We heard one lecture in this course. Its subject was "The Child in Industry — Its Effect upon State Laws and Necessary Legislation." Training the Consumer 195 It was a talk backed by government documents and state investigations, by the reports of chari- table societies, tariff schedules and the rate- regulation of railroads, and not a conclusion did it draw! Quite unemotionally it showed that there is child labor in quantity, and how much and where, according to the census; showed the cost of this in health and intelligence, quoting from government investigations in the South; on the death rate, quoting from the report of the Associa- tion for the Prevention of Infant Mortality; showed that it is absolute necessity that forces children to go to work, quoting from the Mas- sachusetts report on why children go to work; showed the wages of fathers and mothers in the woolen mills of Lawrence before the last strike, and correlated these with the claims that the high tariff on wool is to protect the standard of wages of the American working-man; and with the num- ber of children actually working in these same mills because their parents cannot support them; and all these things with the price of woolen cloth and the profit on it, — Miss Marlatt didn't have to draw conclusions. The brain of a twenty-year- old college student after it has been tabulating chemical and physical experiments in three columns, — first, the process, as laid down in the book; second, the result, as observed by the eye; third, the inference as made by the brain, — draws conclusions from such a lecture as this of Miss Mar- latt quite automatically. Miss Marlatt's students will be among the very 196 Increasing Home Efficiency few of us who have been trained in the principles of consumption beyond the narrow individual principle established by our individual digestions or complexions, our social aspirations or our mental appetites. Housekeeping, even the larger housekeeping which is not production, is but a small part of this science of consumption which can operate quite as directly upon a memorial statue at Washington as upon a can of beans — consumption is our one universal function, and through it we have power and happiness and progress, or retrogression and spiritual and bodily death. Some of us already know what we indi- vidually want to consume and how to get it, but it takes an educated social vision to see the needs of the whole race and how to satisfy them. Is there any bigger work for the universities, the colleges and the public schools than to train con- sumers to this end? CHAPTER XI The Cost of Children ANEW JERSEY farmer has made a careful estimate of the cost of raising potatoes. ^ He has considered climate and fertilizer, cost of land and cost of labor, probabilities of marketing and dangers of waste on the way, and the toll to the industrious insect, and has concluded that every bushel of potatoes costs him seventy-five cents. Potatoes are a valuable crop. An Iowa dairyman has figured that each cow costs twelve and a half cents a day above the cost of marketing her milk. Milk is a valuable crop. The cost of production has been standard- ized for practically every commodity. But no- body has worked out the cost of children, though they are the most valuable crop of all. Children, like every other product, cost three kinds of things: brains, money, and muscle. The money cost is the only one of these three that is at all easy to estimate; obviously there is a minimum below which the most competent mother, let her sew and brew and bake ever so incessantly, cannot rear a child in health. But just what the very minimum, bargain-counter cost of children is no one seems to have determined, although from 197 igS Increasing Home Efficiency every side comes the cry that people do not have children because they cost so much. Now, it will not do to put the subject aside with a Podsnappian wave of the arm; for when the irresistible tendency to increase the cost of living meets the immovable conviction that children are not only the greatest good to the individual but the most valuable gift to the State, something is bound to happen. Up in Mahanoy City, a town in the anthracite fields, where the coal-breakers stand like giant toboggan slides against the sky, and the culm piles are hand-made mountains beside the real hills — wonderful places for the adventurous young — we found very few children of the sliding-down-hill age, and remarked their absence to the driver. "Oh, the Hunks and Polacks, they ain't got many children," said he, stolidly. "Three out of every five of 'em dies. But they don't lose much," he reassured us, "they mostly insure 'em for forty dollars. They say a child costs about eight dollars a year till it's five years old, and then it can sort 'of scratch 'round for itself. When it's ten, it can go to work and help the family. So they insure 'em for forty dollars, and if they dies, they get their money back, and if they lives, they've got their kids. They don't stand to lose much either way," and he tapped his whip reflectively on the dash-board. Eight dollars a year for five years ! Says Rowntree in his study of York, England: *' Every (unskilled) laborer who has as many as The Cost of Children 199 three children must pass through a time — probably lasting about ten years — when he and his family will be underfed. ... If he has but two children, these conditions will be better to the extent of two shillings tenpence (a week); If he has but one, they will be better to the extent of five shillings ha' penny." According to this. It takes a minimum of two shillings tenpence a week to keep a child In York, or a little less than thirty-seven dollars a year. Of course these coal-miners' and unskilled laborers' children are distinctly "cheap" children. They come from families way below the efficiency line, and the only value of their budgets Is to Indicate the lowest limit of subsistence for a child — the limit below which automatic elimination takes place. No one would seriously hold that It Is for the advantage of society to rear children In such shallow economic soil. Taking so much for granted, what do children cost In homes that have the money basis at least for social efficiency.^ In the matter of children, It Is not safe to begin at the beginning, for doctors' bills on the one hand and generous friends on the other make the first cost of babies excessively difficult to determine. "Our little daughter cost us twenty dollars the first year — ten for the doctor, ten for clothes — and I wish you could see what a beauty she Is!" This from a Nebraska farm. "It cost precisely six hundred and sixty-seven dollars to provide my baby's outfit — to get him ^ 200 Increasing Home Efficiency here, to furnish him with crib, go-cart, high chair, and clothes, and to feed and care for him after he came." This from the wife of a New England business man. Between these two range other first-year middle- class budgets, with the doctor's bill and the nurse's salary well in the foreground. The possibility of the first year's cost stretching suddenly into the hundreds is a grave thing to face. Suppose you are living on twelve hundred a year, how many hundreds could you save In the year before the child comes .^ The same erratic doctors' bills In- troduce a wide margin of variation into the dan- gerous second summer. For these reasons It is convenient to begin the study of the cost of chil- dren at a period between three and five, when the irregular expenses of babyhood are over, and those of compulsory schooling have not commenced. The tendency even of the rich Is to dress children of this age simply, and the cost of food Is kept pretty well within limits by the rigid requirements of health. It is the period when the cost of the child is affected more by the Internal eflftclency of the home and the capabilities of the parents, and less by outside influences, than at any other. What, then, is the yearly cost of children between three and five.^ Mrs. Ardell, of Wisconsin, Is a capable woman and a good manager. She stretches her husband's twelve hundred a year over about as many things as twelve hundred dollars can be made to cover. She seems to get a lot of joy out of life, and doesn't The Cost of Children 201 pay heavily for it In doctor's bills. She lives in a town with a soon-to-be-reallzed ambition to be a city, and has a tiny house and a large yard, where the four-year-old Ardell can disport himself in un- watched safety. Naturally she keeps no nurse- maid nor other servant — one can't on twelve hun- dred. Sixty-seven dollars and twenty cents a year Master Ardell costs his parents in money; $43.80 for food, $10 for clothes, $10 for doctor's bills, $3.40 for Incidentals. According to his mother's schedule, he gets no store-bought toys; he does not go to kindergarten; Instead, he spends most of his waking hours out of doors while his mother keeps her attention tied to his little romper strings, dur- ing the six days at least while her husband Is In his office. She can rest from the cook-stove and broom by taking care of the baby. Professor Simon Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania, seems to have had her in mind when he said: "Whatever narrows the environment of individ- uals, or limits their activities, stops their growth and stops social progress." It Is perhaps fortunate for the community that Mrs. Ardell was fairly well educated and well read before the limiting influence of her small son fell upon her. One wonders just how Inevitable It Is that the world should close in for the parents as it opens out for the child. Take the Wards, who live in a Pennsylvania town of about the same size as the Ardells, and who have the same Income — twelve 202 Increasing Home Efficiency hundred a year. They, too, have a four-year-old son, but he costs them $95.17 a year — $28.97 more than the Ardells pay for theirs. The following is his list of expenses: Clothes: Shoes (3 pairs at $2.00) $6.00 Suits (3 at $1.75) 5.25 Overcoat 4.00 Hat 1. 00 Stockings (8 pairs at \^}4. cts.) .... i.oo Union suits (2 at 50 cts.) i.oo Body waist .25 $18.50 Food (estimated) 45-67 Help (a woman to sit with him one night a week while his parents go to their reading circle) 13.00 Insurance (to provide for his education) 18.00 $95.17 No doctor's bill stood against Mrs. Ward's son in 1911. The extra money spent on this youngster is to provide for his education and to make it possible for his parents to promote their present efficiency. The Wards have set their faces against stagnation. Mr. Ward writes of concerts and lectures they attend, of university extension schemes and co- operative buying experiments in which they are interested, and Mrs. Ward "keeps up her music.'^ The Cost of Children 203 For these advantages they sacrifice something from their clothes and something from their sav- ings, on the principle, as Mr. Ward states it, that "to save as an end in itself is vicious; the father and mother must be free to enter into the Larger Life." From the standpoint of society as well as that of the children themselves, it seems important that they should take as little as possible from the present efficiency of their parents. Unless they more than make up to society for what they sup- press in their parents, are they not a losing proposi- tion .f* And is it right to place this heavy responsi- bility upon them.'* Neither the Ardells nor the Wards celebrated the advent of their children by keying up their standard of living; they continued in the houses they occupied before the children were born, and generally went their old ways. When even a slightly improved standard is adopted, the cost of children goes up with a jump. Take the case of Mr. Merton, a New England salaried man, with an income of $1,800. He has two children, one ten, the other four years old, and with their coming he raised the entire level of his housekeeping. "In addition to their direct expenditures," he writes, "about one hundred dollars should be reckoned as additional cost of rent, for if we had not had children, we should have lived in a smaller house or else have rented enough rooms in our pres- ent one to bring the annual cost down correspond- ingly. For the same reason the children should be 204 Increasing Home Efficiency accounted as adding to the annual cost of fuel — perhaps $40. I think $20 would be below, rather than above, the amount chargeable to their ac- count annually for added expense of washing and cleaning, replacement of bedding and table linen, and wear and tear of furniture." Of this ^160, ^54 is somewhat arbitrarily charged to the account of the four-year-old daughter, mak- ing her personal costs as follows: Food ^35.00 Shelter, fuel, wear and tear 54.00 Clothes, etc 18.70 Doctor 4.00 Attendance (woman occasionally at night) 5.00 Toys 6.00 Sundries 3.00 $125.70 The cost of children not only goes up with a jump with each modification of the standard of living, but the jump speeds up at each level. A larger house means a fuller life for the mother, and a fuller life for the mother generally means a nurse- maid. Or, again, if a kindergarten is not available, or the parents prefer to have the child begin its education at home, the dancing teacher is likely to be added to the nurse-maid, and sometimes the trained kindergartner will supersede the unskilled attendant. This progression appears in the fol- lowing group of budgets: The Cost of Children 205 I. Pennsylvania Family, Annual Income $3,500. Girl four years old. Food, etc feo.15 Clothes, etc 24.25 $114.40 II. Maine Family, Annual Income $4,500. Boy four years old. Food $104.00 Clothes 60.00 Books, toys, etc 30.00 Nurse-maid 156.00 Dancing lessons 10.00 $360.00 III. New York Family. Annual Income $6,000. Boy four years old Food : Milk (certified) $74.40 Fruit 21.60 Eggs 9.00 $105.00 Clothing: Suits, etc $48.00 Shoes (made to order) 30.00 78.00 Doctor 24.00 Insurance (for college education and start in life, etc.) 300.00 Carfare to parks 6.00 Barber i.oo Incidentals 24.00 Dancing school 20.00 Trained kindergartner 624.00 $1,182.00 2o6 Increasing Home Efficiency This last budget (III) is about the upper limit of cost for a perfectly well child in -the middle class. Stripped of those items which are either un- usual or in excess of what is generally regarded as necessary — trained kindergartner, dancing school, large sum for insurance, made-to-order shoes, cer- tified milk — even this comes within two hundred dollars. From the consideration of these budgets, and many more in our possession, it seems safe to esti- mate the necessary cost of a child between the ages of three and five at about one hundred dollars a year when the mother is both housekeeper and nurse-maid or teacher. This amount will be more than doubled where a nurse-maid or governess is employed. A woman from a small New York town protests that these budgets do not present the modifica- tions that come with many children in a family. She says: "The unfortunate parents of the unfortunate only child should know that two children do not cost twice as much as one, nor three children nearly three times as much. There are so many things that must be provided for a baby and that are outgrown before they are outworn. The first long clothes are worn for so short a time that they are always ready for a second baby, and usually for a third with just a little mending. The baby carriage, crib, tub, play yard, high chair and so many of the things that make the first baby a seri- ous expense, may be handed down to little brothers The Cost of Children 207 and sisters quite indefinitely. Even in the ques- tion of food, where pennies are counted very care- fully, three children on the average eat perhaps twice what one child would of special dishes pre- pared for them, and the time and expense of fuel are little more in cooking for three or four than for one. Then if the mother teaches her own little children, surely she will consider her time better spent with three or four than with one, and when she is not teaching them, they will play content- edly by themselves where an only child would need more of his mother's attention." This is a valid criticism of these estimates, and IS met only in part by the fact that all people who do have children at all must begin with a first one to whom these estimates will apply. A New England friend makes a very different sort of an objection. She protests against the publication of such estimates as these, on the ground that "they will discourage young people from having children." She voices what seems to be a very general superstition, that it is wise to draw a pleasant veil over the cost till the offspring have actually arrived, because then the parents "will have to manage somehow" — as though each child arrived holding a certified check for Its mainte- nance In one hand and directions for its care in the other! It is strange that people — really Intelligent people sometimes — will still hang on to the medie- val Idea that ignorance is an asset. An eastern clergyman inquires: 2o8 Increasing Home EflSciency "Is it morally right to Inculcate the thought that unless a young couple can foresee as a dead certainty that they can send their sons and daugh- ters to college, they must not have children? I am inclined to think that the real reason why a couple with an income of ^1,200 is afraid to assume the responsibility of raising a family is because they want to keep pace with a family that has an income of ^2,400, and the family with ^2,400 wants to keep pace with the family with ^3,600, and so on." Now is one more likely to forego a thing because its money cost can be calculated? An abstractor of titles from a western city gets really quite stirred up over this whole question of the cost of children. "Going thus into a cold systematic calculation of the financial cost of children," he writes, "brings In a line of argument indicating a reduction of the number of children In a family so that their elders may have more time and money for social dissipa- tion, or so that the fewer children may have more money for long drawn out education. 'Education' so-called, meaning long continued schooling, Is a great American Moloch to which the children are sacrificed. My wife and I have six children, and during all our married life have attended strictly to business, she In the home and I In my office. Like ourselves, we have had none of our children go beyond the equivalent of a high school course, some of them not quite that. We have come to realize that the American people have too much The Cost of Children 209 confounded schooling with education, until educa- tion has indirectly come to be so grievous a finan- cial load to parents that with the unsatisfactory results achieved, makes the raising of children seem not worth while. There has arisen an ex- cessive and false notion of the duty of parents to the children, instead of the older idea of the duty of the children to the parents. The parents are expected to do too much for the children and they become a financial mill-stone around the parents' necks. But we are firm in our belief that any writ- ing or talking about the cost of them, no matter how well-intentioned, has the strongest possible effect in discouraging the raising of them. Those who really love the babes should taboo all reference to cost." It does not occur to this irritated gentleman that the only way to reduce the cost of children so that they can be produced without financial hindrance is to understand what the cost is at present, and how it can be cut or more easily met. There is abundance of evidence to show that the number of children in middle-class families is de- creasing. Among seventy-six families whose com- plete budgets we have, they average less than two. Hasn't modern society got over the idea that it can destroy its enemies by pulling faces at them and calling them names .^ Would it conduce to the happiness of a child to know itself an inadvertent obstacle between its parents and their unrealized ambitions? Rather than Ignore the facts, might it not be well to con- 2IO Increasing Home Efficiency sider why, since a child is the most valuable gift a person can make to the community, the tax upon parents is so high as compared with their resources ? What, for example, is the trouble back of such plaints as these we have received? "My life has been dwarfed in raising my family." "Our children have their higher efficiency cur- tailed in order that they may keep alive." "Father and his ambition had to be side- tracked to educate us children, so our home must be classed as a non-paying one." "No teacher in this part of the country can care for his children and have any money to spend in keeping himself mentally efficient." "My wife is a wonderful manager, but no amount of management will make the salary my congregation pay me large enough to bring up two children on." "My children say to me, 'Why, papa, can we not go on with our education.^' And the only answer an indulgent father can make is to say frankly, * Children, the family grew faster than papa's income, and now I must ask you to help through." All these good people seem to be surprised and hurt. Are not children like flowers, growing of God's good grace .^ Well, if we had the statistics in black and white, it is probable that we should find some cash outlay necessary to raise dan- delions; and it wouldn't make them any less wel- come in the springtime, either! The Cost of Children 211 Now, such plaints do not appear to be based on the "fixed costs" of children, although an analysis of many budgets shows that these increase from $100 for a child between three and five, to ^128 when the child is seven years old, ^180 when it is between ten and twelve, and $212 when it is be- tween fourteen and sixteen. They are based on the uncertain costs of middle-class standards, on the varying demands for health, and education, and a start in life. Undoubtedly some of this uncertainty is due to the survival of the ancestral idea that our homes are isolated units and that their efficiency is to be measured not by the value of their social output, but by the number of steps above "father" the children are enabled to start. This cost cannot possibly be laid to the parents' wish to keep pace with the family ahead, but is chargeable to un- sloughed ancestral ideals. Is it not strange that American middle-class homes will allow themselves to be crippled finan- cially by the need of sending their children to private schools and to save money for their college courses.^ Is not the right to free education and its social advantage, accepted by us all.^ We have letters from one family with an income of only $2,400 a year, showing how it is trying in vain to stagger along under the burden of a son in college and two daughters in a private school. This family is by no means exceptional; and yet few parents even dream of whispering into the public ear that it is the business of the State to provide 212 Increasing Home Efficiency free such education as their children ought to have — an incontrovertible example of home incom- petence. But there are homes which are highly efficient in getting from the community the sort of school- ing for their children that is money in their pockets. Mrs. Wyman, a little woman living in Foxbrooke, one of those New York suburbs to which the "stock and bond" people are prone to remove while their children are small, has written it into her creed that she must get Reduced Rates on the Arts and Sciences. "I'm not looking for any bargain-counter educa- tion for my children," explained she, severely, "nor for any of the machine methods of instruc- tion still to be found in the rural districts. I don't want them to get down to the level of bare intellectual subsistence. I want them to learn amply, to be intellectually rich. They've a right to it." "See here, Mrs. Wyman," protested a neighbor, "you're using the wrong word. When you say they've a right to it, you imply that it's somebody's duty to give it to them." "Well, isn't it.?" "Why, not if you can't pay for it." "But I'm paying for so much more than I'm getting already 1" "How do you mean.?" "Why, I stand ready to furnish a hydraulic engineer in Arthur, Jr.; a trained housewife in Anne; and so far as the symptoms go, an aviator The Cost of Children 213 in William. Now, society needs all these things. It's got to have them, and yet it isn't willing to do even what the big corporations do — help me to fit them for their jobs. I won't stand it to have society parasite on me like thatl" "How are you going to prevent it?" we asked. "I'm doing it already, and in its blind way society is beginning to let go. Oh, the way I've got myself disliked makes me feel quite prom- inent and successful!" And she laughed as only a much-loved woman can. But it was true that Mrs. Wyman was making enemies. It is inevitable that an unfit form of life should dislike the higher form which eliminates it. She had become a scourge to the old order, and they knew it. Mr. McCann, brother of the Fox- brooke contracting carpenter, had treated us to the countryside gossip about her. "Oh, she's a terrible woman — a terrible woman! Went talkin' 'round that our school wa'n't good enough for her children! I guess if it was good enough fer my children it was good enough for her'n. An' then she got the county sup'rintendent to say we'd gotta hev a new schoolhouse. Yes'm, thet's what she done! An' seein' we'd gotta hev it, my brother Jake, he wrote up there that we didn't want none o' them stylish buildin's — only just a plain schoolhouse. An' he sent in the plans like he alius done fer town buildin's. An' if them city fellers at Trenton didn't up an' send 'em back to Jake again, sayin' they wa'n't right! Well s'm, you can bet Jake wouldn't stan' fer that. An' 214 Increasing Home Efficiency him a-backin' out, there wa'n't nothin' but to use them plans they sent down from Trenton. An' not a soul in this hull town got a thing out o' it! "An' it was just 'cause that woman thought our schools wa'n't good enough fer her chil- dren. I don't see nuthin' about her children that's better'n any other people's children. Why couldn't she send her children over to Mis' Dacy's school at Esterly like the other high-toned people done.?" Mrs. Wyman laughed when we told her. "I don't believe in sending young children away to school," said she. "And besides, I can't afford it. If I took the price of private schools out of Arthur's salary, I'd have to make the children go without something they ought to have. Anyway, the community wants educated men. Theo- retically the public schools are provided for the purpose of producing them. All the finances of the State are there to pay for the best education to be had, so why should I pay for it out of our Httle ^3,cxx) a year? I didn't believe in it, so I just got five other women to h^lp riie, and we found that the State would give us practically as much of the things we insisted on having as they had in stock. It didn't have everything, so we compromised on a teacher of singing and a course in Applied Art and they threw in German of their own accord. Do you notice that since the schools are better, not so many people send their children to Esterly.?" The "stock and bond" people had been used The Cost of Children 215 to treat Foxbrooke like a great nursery. They came there with their babies to get them out of the New York streets and to avoid paying New York rents, and filled the place with perambula- tors. It resounded with infant voices. A private kindergarten was established on the hill, to which processions of trim little boys in Russian blouses and girls in mushroom hats were led every morn- ing. But until Mrs. Wyman took hold of the public school question, there was no good instruc- tion beyond the kindergarten, and the same sense of parental responsibility which drove people to Foxbrooke with their babies, drove them away when their children came of school age. Mrs. Wyman has not only helped to make Fox- brooke something more than a brief episode in people's lives; she has saved money for every parent in the town as well as for herself. To her own income she has practically added the $150 a year which the tuition for Anne in Miss Dacy's Collegiate Preparatory Department would have cost; ^40 a year for William's tuition in the Primary; $150 a year for Junior in the Techno- logical Institute in the city; thirty cents a day for carfare for the three, and whatever the special teachers in music and art would have cost over and above the tuition. A very perceptible addition to Arthur's salary! Mrs. Wyman's achievements in the matter of schools are only unique in that it is unusual for one little middle-class woman to buck the com- munity single-handed, for that was what she has 2i6 Increasing Home Efficiency done. In New York, when the people wanted their children to learn stenography and dress- making and cooking, these things marched right into the curriculum of the public schools. And in Chicago, they've got carpenter work and plumb- ing, and one school, at least, goes in enough for real advancement to buy pictures for its school- rooms, at the American Artists' Exhibition and the Water Color Show and to offer courses in illustrating and embroidery. It may sometimes be a little hard to lash a school board into the vanguard where it naturally belongs, but if you can do things like that in Chicago, it seems prob- able that if you want any simple little thing like technical training or agriculture put in anywhere else, you can get it. There is another woman who is reducing the cost of her children's education at the same time that she is improving its quality through the same means as Mrs. Wyman but under the very different circumstances of life on a Nebraska farm. She is an authority on education, having been a suc- cessful teacher, and she knows exactly what she wants; the best features of the city schools, adapted to country life, plus all the special instruction that country children ought to have — about five hundred dollars' worth of education per year per child, and she wants it for nothing! The country schools in her neighborhood were poor and grow- ing worse; she can't afford to send her children away to school, and even if she could, what joy to a parent is an absentee child? It does not look The Cost of Children 217 like an easy proposition, but she is solving it; she is bringing the mountain to Mohammed; she is making over the rural public school. She has begun by getting herself made secretary to the school board, the only position open to a woman, where she has a voice in appointing the teacher and arranging the curriculum, and she personally selects the new books to be bought for the school library. She admits that the school is still far from what she thinks it ought to be. "But it's coming on," she insists. "And just you wait till Fm through with it!" When this spirit of determined progress enters the rural districts, it is astonishing what it can accomplish. During recent years the State of Virginia has been distinguishing itself for the energy and brains it has been putting into the development of its rural schools. It is a favorite saying of Mr. Joseph D. Eggleston, Virginia's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, that "a man should not be educated to live on his own visions and another man's head. Our schools should educate our boys and girls so that they may have both visions and provisions." This spirit is trying to permeate the schools of Virginia. An enterprising young principal in the south- eastern section of the State has estimated the amounts that an adequate system of rural schools has saved the families In one district where in the absence of efficient public schools, the parents formerly sent their children to private academies. Here are his figures: 2i8 Increasing Home Efficiency Mr. L. A. 2 girls 6 years $ 1,500.00 Mr. R. M. I girl 4 " 1,000.00 Mr. G. J. I boy 3 " 750.00 Mr. G. A. I boy 4 " 1,000.00 Mr. E. W. 2 boys 4 " 1,000.00 Mr. E. J. 2 boys i year 250.00 Mr. L. F. 2 boys 3 years 750.00 Mr. B. L. 2 boys 2 " 500.00 Mr. O. I boy 4 " 1,000.00 Mr. S. I boy 3 " 750.00 Rev. Mr. D. 2 girls 2 " (at ^200) 400.00 Rev. Mr. N. i boy 2 " (at $200) 400.00 Mr. V. I boy i year 250.00 Mr. J. E. I girl I " 250.00 Mr. F. B. I girl 3 years 750.00 Mr. H. f 2 girls 1 1 b( boy 2 " (at $250) 1,500.00 Total savings in 4 years ^12,050.00 "These figures seem high," he explains, "but in every instance I have taken the financial stand- ing of the people and their method of educating their children into consideration. I mean that these men have older children whom they have educated in secondary private boarding schools at a cost of not less than ^250 per year. These children educated at the public rural high school receive more thorough and more efficient training than they formerly received In the academies and seminaries. And besides the saving of this ^12,050 to these sixteen parents, there have been 69 other pupils In the past four years who owing X The Cost of Children 219 to the financial condition of their parents would probably not have been given any secondary edu- cation at all except for the success of our rural school campaign." What these Virginians did in the matter of their high schools is not only good public morals, but good private ethics as well. Was it right to support a few worthy middlemen as private school teachers at the cost of the education of these sixty-nine? Was it right to spend that $12,050, when it could be used in other ways more efficiently.^ Wasn't it just as extravagant as buying February strawberries? This point of view toward the cost of children is so reasonable on the face of it that one is sur- prised to find oneself regarding these instances as exceptional. It is not, perhaps, so strange that middle-class people take no means to free themselves froin the increasing menace of the doctor's bill. Among more than a hundred letters, only one makes any suggestion to diminish the increasing cost of health. This is from a New York physician, who believes that we should have free health as we have, theo- retically, free education. "The community should demand that the best talent be in charge of free hospitals and clinics," he writes, " that they should devote all their time to their respective fields of service, and be so re- munerated as to make public health service not only an object of wage-earning, but also an incen- tive for greater professional skill." 220 Increasing Home Efficiency This suggestion is likely to offend middle-class susceptibilities. Free hospitals and free clinics are for the poor, and shall middle-class men and women or middle-class children be tarred with the brush of pauperism? Precisely the same foolish, undemocratic argument that stood for genera- tions against the progress of the public school! It is strange how we cherish ancestral ideals even at the expense of public health and private well- being. We used to think that the way to get pure water was for every one to keep his own well, — like the kings and the feudal lords our fathers got rid of. The collection of garbage and sewage disposal was once regarded as every man's in- alienable right. But even our millionaires today condescend to use the public highways and sewers and water supplies. And if they didn't we would compel them to, because our knowledge of con- tagious diseases has made us understand that sanitation is not a private affair. When we or our children catch measles or scarlet fever or small-pox, society steps in, quarantines us, dis- infects our homes and declares that we shall not be a common nuisance. Only the ancestral tradi- tion that says that a man may do with his body as he once could with his children, — what he has a mind to, still makes it illegal for the public doctors to cure our diseases even when they lock us up and placard our front doors. Except in the case of the Poor! In the case of the working-class poor, we have begun to see that health has an economic value, and we who employ The Cost of Children 221 workmen and workmen's wives and their children are beginning to object to the waste of good labor power. Take the mining and manufacturing State of Pennsylvania, for example. The law creating the present State Department dates from 1905, and followed the stamping out of a State-wide epidemic of small-pox by certain members of the existing staff. To apply to all communicable diseases the technique which had won public con- fidence in the fight against small-pox was, accord- ingly, the department's first obligation. Among the well-to-do, who could afford competent phy- sicians and commercial anti-toxin, diphtheria had lost its old terror; through the work of the German scientist Behring, its cure had long since been established. But in the State at large, the case mortality before 1905 fluctuated between forty- five and fifty per cent, i. e., from forty to fifty among each hundred who contracted diphtheria died. Obviously, diphtheria was essentially a problem of poverty, and it was to the poor that the department turned. Pennsylvania was not without able private physicians, neither was it entirely lacking in effi- cient local health boards. But the swift, pell- mell, anarchistic exploitation of its rich mineral resources had bred the mental attitude of the mining camp that stakes life lightly on the chance of quick wealth. There was abundant evidence that the death rate from diphtheria was high; but how widely the disease was distributed, precisely where the centers of infection were, no one had 222 Increasing Home Efficiency bothered to find out. The community had not awakened to the importance of such knowledge. The law of 1905 not only requires the reporting of all cases of diphthera (as of other communicable diseases) by the attending physician, but equips the department with adequate police power for its enforcement. The moment a case is reported, the department sees to the establishment of quar- antine either through the local authorities or, in their absence, directly. If the patient can afford competent medical care, well and good; if not, the department supplies the treatment. It supplies anti-toxin from its own laboratories, supplies it through its own physicians, and takes full re- sponsibility for the result. In the Division of Medical Inspection through which this curative work is done, there are sixty-six medical inspec- tors; one hundred and five deputy medical in- spectors, who have power to take charge of all suspicious cases that appear in railroad stations or on trains; six hundred and seventy local health- officers distributed throughout the State; and, since January i, 191 2, one thousand inspectors to safeguard the schools. To facilitate and give additional accuracy to the work of this division, the department operates laboratories in Philadelphia for special microscopic investigations and for the manufacture of biological products. From these laboratories diphtheria anti-toxin Is distributed to the poor through six hundred and fifty-six sta- tions located at strategic points in the State. If this method is good for the poor, why is it The Cost of Children 223 not good for all of us? Is It better that we should choose our doctors by the color of their hair or the automobiles they drive, or take our chances with clever advertising quacks and patent medi- cines ? Literally thousands of middle-class children are victims of this middle-class folly each year. But, here and there tradition is beginning to give way. Only yesterday. Society discovered the relation between unenlightened motherhood and our huge Infant mortality. "Can the Nation afford to lose three hundred thousand potential citizens a year?" Society began to ask. "Certainly not" came the answer: "And since it is the poor who cannot pay for skilled physlcans and nurses, let us provide them with charity schools." And these free schools are proving themselves so highly efficient that mothers of all classes are turning to them. One day we happened in upon one of these mothers' schools in upper Manhattan, and found a roomful of neatly dressed women of all degrees of modest prosperity, some with babies In their arms, some expecting babies. Our companion was a young college-bred woman who had recently had a child of her own. She had been attended by a physician of large reputation, assisted by a corps of expensive trained nurses. Everything had been done for her, except that she had re- ceived practically no special Instruction: it had only been expected of her that she would do as she was told. But her child almost died of im- 224 Increasing Home Efficiency proper feeding during Its first year, and she herself" had suffered from the breakdown of her feet, due to too much ill-advised walking. It was extremely interesting to watch her as the school doctor in- structed these student mothers in the science of motherhood. They were receiving a preparation for their most important work in the world which she with her college training and her expensive specialist and her trained nurse and her untutored maternal instinct had entirely missed. And what is true of diphtheria and the problem of infancy is true of the entire problem of health as it is of the entire problem of education — it is to the advantage of society that we should be strong and well as much as it is that we should be educated for life. Free health will do as much to reduce the unnecessary cost of children as free education. In New York a movement is on foot that will eventually establish the school for mothers as a respectable institution. The very same thing is happening in this evolution of schools for mothers that happened in the rise of our public schools. A hundred years ago people discovered the connection between literacy on the one hand and crime and pauperism on the other. "Do we want to have children brought into the world, only to have them become burdens upon the community.^" Society began to ask. "Certainly notl" came the answer. "And since it is the poor who cannot afford tutors or private academies, we must provide them with charity schools." The Cost of Children 225 In 1805, for example, the Free School Society was founded in New York to teach the poor their letters. Soon all classes in the community saw that the school instruction given to the poor was infinitely better and more democratic than most other people could get for money. Then The Free School ceased to be the pauper school; it was taken over by the State, and members of all classes sent their children to it gladly. These three — health, education, and a start in life — are the great unknown quantities in the money cost of children that imperil the middle- class standards of living. But what of those other costs — costs of brain and muscle — that also imperil the middle-class ideals.^ A college professor has got this muscle cost down to a time measure. "The amount of my wife's time," he says, *' taken daily because of the children — including the time spent in dressmaking for them, washing, ironing, etc. — averages between three and four hours. Probably an hour of my time is taken, in addition. The necessity of being at home to at- tend to the children obliges my wife to forego many pleasant social activities, and to curtail greatly the time she might otherwise devote to benevolence or public objects." He, however, has a yard in which his children can safely play with- out supervision. In the city there would be four or five hours in addition spent with the child in the street. Now why should it shock any one to find out 226 Increasing Home Efficiency how much time and strength a woman spends on her child and how much she loses in other oppor- tunities of usefulness to do it? But they do object — oh vigorously! "It seems such a foolishly short-sighted idea, such a sign of diminished spiritual powers," pro- tests a mother from New York State, "to count up the hours spent in caring for children and the pleasant social activities foregone because one's continual presence Is needed at home. Would the time, if not used In the care of children, and the pleasant social activities If enjoyed, have yielded a more valuable contribution to social progress than the children? I doubt It." This mother seems to take it for granted that without the mother's "continual presence" the children will not contribute to social progress, and that the social activities of the mother are of no value. Here's a letter from a Pennsylvania woman who agrees with her: "There are at least two things I must ever re- serve for myself If I would be a good mother and home maker — one, the personal care of my chil- dren, the other, the direct supervision — mostly, indeed the actual work — of the preparing of the meals, that the health and efficiency of my family may be as great as possible. And a woman has little call to be Vusty' so long as she has good books (I have little time to read myself — my hus- band reads me the most important things) and interesting friends who still think It worth while to come and see her. I hope to have the strength to The Cost of Children 227 devote myself to my children until they shall be fortified and equipped for their work in life." This is the old spirit of kissing the rod, and it has permitted more unnecessary waste and hard- ship than any other pernicious heirloom. It's not by this sort of inert acquiescence, but by seeing that something is wrong and trying to set it right that we shall come upon smoother ways. As the intelligent mother of three says: "I can write and I have a head for facts and figures. I would be glad to be of use in the com- munity; I don't want to be a social drone; but I have my hands full truly, taking care of my chil- dren." "But," our New England friend might ask, "what greater privilege could that woman have than to devote herself to her children.^" Is it, after all, a question of devotion.^ Most women who write us think that they cannot be good mothers if they limit their social service to their own homes. The ability to educate children is not an inherited instinct and obviously it is to the advantage of society to get a double value from women, if possible. There is a real demand for some mother-saving device, particularly while the children are young. The only devices we have today are the nurse-maid and the kindergarten. Oh, that nurse-maid I No one who has merely employed a nurse-maid can know her as one who has actually been her does. One of us studied the American home from the standpoint of a nurse- maid for Everybody's Magazine. She has sat 228 Increasing Home Efficiency with her in employment offices looking for a place; walked by her side pushing baby-carriages through the streets; gone to dances with her and helped her entertain her "gentlemen friends"; and knows her from the fat-buttoned shoes she wears to the way she does her hair. A few trained and competent nurse-maids she met in different parts of the country, but they aren't a tenth of one per cent of enough to go around. And these few good, efficient nurse-maids — aren't they the sort of women whom it is for the advantage of society to allow to marry and bring up their own children? And the others — the incompetent sort — ought they to be intrusted with any children at all? It does not seem that the nurse-maid is a mother- saving device from the standpoint of society at large, because so much of the work she does badly or misdoes has to be done over later at an in- creased cost. Here and there groups of women are trying to solve this problem by cooperative nurseries under trained child-gardeners; the kinder- garten solves It for a few hours each day for some people; but the problem as a whole has not been met. The minimum cost of children sums Itself up simply enough. It doesn't cost a prohibitive amount to clothe and feed and shelter them. Peo- ple who believe their duties to their children are limited to these three things do not complain of the cost. The difficulty Is that it may cost a great deal to keep them In perfect physical fitness, to educate them, and to start them in life. People The Cost of Children 229 who believe their duties to Include all these things are likely to be appalled at the prospect. It Is not as though the mothers of the middle- class were not satisfied with the amount they have to eat and drink and the protective quality of the clothes they have to wear. The book the Sage Foundation has published on the standard of liv- ing In New York says that on ^900 a year "families are able, In general, to get food enough to keep soul and body together and clothing and shelter enough to meet urgent demands of decency." Most middle-class women are quite as intelligent as any Immigrant's wife. They could certainly do as well as our washerwoman, Mrs. Schultz, who, with the added burden of an Imbecile husband, has brought up a useful family. Mrs. Schultz's three boys went to work promptly at fourteen and now one of them is clerk for the Consolidated Gas Com- pany; another works for a towel supply firm; the third Is in a wholesale grocery house; and their united Income is ^68 a week. They're all good, sturdy German-American boys, eating the good boiled potato from the knife-blade, and spending happy coatless, shoeless evenings with their mother in their little East Side flat which has no bath-tub. The young Schultzs are perfectly good citizens and their mother Is justly proud of them. But the outside limit of their earning power is probably $100 a month each, the height of their careers will be reached by thirty, and their indus- trial places could be filled at a moment's notice. In the economical education of middle-class 230 Increasing Home Efficiency children, there are methods less tangible than the obvious paying-less-for-what-you-get. They might be called "Long Distance Economy" or "Expensive Tastes as a First Aid to Thrift," and can be practiced by those women who are not try- ing to do what Mrs. Schultz has done — produce offspring that fit into the community life like in- terchangeable parts into a machine — but who are striving to produce something much more costly and difficult of production — something hard to replace and therefore expensive. "Only one per cent of the school children go to the university, and therefore a university man is valuable," they argue. "We will not let our boys work now because it will make them worth less as men. We will not have their play time stolen from them because they may demand it back when they are grown up. They shall not go through physical bankruptcy — it is too costly. We want them to be able to meet competition — not to have to evade it by emigration. Our children intend to be wonderful creatures and we try to prevent their being content to be commonplace. Society does not need the commonplace, and we will not glut the market with it." In producing exceptional children, parents are making provision for their own future. The bread they are casting upon the social waters is likely to return to them jam-spread in time of disaster. Their children are not likely to develop the attitude of a Vermont farmer who has just sent to New York for a destitute elderly woman to do the house- The Cost of Children 231 work without wages for himself, his wife and four children, promising that "he would give her the same care that his mother would have." The up- bringing of middle-class children is practically an old-age pension for their parents, though whether this is wise economics from the standpoint of the community is quite another matter. But to produce these exceptionally valuable children is far more difficult than getting dancing introduced into the schools. It involves, first, developing the demands of taste and then satisfy- ing them, giving a family a moneyed love of beauty and art, a capitalistic taste for real luxuries on a salary; that is, the sort of taste which can be bred into a race by familiarity with the beautiful things the rich can buy, and the leisure to enjoy them. "Somehow the disadvantages of ^3,000 a year have got to be overcome," said a Philadelphia mother, firmly. "Take the matter of clothes for Jane. Now she has a perfect right to beautiful things and the joy of the changing fashions, and she's got to know the real from the imitation. She dropped a wish into the air for white furs. White furs upon my daughter! But I know just how quickly Jane learns from seeing things. I took her shopping with me on Saturday and made oc- casion to lunch at a cheap restaurant during the rush hour. It happened most fortunately. About every other shop girl who came in was wearing white furs — cheap imitations, in various stages of bedragglement. I saw Jane watch set after set to its seat and take in the full effect of it in combina- 232 Increasing Home EflSciency tlon with worn black jackets, exaggerated hats and shabby shoes. Then in the afternoon I took her to a little concert uptown where I thought some of those quite well-dressed girls of old Philadelphia might be. They were. I could almost see Jane set the gentlefolks, and the soft pretty place and the lovely music over in a column against the cheap imitations. Yes, that white fur anti-toxin worked perfectly. The only approach to the subject was when she said once: "'Wouldn't it be perfectly dandy, mother, for you to have a set of ermine T "But just the same I know that every one of those struggling girls in the white furs and awful hats had a right to something better. I say right because if beautiful things will make Jane more valuable, they'll help the shop girls just as much, and if there is one thing that is sure, it is that the community cannot afford to have us go without anything that makes us more valuable to it. "Now, of course, if Jane were a young plutocrat, she wouldn't have to acquire good taste herself because she could hire it. But as it is, this isn't a place where even the law could help her out. I have to lead my children personally into that realm of taste. "I'm trying," said she, "to drive into society the idea that people like John and me and our children have a right to a good deal because we are valuable — much more valuable than the mill hands we might have been. And I'm trying to drive into the children the idea that a great deal The Cost of Children 233 Is expected of them because they have received so much, and because they have inherited a lot they could not have been given. At the same time I'm impressing on them the fact that they have a right to receive a great deal more in return. And I try to make them see that what is their right is everybody's right. "Do you remember the story of the princess who was stolen away by the wicked witch and set to spin with the peasant girls .^ She sat idle until the witch asked her: "'Why do you not spin.^' "'You must give me a golden wheel,' said the princess. "So the witch gave her a golden wheel — but still the princess did not spin. "'Why do you not spin with your golden wheel .^' asked the witch. "'You must give me silken floss,' said the princess. "So the witch gave her silken floss — but still the princess did not spin. "'Why do you not spin with your golden wheel and your silken floss .^' asked the witch. "'You must bring a great lady to teach me,' said the princess. "So the witch brought a great lady to teach her and the princess began to spin. And the golden wheel whirled so fast, and the silken floss twisted so tight that the thread was as flne as cobweb, and the witch took it up to the palace and sold it to the King. 234 Increasing Home Efficiency "'Who spins this fine thread?' asked the King. "'One of my maidens,' answered the witch. "'How does she do it?" asked the King. '"With a golden wheel and silken floss and a great lady to teach her,' answered the witch. "The King wondered so that he sent his son to follow the witch home. And when the prince came into the spinning room and saw all the peasant girls spinning coarse yarn you could buy for a penny, and the princess spinning fine thread which was worth a piece of gold, he said : "'Pretty maiden, why do you spin such fine thread?' "'Because I am a king's daughter,' she said. "And of course you know what happens after that in a fairy story. "I only want the best for my children — that's what the prince in the fairy story means. Time was when there were so few good things somebody had to go without, but now we all have every chance for usefulness and happiness the whole round world affords. Thank Heaven that the intelligent discontent of the princess is spreading. There's no reason why every peasant girl shouldn't have a golden wheel and silken floss and a great lady to teach her." We were talking the other day with the wife of a high-salaried professional man. Before her marriage she had been a writer earning a good income. She has two children, and, because of her unwillingness to have anything but the best medical care, the older of them has cost more The Cost of Children 235 than six thousand dollars in seven years. More- over, like an increasing number of middle-class women, she feels that the public schools are not providing the kind of education she wants her children to have, and, because she cannot single- handedly make the public schools what she thinks they ought to be, she has given up her profession and is devoting her entire time to training her children at home. "I wish we could have another child," she said, "but, judging by what Alice and Tom have cost us, I know we shall have to go without one. Be- sides, I'm not a teacher by nature or training, and I'm never certain that the care I give them is the very best." Hitherto society has placed the cost of improv- ing the quality of children exclusively upon the ^ parents, with the result that, as standards rise, homes like that of this professional man feel com- pelled to limit their output. This suggests what is probably the most serious unanswered question in the development of home efficiency — not whether people can afford to have children, but whether society can afford to have those people who are intelligent enough to count the cost, go without them. CHAPTER XII Launching the Child MY children are such a comfort," said Mrs. Aken, a charming gray haired lady. "They have turned out so well." We agreed that it must be a comfort to have one's children turn out well, and then asked our- selves if hers really had. There was William, the eldest, a Chicago stock- broker. He dealt in "public utilities," mining stocks, and "industrials," keeping well within the range of lawful enterprise. Sometimes we heard that he was making money, sometimes that he was losing it. On the whole, he grew more affluent as the years went by. There was her married daughter, Annie, who, as her mother said, was "so domestic, and married so well." Financially, she had. She has now two lovely children who have passed through the vicissitudes of babyhood and landed safely in the best private school in the city. She has such a genius for organization that she does not need to keep her hands perpetually on the steering gear of her house. She has shifted that burden to the servants whom she has trained and whom her 236 Launching the Child 237 husband pays. Hours and hours of free time Annie has, while her children are in school and her housekeeping goes automatically on. Frank Aken was the youngest. He showed a bookish tendency at an early age — a dissociated bookishness which led him into numismatics and a study of the domestic life of Greece. No doubt he has turned out well in a sense, for he is teaching the classics in a boys' preparatory. He has been married some years, but his salary is so small that he does not dare to have any children. As we considered these three — the stock-broker; the woman who considers her life's job finished when she has produced two children and has trained servants to run a house to hold them; the teacher of Latin and Greek, without which studies of course no classic education can occur, but to the teacher of which society does not pay enough to permit his having children — we wondered if Mrs. Aken's children had turned out so well, after all. They conformed perfectly to the old ideal of law-abiding, self-supporting offspring, but if so- ciety had been asked, would it have said they were valuable.^ Now of course the most precious output of the home is the child; but to produce it, and feed and clothe and educate and bring it to maturity, is only part of the problem. Shall one raise lettuce or cauliflower or corn only to plow them under.? The home must launch its children as the gardener must market his vegetables — it is part of the job. The difference is that the gardener need only 238 Increasing Home Efficiency consider getting rid of his product, but the home must consider the effect of its output on the com- munity that assimilates it. We have a letter from Mr. Warner, a proud father who recently retired from business and looks with pride upon what his home has accomplished. *'Our children," says he, "attended the common school. The eldest had a year in boarding-school and considerable money spent for musical training, and she married well at nineteen and a half years. The next went into the navy as an apprentice at sixteen, spent nine years in the Navy and six in the Army, where he is now a sergeant. The third left home at seventeen to learn a trade. The fourth attended high school several years, passed a year in a law office, studied two years at law school and is now commencing the practice of law." We gather from Mr. Warner's letter that his children are definitely self-supporting. Of course the general experience is increasingly against girls marrying at so young an age. His daughter may be an exception, but girls of nineteen are not usually well enough educated or sufficiently ex- perienced to make efficient wives or mothers, and of course it is not for us to say that so long as we have an Army, we do not need sergeants, but fif- teen years' training seems a great deal of prepara- tion — and, do we need an Army.^ There is a good chance that the boy who learned a trade is doing something that needs to be done. How about the young lawyer? Dr. Henry S. Launching the Child 239 Pritchett, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, says: "No small proportion of the American lack of respect for law grows out of the presence of this large number of men seeking to gain a livelihood from the business which ought in the nature of the case to support only a much smaller number. When six or eight men seek to gain their living from the practice of law in a community in which, at most, two good lawyers could do all the work, the demoralization of society becomes acute. Not only is the process of the law unduly lengthened, but the temptation is great to create business." There's a good chance that the lawyer son is helping to demoralize society. Both the Akens and the Warners have attained the easily accessible ideal of making their children self-supporting and respectable. This is purely a personal ideal with a purely personal gratification. It may not have any relation to the social demand at all, since there are many self-supporting, ap- parently respectable people for whom society has no real need. There is, however, a fair proportion of the pop- ulation who do not think that respectable self- support is enough. They feel that they must launch their young in line with their greatest ability and inclination, and sit in breathless ex- pectancy waiting for their offspring to develop tendencies and talents. A gentleman from Michigan writes: "The trades and professions offer a field wide 240 Increasing Home Efficiency enough and diverse enough so that any young man's natural gift may find expression in them. And here is the real point — what is a boy's natural gift? He could probably succeed along that line and would probably fail in any other. A parent could wisely use all his discernment in studiously learning the natural tastes of his child. Give a young man something to do that he likes and help him qualify for it!" Says a Pennsylvania mother: "I found in early life that my son was a sales- m.an. I allowed him to develop that talent. At nine years he had a little candy stand in the yard, also sold flowers. I paid him myself for the work he did for me. If I had forced him to stay in school, I would have wasted time and money and he would not have been able to face the world." Another family with an income of only $2,400 is already beginning to save because its eldest son, aged thirteen, has expressed a desire to enter the ministry, and it is evident to his parents, first, that he should not be thwarted in his laudable wish, and, second, that he will probably be un- able to support himself if he carries It out. We have word from the mother of a sixteen- year-old girl in the West who showed a talent for drawing. "I have cultivated it," says the mother, "ever since Alice was seven. I have given her the best training the city affords, but there seems to be no market for pictures unless you are at the very top of the profession." An attorney from Akron, Ohio, has sent us the Launching the Child 241 story of how his son pursued his ambition to be a foreign missionary. The boy took two years' regular college work, then was transferred to a theological seminary. When he was ready to go into the field, he could not have accepted a call even if he had received one, because his eyes had given out under the strain of study. His carefully cultivated talent was useless. Says his father: "Satisfied that he could not proceed along the line of his choice, he came home a broken, dispirited young man. He could conceive of no future ex- cept to get a shanty and a few chickens. Then he thought he could possibly work toward self- support." He first hired out to a chicken farmer, then took a three months' course in the study of poul- try. His eyes grew increasingly better as he re- moved them from print and focused them on the hen. He was offered a position as foreman of a poultry experiment station. His practical work gave him finally a degree in poultry culture, and he is now a professor in full charge of the poultry extension work throughout the State — a success- ful man. He is said to be the best poultryman in America, but he has not succeeded through his effort to follow his inclinations into the heart of China, but through stumbling on the social need of better chickens and more eggs. The fact is that his life came near being wrecked because he was educated merely in the line of his inclinations without regard either to his aptness for the job — as the failure of his eyesight showed — or to whether 242 Increasing Home Efficiency there was any market for him when he should be a completed product. That's the trouble with the idea that a child's career must lie in the direction of its inclination. It's only a fraction of the truth, as the idea that a child must become self-supporting is only a frac- tion. What's the use of being able to do some- thing superlatively well if society doesn't need to have that particular thing done at all? And how repugnant to the feelings of a child, shaped carefully like a peg to fit a square hole, to find that advancing civilization in the shape of some swift- whirling gimlet has made all holes round! Parents will launch their children somehow, and this parental drive, whether it focuses itself merely on making the children self-supporting or on cultivating their incipient talents, is an enor- mous social force — how strong we have never known, because so much of it is wasted in blindly pawing the air. We have a letter from a widow with an income of $1,500 a year, who is bending all her life to the education of her two sons, at the continual sacrifice of herself. She does the housework in order that they may have dancing lessons. She cuts her yearly expenses for clothes to $115 a year, while each son has, as she says, an allowance of $150 a year, "which has thus far suflficed for gentlemanly clothing and the expenses of ath- letics." She saves on everything, cheering herself the while "with the vision of the end this economy is meant to accomplish." Launching the Child 243 "I cannot say how we shall manage matters when It comes to a university course," she writes, "but I do quite confidently expect to manage somehow. We have talked of the Government foreign service, diplomatic or consular, as a pro- fession for them. Surely a university education, a speaking knowledge of three languages, good health, and a trained judgment ought to lead toward paths of distinction." Not necessarily! Only a few weeks ago a man came to our door with a thinly veiled plea for money. Said he: "Nobody wants a man around when he ain't got nothin'. Why, even these Mills Hotels that some rich man built for the poor man — do I get a chance to stay In them.^ No. They're all full of these college fellows out of a job. There ain't no room in 'em for a working-man." The time has gone by when a speaking knowl- edge of three languages and a trained mind Insures an income, and the cost of acquiring them Is very high, although the Idea still survives that boys and girls can work their way through college. Says one gentleman from Michigan: "I think any young man or young woman with a good brain, abundant grit, and good physique can ac- quire a college education without Injury to them- selves. Probably the more they have invested personally, the greater the treasure will be." Many people do get through college this way, but It Is questionable whether any one who has stood up under a good stiff college course himself 244 Increasing Home Efficiency would advise any boy or girl to add self-support to the burden. We have the record of a farmer's son who wanted to be a civil engineer. He left home with ^70 to undertake a four years' course in Purdue Uni- versity. He has now struggled along three years, having had about $300 by way of assistance from his father, and is paying his way and a little more. This cost of a little over $100 a year for keeping a boy in college is the lowest of which we have any record. A well-to-do business man from Chicago writes that the cost of sending his daughters through college has been approximately $2,000 each. Both of them have become teachers at adequate salaries, so it would seem that this outlay of $4,000 has been sufficient to educate and launch these girls. Two boys at Dartmouth cost approximately $600 a year each. The expenses of a Pennsylvania minister's daughter at Smith have averaged $828.04 a year. Writes the mother of a boy whose college course cost $1,800 a year: "People should remember that if boys and girls are brought up on good food, comfortable rooms, and decent clothes, they can- not do with less when away. I worked much harder while he was in college than ever before or since. I did with less help in the house, but I was determined that the pleasure of sending the boy where he could learn should not be a burden to my husband, and thus become a trouble in- stead of a joy. The third year of his course he Launching the Child 245 gave out with nervous exhaustion. He was not used to city life, and never had good judgment about what he could endure. He was not able to do anything until a year ago, and was also a very great expense — so much that I do not want to know how much." There seems to be no point above which the expenses of college students may not rise, but the average of those we have analyzed, counting out students from families with incomes of more than ^6,000, or students who have received scholarships or worked their way through, is ^665 a year. Now, what will happen to that unselfish mother with $1,500 a year if over $1,300 of it goes to her two sons' education.^ Suppose she does manage to somehow put them through the university, and then they don't fit into any needed work.^ It has happened to others. It might happen to her. It is a social calamity to have that sort of splendid parental force wasted — wasted In launching chil- dren in stagnant ponds. In backwaters that lead no where. In rapids and swift currents that need not be navigated. A letter came today from a woman whose hus- band was practically crowded out of the career that his college course opened to him, and who has gone to the Yakima Valley to start again In work that will meet the specific demand of that region. "There are hundreds of people here who have found the professions overcrowded In the East," she writes. "Fruit culture appeals to their scien- tific training, and they are succeeding as fruit 246 Increasing Home Efficiency ranchers." She says that to start over in this new work, it is necessary for them to hire out on fruit farms to get the practical side of the work, and to take winter courses at the agricultural college for the theoretical side. "The work," says she, "calls for expert knowledge of soils, irrigation, pruning, controlling insect pests and fungous growths, and a multitude of other things." These people, having been fitted to a profession where there was no demand for them, must be re-educated before they can make a living. It is, to say the least of it, a wasteful proceeding. Everywhere in the country we are throwing away not only the drive of that applied parental affec- tion, but the child's career as well, and we're doing it chiefly through ignorance. We do not know either what the community needs in the way of applied middle-class brains or what it is willing to pay for — which may be quite a different thing. We have, to be sure, a general idea that there are more manufacturers of ladies' cloaks in the New York Ghetto than can make a living, more book- keepers and stenographers and clerks than can survive in Chicago, too many doctors and lawyers everywhere, but nobody knows how many or why. Nobody has yet noosed the law of proba- bilities sufficiently long to find what industrial output is needed from the middle-class home. We go on blindly producing at great cost in money and effort without knowing whether the product is needed or not. It is only in reference to wage- workers that we are beginning to take serious Launching the Child 247 thought for the misfits and unemployed. The growth of bread lines and slums, of vagrancy and pauperism and crime, the high infant mortality, the increase in juvenile delinquency and prosti- tution, the spread of tuberculosis and kindred diseases of neglected poverty, are not only be- ginning to cost more than we like to pay for courts and jails, public health and public charity, but are also undermining our industrial efficiency so that we are threatened by the competition of more foresighted and socially intelligent nations. For long generations we assumed precisely the same attitude toward unemployment among the wage-workers that we still hold toward the mis- fits and unemployed in the middle class, — every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, — as if we were not all concerned with the devil's harvest, as if the failure of any one individual were not a social waste for which we and our children must pay! Happily, in one State at least, the tragic wreck- age of the panic of 1907 shook this dangerous complacency. In June, 1910, the New York State Commission on Employers' Liability and Unemployment sent a questionnaire to more than five thousand employers, representing every in- dustry in the State, seeking information about the fluctuations in the number of their employes from year to year and month to month, the sources of their labor-supply, and their methods of secur- ing workers. At the same time the secretaries of more than two thousand trade-unions were asked 248 Increasing Home Efl&ciency to report the number of their members who were unemployed during the year, and to describe the effect of lost wages upon the working-men's fam- ilies. This information the Commission supple- mented from the various investigations by the United States Department of Labor into wages and the cost of living, from all available State documents dealing with unemployment, from the quarterly reports of trade-unions to the New York State Commissioner of Labor, from the special Federal censuses of manufactures made in 1904 and 1905, from the records of charitable societies, commercial and philanthropic employ- ment agencies, and other kindred sources. Upon this broad basis of fact the Commission framed its conclusions, the chief of which is that "unem- ployment is a permanent feature of modern in- dustrial life everywhere. In the industrial centers of New York State, at all times of the year, in good times as well as bad, there are wage-earners, able and willing to work, who cannot secure em- ployment." This is the great fact which today challenges serious attention; for it involves all our social and economic problems — it gauges the social efficiency of our industries, it is fundamental to the physical health of the nation, it is basic to the problems of destitution, the dependency of chil- dren, vagrancy, and crime. And it applies to the middle class quite as much as it does to the wage- workers. Of seven hundred and twenty-three employers Launching the Child 249 who replied to the question, "Are you always able to get all the help you want?" sixty-seven per cent answered, "Yes." At the same time eighty-seven per cent stated that they got their help wholly or mainly from workmen who made personal applica- tion at their factory doors. In few establishments do they even have to hang out a sign, "Hands Wanted," or blow the whistle, as the canning factories do, to announce that fresh loads of fruit or vegetables have made places for more workers. They have rather to protect themselves from importunities by placards like those one sees outside almost every building in process of con- struction: "No Carpenters Wanted" — "No Brick- layers Wanted" — "No Steamfitters Wanted" — "No Workmen of any Sort Wanted." "It is apparent," says the Commission, "that many workmen must be going from plant to plant in vain." To what extent this Is true of the middle class most of us know through bitter experience. Of one hundred and seventy-nine trade-union secretaries who replied to the question, "Are there at all times of the year some of your members out of work?" fifty-three per cent answered, "Yes." Only eight per cent said that their members lost no time through unemployment, while twenty- five per cent replied that their members lost an average of three months or more In the year. The reports of the New York State Department of Labor, covering a period of seven years, show that in ordinary times at least fifteen per cent of the organized workers of the State are idle during the 250 ^ Increasing Home Efficiency winter months, while even during October, the month of maximum industrial activity, the per- centage of unemployment among skilled workers does not drop below five. During years of panic and industrial depression the limits both of max- imum and minimum unemployment rise sharply, and the recorded idle among the best trade-unions range from fifteen to more than thirty-five per cent. These figures deal entirely with skilled work- men. No comparably accurate data were procura- ble to show the extent to which the unskilled suf- fer from worklessness. Such facts, however, as the Commission was able to gather, furnish an interesting index to the truth. During 1910 the Free Municipal Lodging House in New York City gave shelter to more than thirty-three thousand homeless and penniless men and women, most of whom, though unemployed, were "by no means unemployable." In this same year the Salvation Army had five thousand applicants for work, for only five hundred of whom was it able to find places; and the National Employment Exchange, an agency conducted at great expense by a small group of financiers, found work in eighteen months for only four thousand, six hundred and fifty- seven out of approximately twenty-four thousand applicants. Too much weight is not to be given to these figures; undoubtedly many of the work-hunters registered with more than one agency, and in many cases positions were left unfilled because none of Launching the Child 251 the long list was qualified to meet their special requirements. They do, nevertheless, indicate the silt that is seeping through the foundations of our American homes. Always it must be remembered that unemploy- ment is not a disease of panic years which can be met by emergent relief; its evils are not necessarily most serious when the number of unemployed is largest. The important questions are: How many workers do the industries of the State normally require.^ To how many can they give steady em- ployment.^ and, How many do their fluctuating demands keep in the reserve army of casual workers ? The Federal census of manufactures shows that about ten per cent of the wage-earners of New York State form a reserve to meet the varying monthly demands; that fully one-third of those who are employed at the busiest times are out of employment, or are compelled to lose time in going from job to job during the year. Of 37,194 es- tablishments, only forty per cent were in operation for the full year; nineteen per cent lost a month or more, and eight per cent were shut down half the time. " Investigations of over four thousand wage- earners' families in the State," says the Commis- sion in its summary, "show that less than half of the bread-winners have steady work during the year." What is the effect of this industrial turbulence upon the efficiency and stability of our homes? It has been customary in New York to adopt 252 Increasing Home EflSciency the conclusion of Dr. Robert Coit Chapin, that for an average working-man's family consisting of two adults and three children, or four adults, "an income under eight hundred dollars in New York City is not enough to permit the maintenance of a normal standard; families having from nine hun- dred to a thousand a year are able in general to get food enough to keep soul and body together, and clothing and shelter enough to meet the most urgent demands of decency." Because, however, seventy-five per cent of the trade-unions under consideration were located in the smaller cities of the State, the Commission conservatively adopted seven hundred dollars as the amount upon which a family "can barely support itself, provided that it is subject to no extraordinary expenditures by reason of sickness, death, or other untoward cir- cumstance." The secretaries of two hundred and eleven trade- unions reported that if employment had been con- stant, the average income of slightly more than half their members would have risen to a thousand dollars a year, while in only four per cent would it have been less than seven hundred dollars. But owing to the inconstant demand for labor, the average income actually fell below seven hundred dollars in twenty-five per cent of the membership, and reached a thousand dollars in only fourteen per cent. These figures are, of course, corrected for strikes; they represent normal conditions. Moreover, they deal only with a group of skilled, and there- Launching the Child 253 fore well paid, trades. They leave to the imagina- tion the economic status of the unskilled and casual workers, whose periods of unemployment are longer and more frequent, and who, even If they were employed six days a week, the year round at the usual wage, could not earn more than five hundred and fifty dollars. The dock-workers are, perhaps, the most typical of these casual laborers. In every city or town that has shipping by ocean, lake, or river, they are to be found, either idling about waiting for a job, or working night and day, loading and unloading vessels. New York City alone has between forty and fifty thou- sand of them, not more than half of whom are working any one day. What do they do between whiles.^ The Municipal Lodging House gives the history of some of them. They wash dishes in a restaurant for a few days; they help to fix up Madi- son Square Garden for a show; they do building laborers' work for awhile; help a team driver when an extra man is needed; distribute directories and telephone books, and pack and ship goods in a department store during the Christmas season. How shall their families adjust their living to such wage-earning? Or how long will It take an Indus- trial system that presupposes a man to have no family to produce the thing it demands .^^ Of course It may be justly said that the full weight of lost income due to unemployment is not always felt through a lowered standard of living in a working-man's family. When he is out of a job, his wife goes to work, his children go to 254 Increasing Home Efficiency work, and In this way the home may be kept to- gether. In city parks and playgrounds, able- bodied men taking care of babies and young chil- dren while their wives and older children are at work are common enough. But from the stand- point of the homes and the State's interest, these can hardly be considered satisfactory adjustments. For the children of unemployed or under-employed workers, neglected in their early years because their mothers must go to work, are frequently forced to enter industry, untrained and physically handicapped, by way of the first job that offers; and as they grow up they drift out of the "blind alleys" of makeshift occupations, to swell the hosts of casual, unskilled labor. And it isn't as though the unemployed man would rebound into estimable respectability when given a job. One who has listened to the perfervid denunciations of society by the street-corner orator, whose emotions have been set aflame by the sight of the righteous man forsaken and his seed begging bread, is curiously impressed by the clear echo of the agitator's language in the State Commission's report. "The unemployed man walks the street in search of work, hopeful at first, but as time goes on becoming more and more discouraged. The odd jobs he picks up bring an uncertain and very insufficient income. His whole life becomes un- steady. From under-nourishment and constant anxiety his powers — mental, moral and physical — begin to degenerate. Soon he becomes unfit for Launching the Child 255 work. The merely unemployed man becomes inefficient, unreliable, good-for-nothing, unemploy- able. His family is demoralized. Pauperism and vagrancy result." These conditions are not peculiar to New York. The recently published Federal inquiry into the reasons why six hundred and twenty children In selected manufacturing towns in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia left school to go to work, shows that thirty per cent went into industry under pressure of starvation, and another twenty-eight per cent because the parents were not able to maintain such a standard of living as seemed to them imperative without their children's assistance. In this Federal report the most significant piece of information is rele- gated to a foot-note in the smallest type: "In the period between the children's going to work and the investigation, one hundred and ninety-two fathers had been unemployed for varying periods. Using the fullest information obtainable, there seemed only eighteen cases (concerning two and eight-tenths per cent of the children studied) in which the father's lack of work seemed attributable to his own Indolence, Intemperance, or other fault." It is from the ranks of these child-workers, whom destitution pushes prematurely into the ma- chine of industry, that our criminals are increas- ingly recruited. The latest governmental study in juvenile delinquency and Its relation to employ- ment shows that the percentage of delinquent children is nearly five times as great among 256 Increasing Home Efficiency those who work as among those who are at school. Uncertain and insufficient wages, Juvenile delin- quency, crime, and prostitution — this is the array of evils that is breaking up our homes; and the parent of them all is unemployment. Confronted by such facts, it is idle to cling to the illusion that America is a bucolic neighborhood of freehold homes, or to declaim against a program of remedial legislation as an unwarranted interference with personal liberty. What personal liberty have the hungry? At such a time academic discussion becomes both inhuman and unpatriotic; what we need is an enlightened statesmanship. Against the dark background of the New York Commission's general findings one cheerful fact stands out. While thousands look for work and cannot find It, scores at least of positions remain unfilled. So long as business men rely upon the chance-come applicant at their factory doors, there must always be times when places requiring special types of labor will continue empty. Moreover, it is notorious that there are times In the year when farmers cry In vain for hands, and always there are lost opportunities for agricultural workers be- cause the means of communication between the manless job and the jobless man are inadequate. Because common sense suggests that this un- satisfied demand for labor is the readiest means of grappling with the problem of unemployment, the Commission gives first place In Its list of Imme- diately practicable remedies to a generously fi- Launching the Child 257 nanced and State-wide system of free employment offices. Would a manufacturer in need of raw material tack up a sign, "Cotton Wanted," or "Lumber Wanted?" Why should the labor market alone be left unorganized? It is the English system which the New York Commission has taken for its model. After years of futile experiment with Distress Committees and Relief Work — futile because it was impossible to give really useful work to the idle without taking it away from the employed — the English govern- ment passed the Labor Exchange Act of 1909. In February of that year the Board of Trade opened ninety exchanges, and increased the num- ber to one hundred and forty-two in 1910. The kingdom is divided into ten administrative dis- tricts. Three times a day each exchange sends to the central district office a list of all positions it is unable to fill, and a similar list is exchanged among the ten divisions once or twice weekly. Channels of regular intercommunication net the kingdom. When necessary the government pays the cost of transportation of the workman, then collects it from the employer, who in turn deducts it from the workman's wages. At the head of each of the ten districts is a divisional officer, who is assisted by a committee of employers and workmen. The ex- changes do not advance transportation to places where strikes are on, or where the wages offered are below the prevailing rates. Already, in their second year, the exchanges were finding jobs for about fifteen hundred workers daily. 258 Increasing Home EflBciency A Juvenile Advisory Committee, composed of workmen, employers, and educators, who protect the children against "blind alley" jobs, is provided for in each district. The need of hitching up the schools with industry is revealed by the fact that in 1909 forty per cent of the positions found by the exchanges could not be filled because properly trained workers were not available. In the main this is the system recommended by the New York Commission, whose bill includes provision for cooperation with employers and trade-unionists, notice of strikes, and special facilities for children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. We have pretty definitely grasped the idea that the labor market must be organized, because it is for the social advantage that the trades should be neither over nor under-supplied with workers; but it seems to shock people inexpressibly to think that the demand for ministers and teachers and doctors should be put in the class with that for bricklayers and plumbers. And yet the problem is quite as acute in the middle class as among the wage-workers. Take the profession of medi- cine, for instance, a calling of the social value of which there can be no question, and which is largely recruited from the middle class. The introduction of the Carnegie Foundation's Report on Medical Education says: "In a society constituted as are our Middle States the interests of the social order will be served best when the number of men entering a Launching the Child 259 given profession reaches and does not exceed a certain ratio. . . . For twenty-five years past there has been an enormous over-production of medical practitioners. This has been in absolute disregard of the public welfare. Taking the United States as a whole, physicians are four or five times as numerous in proportion to population as in older countries, like Germany. ... In a town of 2,000 people one will find in most of our States from five to eight physicians, where two well- trained men could do the work efficiently and make a competent livelihood. When, however, six or eight physicians undertake to gain a living in a town which will support only two, the whole plane of professional conduct is lowered in the struggle which ensues, each man becomes intent upon his own practice, public health and sanita- tion are neglected, and the Ideals and standards of the profession tend to demoralization. . . . It seems clear that as nations advance in civiliza- tion, they will be driven to . . . limit the number of those who enter [the professions] to some rea- sonable estimate of the number who are actually needed." And In the face of this there were In 1910 23,927 students in preparation to further congest the profession of medicine! It's a perfectly in- excusable waste, for, though there's much the statistician hasn't done, there's little he can't do when he sets his mind to It. If he can estimate the market for the output of a shoe factory, why not the market for the output of a professional 26o Increasing Home Eflficiency school? It ought to be possible to tell how many crown fillings the people of Omaha will need in their teeth in 1920 and just how many dentists must be graduated from the dental schools in time to do it. Of course, no one home can command the nec- essary information to organize the market for middle-class service; it can be had only through some form of community effort. If it is good busi- ness to hire experts to show us how to get the maximum power out of the energy stored up in a ton of coal, isn't it even better business to hire experts to show us how to get the maximum power from the middle-class homes? Isn't it, as a matter of fact, important to the Nation to have the pre- cious assets of professional brains conserved and applied exactly when and how we need them? And it's beginning to be done. Here and there the facts about some special business or profession are being put together, and the chances in it, or the lack of them, brought to light. The Vocation Bureau of Boston for example published in 191 1, together with studies of the baker and machinist, a little pamphlet on the architect, to show the people of Boston how their boys may become architects, and what the chances of money and success in that profession are. It insists on the requirements of "good health, good habits, and good eyesight," so those handicapped will not enter it. It says: "Professional education is by far the best. One cannot well educate oneself for an occupation having such high requirements," Launching the Child 261 and adds: "The majority entering the profession remain draughtsmen permanently, at pay varying from $20 to $35 a week." The report does not publish an estimate of the number of architects who could find work in the country, or even in and around Boston, but it does say: "There are very great opportunities for young men of vary- ing talents and abilities. ... It has the future of an important occupation." A little vague, but a beginning. Why should not this, and much more, be done for all profes- sions and businesses? Why is it not worth the while of the Nation to see that this firing into the blue should stop in child launching as well as gun practice? Does the gunner on a battleship push and pull at a gun till it looks right to him? Far from it. He has the range given him by his superior officer, and he aims that gun by what looks to the unsophisticated eye like applied trig- onometry. Why not perform a similar mathe- matical feat in launching a child? Isn't it quite as important to launch a productive child as a destructive shell? Society may even find it to its advantage to do what some of the great businesses do. Finding that the Nation does not automatically produce the sort of skilled mechanics they need, they have taken the raw material that society does furnish and made it into competent workmen at their own expense, just as a furniture factory makes pine trees into rocking-chairs. Several great corporations have found it to their advantage 262 Increasing Home Efficiency to educate free of charge the people whom they wish for definite uses. How does society, which produces many things, differ from a factory which produces one thing? Will not the same principle hold? If we could so coordinate and specialize our social activities that no man should be edu- cated to a profession where there was not room for him, if the child was made to fit the demand, would it not automatically absorb him? And would society not conserve an immense amount of precious human energy that is now wasted in blind fumbling about? At present we have all over the country unsatis- fied economic demands and undemanded economic supplies. We have laid in a stock of workers in unneeded lines and left much of the needed work of the world undone. No doubt it is a left-over brain process from our ancestral nomadic stage that makes us talk of wringing a living from the world. That was probably what people once literally did, but it is no longer necessary. In fact, it has come to be mere short-sighted folly. There is plenty. If we followed an intelligent plan of social housekeeping, we should find that there are three jobs for each man instead of three men for each job. The necessity of fighting with the world for a living is past, and the world loses in permitting it to go on. A man's choice of pro- fession is not his own business. It is a social question, and one that so far as the middle class is concerned, has hardly begun to be solved. CHAPTER XIII Savings and Efficiency WE'VE a friend whose recipe for story- writing is: "Take a block of large yel- low paper and a soft pencil; place all unpaid bills on the upper left-hand corner of your writing table — the result is literature." But she's the one exception we know to the rule that a mind must be free from the hundred pinches and pulls of money worry to turn out its most valuable product. Most of us know how visions of our children in want and ourselves helpless through old age, will switch our minds from the legal case we may be working out, turn our calculations on the strain of Iron girders to foolishness, lift our brushes from the canvas and our pencils from the paper, or break our voices as we lecture to our classes. If we had the choice of an incentive, wouldn't we prefer the love of our work and the certainty of a reasonable reward to the fear of what might hap- pen to us if we failed? Wouldn't a man run better In the joyous hope of taking an Olympic prize than In the deadly fear of pursuing growls in the forest.^ Why, then, do we torment all our pro- ductive years with the fear of a helpless old age and dependency? 263 264 Increasing Home Efficiency "It IS well to take an optimistic view of the future," writes the wife of a New England pro- fessional man, "and every man and woman who dares to found a home with only the earnings of the father for its support are true apostles of hope; but it is sheer folly not to set aside what will spare them the dependence which is the bitterest drop in the cup of old age. No magic can spend one dollar twice. If we are to educate our children and achieve even partial provision for sickness and the non-productive years, it must be by the old hard road of going without." And so she does what most women of her group ordinarily do — the wives of the doctors, lawyers, architects, journalists, scientists and engineers who, according to our seventy-six budgets, have an average income of ^2,598.32 a year — cuts down on travel and recreation and service in order to put between three and four hundred a year into savings, ignoring the fact that she is spending an undue proportion of her income on the health of her family in consequence, and the fact that even if she can keep up this saving for twenty years she will only have laid by enough for an annual income of ^420 — a good deal less than she and her husband will need for decent living. We have the family budgets of a series of high school teachers and college professors, men on salaries ranging from ^1,200 to ^4,000 a year, and scattered across the country from Maine to Cali- fornia; and in every case but one it is easy to see how old age and the fear of it is like a para- Savings and Efficiency 265 lyzing hand to mar the present efficiency of their homes. As the second bulletin of the Carnegie Founda- tion shows, the majority of the teachers in America receive salaries below the comfort line, though that line varies greatly for different localities in accordance with the local cost of living. Now teachers who are continually worried by money are in no state to turn out their best work, either as teachers or home-makers. Their salaries may not look so small in money, but it is important to realize the difference between a salary that is comfortable to live on and a salary that is com- fortable to save on; for the fear of the future in a profession in which the average income even of college professors at the height of their earning power is only ^2,500 a year drives men to save as the only way to provide for the future, and tends to reduce the amount of money they are at liberty to spend on their homes and their pro- fessional equipment to a point below the efficiency line. It doesn't matter in the long run whether they are content to cut down their home budgets below the point of efficiency or not — cheerfulness under misfortune undoubtedly makes things pleasant for the neighbors, but it isn't a good social substitute for a strong-fisted campaign of prevention. There is plenty of cheerfulness among the teachers just above the line of decency, and a tendency to make the intangible receipts of inspiration, and con- sciousness of their noble calling, and various other 266 Increasing Home Efficiency comforting platitudes, piece out mere beef and potatoes, till one feels pretty sure that the scholar's stoop comes as much from underfeeding as from overstudy. Teachers, or their wives, living on $1,500 a year and less have a fashion of writ- ing: "Our monthly expenditures average around $50, and we think we are living high." "Our salary looks pretty big to us, because we have so many dear friends who have so much less." "Our professors here are fine, upright, happy people, and all on $1,200 a year or less." "We deny ourselves in none of our needs and pleasures."' "Counting all candy, ice-cream, and every eatable, our food average for a day is not above twenty cents." To read these brave letters, gives one a happy warmth in the heart which lasts just exactly till we analyze the family budgets that go with them. Here is the best and most reasonable budget we have been able to get from any teacher with an income of $1,500 or less. It comes from Mrs. Brownson, a cheerful, happy woman in a section of the Middle West where living is so cheap that her husband's high school salary of $1,200 will go further than would seem possible to an Eas- terner: Savings and Efficiency 267 Budget of a High School Teacher in the Middle West, Wife, and Child Four Years Old Income: $1,200.00 a year, salary. 20.00 from private lessons. $1,220.00 Food $180.00 Shelter (rent and water tax) 121.50 Clothes, etc 140.00 Operating Expenses: Coal, wood, ice $50.00 Gas and laundry 20.00 70.00 Advancement: Church 30.00 Y. M. C. A. & Y. W. C. A 10.00 Summer school i35-oo Insurance 140.00 Vacation 50.00 Doctor 10.00 Bank 325.00 Magazines, papers, books 7.00 Incidentals 1.50 708.50 $1,220.00 Obviously, Mrs. Brownson is a careful house- keeper, happily busy trying to make every re- luctant dollar give up a hundred cents of value and to keep her young son up to the mark. Ob- viously, too, she succeeds, for they've just paid 268 Increasing Home Efficiency off the big left-over debt from Mr. Brownson's schooling, and are able to give $30 a year to the church and contribute to the Young Men's Chris- tian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association. Now this generosity is right in line with Mrs. Brownson's cheerfulness — pleasant char- acteristics both — but the community expects much bigger gifts from a high school teacher than dollars. The community expects him to be a mine from which to quarry indefinitely, but a modern mine whose supposedly inexhaustible store has got to be continually replenished from with- out by travel and books and contact with people. l\ teacher's mind is a storage battery; it can't be charged once for all and then go on emitting power forever.1 And the thing that prevents the frequent recharging of Mr. Brownson is the menac- ing hand of the future reaching backward, grip- ping hold of a hundred and forty dollars a year and saying: "Think what will happen to your family if you don't give me this in the form of insurance!" It takes hold of the $325 a year savings and says : "Give me this in proof that you've remembered the rainy day." And it leaves the teacher, who ought to have some hundred dollars a year to put into books and technical equipment alone, with $7 only for maga- zines and papers, and $50 for a vacation for three people, and not a cent for a lecture or a concert or a theater. To be sure, Mrs. Brownson writes that they have an extended circle of acquaintances Savings and Efficiency 269 among the " rich, the middle, and the poor classes " ; but balance against the consequent social diver- sion the fact that all the idiosyncrasies of the human imagination have to be trammeled to fit the $1.50 a year spent for "incidentals!" The food allowance of $180 is well below the lower limit of subsistence in most places as ascer- tained by the University of Wisconsin, but as only $10 went for doctor's bills and nothing at all for medicines, the Brownsons seem to have been sufficiently fed. This is possible because they live in a great fruit and vegetable producing State, where one may purchase the luscious water- melon at five cents and peaches for so little that it is not safe to mention the price, and where flour comes down from Duluth by water — altogether one of the cheapest places in the country to live. But just look at the things that must be left out of the account when the fear of age and decrepitude steals ^465 a year out of ^1,200. That ugly fear steals their chances of present efficiency and looks mealy-mouthed and virtuous while it does it! And though it may not be true of Mr. Brownson in particular, isn't it true in general that such sacrifice builds an unjumpable wall in the path of a teacher's success.^ And isn't it an indirect sacrifice of the brains of all the little Smiths and Joneses that sit under him? Of course one can't starve when one is old any more complacently than at any other age; the grasshopper may have become a burden and the caper-berry have failed, but one eats notwithstanding. The question is, 270 Increasing Home Efficiency Can the community afford such sacrifice? Isn't there some way out? Of course the children and their future have got to be provided for, either by education or endow- ment — that's an axiom; but too often the axiom runs in direct opposition to the justifiable demand of society that each generation shall give itself fully in the present, and its refusal to accept in- stead any I. O. U. reading: "In the persons of my sons and daughters, I promise to pay — ." The attempt to substitute one's children for one's self is apt to be disastrous. Of course there is the beautiful idea of lifting them a step up, the theory that no sacrifices are too great to be made for them, that no slaving is real slaving, no hard- ships real hardships, where they are concerned; and doubtless these thoughts do ease the mind, though they don't radically rest the muscle. One has got to be pretty sure that it is only one's self that one is sacrificing; it may be one's neighbors. Mrs. Taylor, wife of a high school principal in a Middle Western city, sends us the following schedule: Budget of a High School Principal in a Middle Western City, Wife and Four Children. In- come ^3,700 A Year. Food $ 500.00 Shelter (heat, outside cleaning, light, etc.) 715.00 Clothes 333-00 Operating expenses, etc 128.00 Savings and EflSciency 271 Advancement: Annuity premium $414.00 Insurance 94.00 Taxes (on vacant lots) 25.00 Tuition at 450.00 Tuition at 381.00 Church 30.00 Allowance to children 1 20.00 Husband's expenses 510.00 2,024.00 $3,700.00 Mrs. Taylor says that she and her husband are putting their children through college, and feel that this education is a sufficient substitute for money to start them in life; but she makes these elucidating comments: "You will see from this schedule that it is ab- solutely necessary that I should do all my work myself, including the laundrying. But trying to put our children through Eastern colleges was too much for some of us, for I have been under a severe mental strain, and one daughter has been in a sanitarium for months because of a nervous breakdown. Teachers as a rule are not paid ac- cording to their needs, and have to stint in every- thing in order to make a living. We took out an annuity policy three years ago for $5,000 to be paid up in ten years, which will pay us $250 a year till the end of our lives. My husband has life insurance for my benefit, the premium of which I pay; but after my husband outlives his usefulness 272 Increasing Home Efficiency as a teacher, he and I will have to live on ^250 a year, there being no provision made by law to help the superannuated teachers." Now the Taylors have done the thing which ever since the Mayflower landed we Americans have tried to do — they have given their children OPPORTUNITIES. They have seen the word spelled in capitals all their lives, they have pur- sued and overtaken it, and are quite willing to pay the cost; but does it seem a thing we can afford to let them do at the price .^ If^^j ^^ addition to their sacrifice of present efficiency, they turn the minds of other teachers to the elementary propo- sition that such and such an income will give such and such things only, that a time will come when a teacher's usefulness is over, and that the lean years must be provided against out of the fat ones, until the less daring ones grow afraid to assume the responsibility of children] Mr. and Mrs. Carton, out on the Pacific coast, have reversed the sacrifice of the Taylors. Mr. Carton holds a small professorship at a salary of ^1,800 in a community where living is high. He believed that it was his duty to be a good teacher first and a happy man afterward, and that he ought not to marry until he had stored up enough in his head to be sure of holding his position and enough in his pocket to be sure of making a wife comfortable. Remember how small is ^1,800 a year on the Pacific coast! After a long engage- ment he married and continued to save. He didn't dare cut off chances to study — competition for his Savings and Efficiency 273 job was too keen; so there were summer courses and conventions and a year's leave of absence and a lit- tle travel and lots of books, and always the saving, saving, saving, urged by a little tormenting demon sitting in the back of his head who whispered: "You're going to be old! Suppose you fall ill? What about accident? What will happen to your wife? You've got to provide for her!" And that ruthless demon reached over and drew worry lines about Mr. Carton's eyes, and picked out his hairs, and troubled his soul, and whispered always: "One must either provide for children or go without them!" and kept him and his wife always alone. To be sure, he tried to supplement his income by writing text-books and giving lectures and doing the other things which lead Dr. Henry S. Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation to say: "A large proportion of the teachers in American universities are engaged in turning the grindstone of some outside employment with one hand while they carry on the work of teaching with the other." Again, it is the fear of age and poverty that has stolen from the community the children the Cartons might have had, and their home as judged by its output is only half efficient. It has given a good teacher, but it has stopped short at this generation. This too seems a waste we can't afford, and is referable to the same cause which makes the high school teachers in communities where there is "no provision made by law to help the superannuated" put so large a proportion of 274 Increasing Home Efficiency their salaries into savings instead of present effi- ciency. With 446,133 teachers in the United States, these wastes bear seriously both upon edu- cation and the home. Fortunately, we know the cure of this evil as well as we know the uses of q^uinine. Let a cured patient explain. He is Mr. Forsythe, professor in a small Eastern college. He receives $1,800 a year, is entitled to a pension at the age of sixty-five or after twenty- five years of service, and his wife, in case of his death, will have a widow's allowance. The fear of the future either for him or his, need not steal anything at all from the present. Here is his family budget: Budget of an Eastern College Professor with A Wife and Two Children. Income $1,800 a Year. Food $ 260.00 Shelter (payments on house and farm) 500.00 Clothes and personal expenses: Children $ 60.00 Wife 120.00 Husband 90.00 270.00 Operating Expenses: Fuel ^120.00 Service 72.00 Telephone 18.00 Light and gas 24.00 234.00 Savings and Efficiency 275 Advancement: Life insurance $192.00 Benevolence 84.00 Incidentals 80.00 Surplus 180.00 536.00 $1,800.00 About some of the items in this budget Mr. Forsythe is slightly apologetic; they are the items that look even remotely like savings. Why should they buy a home.^ Mr. Forsythe explains: "Families without children in are able to get pleasant apartments for $20 a month, but our reason for purchasing a house v^as that in this wa.y we secured a very large lot where our children might have plenty of air and sunshine and be safe." Sort of in loco nursemaidce! Now nurse-maids average about five dollars a week — that is, $260 a year — besides food and lodging. To buy that house looks like good business. Professor Forsythe writes : "The natural beauty of our premises — there is a steep rocky slope back of us crowned with oaks and pines — and the privacy and repose are also worth much to us. Almost every year we purchase a few trees or shrubs for our grounds, and we also bring young pines and hemlocks from the woods and set them out where we hope they will grow to be things of beauty. Our home is a pleasant place to live and work in, and a dear refuge to look forward to after hours of outside work. 276 Increasing Home Efficiency "We also bought a little farm in order that we might be able to escape completely from our or- dinary activities during the summer months and live unconventionally in the midst of natural beauty. Most people, doubtless, would not find so long a vacation needful, but we find that only in this way can we recuperate from the wear and tear of the year's work." The Forsythe home-buying, which with many people would be a form of investment, is to them a luxurious indulgence, making them more efii- cient at the present time. But there is life insurance; what is the present value of that.^ Again Mr. Forsythe: "This pays for endowment policies which will mature in from twelve to fifteen years, and we propose to devote the greater part of the money to completing the payments on the house." That food allowance in the budget looks dan- gerously low; but we have taken pains to check up prices in that particular region, and find that butter, eggs and milk are considerably cheaper than in most places, fish at least a third less, while meat, vegetables, and fruit are about the average. Then, as Mr. Forsythe explains: "Our home and farm orchard supply us with abundant apples and pears, and, eating them freely, we purchase relatively less quantities of vegetables." So, evidently, part of the cost of "shelter" ought to be credited to the food account. But the final test of the food supply is the doctor's bill Savings and Efficiency 277 and except for the expenses incident to the birth of the two children and a surgical operation in no way related to too little food, no mention is made of a physician's charge. Let us slide past the easily explained items of fuel, service (occasional help only), clothes (Mrs. Forsythe makes many of the children's clothes), down to the last three items — benevolence, in- cidentals, and surplus. Benevolence includes church dues, contribu- tions to charity, and membership fees in civic and benevolent associations. Incidentals include presents, flowers, theater and concert tickets, railway fares to attend teachers' conventions and "classical organizations," and the eight regular magazines that come Into the house. Mr. Forsythe mentions that they have access to all the best magazines In the college library also. They plan to attend the good plays, operas, and concerts during the year. "Needless to say," he concludes, "we always overrun this appropriation twenty to forty dollars." And this brings us to the last item — surplus, which isn't really a surplus at all, but elbow room in the other departments. It buys them a few good books every year, besides the technical ones for the professor's work; it buys music for Mrs. Forsythe to play and sing; it buys pictures for their walls; and It Is hoarding itself up by littles to buy a new piano in place of the old one. All this is for themselves, of course; now what are they doing for others ? Mr. Forsythe writes : 278 Increasing Home Efficiency "We plan to invite the students as often as we can, by classes, or in groups of four or five for dinner, or to tea on Sunday afternoons. And we are trying to reach some of the foreign population and get them to come to our house. My wife devotes all the time and strength she can to as- sisting in the management of a working-girls' home and a model employment bureau, besides doing a good deal for the young women in our college." "But," Mr. Carton of the Pacific coast, or Mrs. Brownson of the Middle West, might ask, "how about providing for those two children.^ Do you mean to foist penniless offspring upon an already glutted community?" "They'll have an education in place of a home," their father might answer. "But," we can hear Mrs. Taylor pipe up, "do you labor under the delusion that you can edu- cate your children for nothing.'' Look at my ex- perience!" Such questions do not fluster Mr. Forsythe, because, thanks to his pension, he is free to spend all of his income on the present efficiency of his home as a factory for the production of citizens. Something more (this is not included in the bond, and just happens to be within our knowledge) Mr. Forsythe is giving back to the community a lot of first-rate influence on his pupils quite aside from the mere technique of his special subject, and he is giving text-books that toiling youngsters may not indeed struggle with joyously — such is Savings and Efficiency 279 the perverse nature of the young — but which they may at least absorb with profit. And Professor Forsythe writes that his family is fairly typical of those in his college community. Now, if he is right, we have come to the cure of a lot of ills and the solution of a lot of problems. No doubt before the days of pensions there were teachers in high schools and colleges who matched Mr. Forsythe's twofold efficiency, but in the scores of letters that have come to us, his is distinguished by its confident spirit of present freedom. He is joyfully concentrating his entire energy upon his immediate maximum production, while through the letters of his unprotected co-workers runs a pre-occupying concern for the future. We're not for one moment criticising those other teachers. Under the circumstances, how could they do other than they do? But what shall be said of a community which forces them to make a choice between sacrificing their homes and sacrificing their service.^ Yesterday we asked the head of a great public school system: "If you knew that you would have a pension for your old age, and that your family would be provided for if you died, would it make any difi"erence In your work.^" He began to walk up and down the room. " It would make me thirty — no, forty — per cent more efficient right now! The thought of what might happen to them if I were scrapped, is a ball and chain on my foot, holding me back from no end of things I niight and ought to do." 28o Increasing Home Efficiency And just what might happen to them and to him? An old teacher with 43 years of hard work be- hind him writes: "Commencing when I was nineteen years old, my life has been one long struggle. There have been no pleasure trips in the summer nor theater parties in the winter. Love for each other and for God has been our comfort. I find myself at sixty-three years of age without a shelter for old age, depending for future necessities upon the promises of the Bible and the love of my children.'' Now it is not that this man is in danger of being cold or hungry or having no roof over his head, but that after having rendered valuable service to the community, after having brought up and educated five children, after having struggled and denied himself for forty-three years, we allow him to taste this last bitterness of the middle class — and allow to all of ourselves a lifelong foretaste of this bitterness in our own mouths. According to the calculations just published by Mr. Lee Welling Squier, there are at this moment a million and a quarter men and women over sixty- five tasting the bitterness of dependence in the United States. And they're not dependent through their own fault either, but through our collec- tive fault and their personal misfortune, for as the Massachusetts Commission on Old Age Pensions, Annuities and Insurance reports, sixty and one- tenth per cent of the old age dependents who have lost their property attribute their loss to extra ex- Savings and ElBBciency 281 penses on account of sickness and emergencies. It is generally estimated that seventy-two per cent of existing pauperism throughout the United States is attributable to misfortune. And how this middle class does try to save! How it takes out insurance and goes into building and loan associations and supports savings banks! The representative of one of the great life insur- ance companies told us that almost all their endow- ment policies were taken out by people with in- comes between ^2,400 and ^3,000 a year. Here are the average amounts the middle class puts into insurance and savings, compiled from our budgets and classified by occupations. Capitalists $ 70.00 Clergymen io5-99 Farmers 267.38 Physicians 276.00 Miscellaneous professions 3I4-07 Mechanics 3I7-30 Educators 346.56 Clerks, Accountants, salaried employees .... 381.02 Business men 626.93 Obviously the small capitalists do not need to save because they are already living on incomes which are entirely independent of their own earn- ing capacity. The clergymen don't save because they can't — the requirements put upon them are so heavy that instead of being able to save, they run up larger average deficits than any other class. Large provision for the future is not so necessary 282 Increasing Home Efficiency for farmers because in general the farm itself con- stitutes a permanent income. But the others — ! Take the clerks who are on comparatively low paid jobs, and save $381.02 a year. How hard this saving bears upon their homes is shown by the results of a poll taken by a Washing- ton, D. C, newspaper among 10,000 civil service employes. Seventy-one per cent of them indi- cated that their incomes were so low that to save any part of them for old age would be a hardship quite impossible to contemplate. But even sup- pose that this group of the middle class should put all of their annual savings into the bank for the twenty years they may be supposed to hold their positions, what would they have at the end of iti^ — $7,620.40, which at the high rate of six per cent, would provide them with an income of $457.22 — much less than it would cost them to live in decency! Now if this hampering fear of old age so cuts down the efficiency of teachers who are better paid and more sure of their jobs, how much must it decrease the value of the work these clerks give in return for their salaries! And yet how many things — things that are necessary to the efficiency of the home, we make contingent upon the savings which by cutting down the present income may make social efficiency impossible. "We are saving with a view to owning a home of our own," writes one. "We hope to raise a family of children and are Savings and Efficiency* 283 saving and expect to save for their education,'' writes another — making the great social contribu- tion of children dependent upon the power to save. "We have been able to save a larger proportion of our income this year than ever before. My hus- band is forty-one years of age, and we feel that we are at the height of our health and strength and must save for the future when the income may be much smaller," writes a woman, triumphing in the things she is learning to do without. "When I know that we have put by enough, so that we can receive even two-thirds of my hus- band's present salary for the rest of our lives, the whole face of nature will change for me," writes the wife of a Boston salaried man who is foregoing the opportunities of the present to win security for old age. But this Gorgon of thrift is dying — slowly per- haps, hardly more than by inches, but still dying. We are learning that if the home must be a sav- ings bank, it must conserve more precious things than dollars. As the wife of a western engineer says: "Homekeeping, I take it, means more than a matter of endless contriving and economy. When I find that I am too tired at night to be a com- panion to my husband, or that my brain is repeat- y' ing over and over the details of to-morrow's work lest a precious moment be wasted, then I know that my body and brain have received what my engineer relatives would call a 'permanent set,' — that they have passed their elastic limit of strain, 284 Increasing Home Efficiency and will not return of themselves to their normal state. And that is the point at which I believe in substituting money for brain and muscle. Suppose I do throw away the meat-bones without making a delicious soup of them? I am ready to slip into a fresh gown before dinner, to pick a posey for the table, to tell the baby a story, to read with my husband, and to go to bed with a clear conscience and a quiet mind." And so the wife of an Eastern business man: "If anything should happen to my husband, we are provided for and nobody, I don't care who it is or how many millions they own, — nobody has a better time than we do. Nobody's children have better advantages or are more loved and cherished." Now isn't the attitude of mind shown by these two women what we would like to sow broadcast over the race.^ Doesn't happiness, and the quiet mind, the certainty of being able to provide for your children, and of not coming to want your- self, make for home efficiency in the present.'* Because after all, it is the fear of dependency and of the shame we have attached to it that forces people to scrimp and hoard to the present disad- vantage of us all. And as a matter of fact, public provision for aged dependents is not a new thing. Each year the government pays something like ^114,590,068.24 to civil war veterans who average seventy years of age, and while we have no complete statistics of the disbursements of public and private philan- Savings and EflSciency 285 thropies, we know that at least $64,309,900.17 goes into public and private homes for old people through these channels. Here is a community charge of $178,899,968.41 a year. Mr. Squier in his book Old Age Dependency in the United States estimates that other forms of contribution would bring this up to at least $250,000,000. Obviously the money which might provide security for old age is being spent now, but except in the case of the civil war veterans it is spent grudgingly after the mischief has been done, and as a result the community derives a minimum benefit from the investment. Moreover, it is so spent that those who receive it are branded with the disgraceful mark of pauperism. The problem is to disburse this money with honor, — to make it what it really is, a deferred payment to the old for their past service to the community. For even if people have not saved money during their youth, it is idle to say that they have not contributed to the wealth of the State. Besides, as Chancellor David Lloyd-George said before the English House of Commons: "As long as you have taxes upon commodities which are consumed by practically every family in the country, there is no such thing as a non- contributary old age pension scheme. If you tax tea and coffee, sugar, beer and tobacco, you hit everybody one way or another. Indeed when a scheme is financed from public funds, it is just as much a contributary scheme as one financed directly by means of contributions." 286 Increasing Home Efficiency Once we have established the principle that it is for the advantage of society that every normal member of it should live in decency, and once we have established the financial minimum both for decency and efficiency, we shall no longer en- courage those who have not the minimum for efficiency to trim it still further for the sake of savings or insurance. A thrift which encourages them to do this is a social vice not a virtue. Since we do in fact provide for the aged now at a cost of ^250,000,000 a year, why not do it in a way to promote the present efficiency of those to whom the money will ultimately be paid ? If a man takes out an insurance policy, he merely turns over to a private corporation certain siims of money upon which the corporation does ultimately pay a cer- tain interest, but which it uses in the meanwhile to its own very considerable profit. If instead of turning over these sums of money to private busi- ness, he should be free to turn over to the com- munity an equivalent in brain and muscle, would it not profit the community to make deferred pay- ments upon his social service? If retiring pensions promote efficiency among college professors, why would they not do the same among the entire middle class .^ This whole business of individual saving works around In a vicious circle. If you have too small an income to provide against emergencies, you must further reduce your working capital by sav- ing to meet them; if your tenure of work is uncer- tain, you must reduce your chance of enhancing Savings and Efficiency 287 your economic value by saving against unemploy- ment; — the very sense of security which you try to create by saving is destroyed by the necessity of saving. And the remedy for this evil Is a uni- versal system of scientifically administered In- surance against sickness, unemployment and old age. Psychologists tell us that we have Inherited use- less hates and desires and fears from the strange pre-human times, — feelings that serve no protec- tive purpose In this new world we have made for ourselves since our late tree-dwelling. We still have the monkey fear of the great swallowing python, but we apply It to the unwilling worm; the fear of the dark room Is the harmless survival of the fear of lurking beasts; and, worse fear of all, that fear that came with our first power to reason, — fear of the helplessness of age. For very early we saw that the great prizes of food and shelter were only to the strong, and except he provide these out of the strength of his youth, how shall an old man llve.^ It Is for us as an organized community to say whether we shall have savings with fear, or freedom with efficiency. CHAPTER XIV One Answer to Many Questions IT Is now nearly three years since the question raised by our middle-class neighbor in the attractive middle-class suburb when she cried out that she was nothing but a clearing house for the family bills and did not control any of the things that she used In her housekeeping, sent us on a journey of discovery through the middle-class country. We have run up and down the land both personally and by letter, and have piled up about ourselves a great modern kitchen midden of middle- class beliefs and practices. We have not found the middle-class housewife perplexed over how to cook, or clean, over how to serve her meals or how to wash her clothes. The technique of these employments has been pretty well worked out, and the general feeling seems to be that the woman who hasn't mastered them has nobody to blame but herself or her grandmother. Any one who can measure flour In a cup and watch the clock, can cook. Our grandmothers had no call to make this cry that they did not control the things they used in their housekeeping — they did. They made, or grew, or foraged, practically everything they con- 288 One Answer to Many Questions 289 sumed — they and our grandfathers together. If they wanted a chair they built it, if they wanted light they made candles, if they wanted news they went out and collected it from the neighbors. Their problems were close by, under their four hands, and being able men and women they solved them, eventually. But the time must have been when they were as much baffled by their prob- lems as we are by ours today. We are not less able than they were. We are not failing to solve problems which they mastered. We are not degen- erating, but we are struggling vv^ith a span fire new set of original problems. It is as though we were the first who had ever been asked to prove that the square erected on the hypothenuse of a right triangle was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Did the philosopher who first met up with that familiar puzzle crack his heels together and solve it with a gladsome shout .^ Hardly! Our ancestors had easier problems to solve than we have for the very simple reason that theirs were nearer at hand. Ours must be solved at long range. The tools which the middle-class house- wife once used to feed and clothe and educate her children have fled from the middle-class home, and the middle-class housewife, hampered by the length of the lever she must use to control them, bound by the romantic tradition of the "Proper sphere of woman," and terrified at the indeli- cate possibility of appearing unwomanly, flutters ineptly on her threshold. 290 Increasing Home EflBciency Part of her inefficiency would seem to grow out of the mental confusion under which the middle- class woman labors. She seems to think that her function is to preserve the home as a sort of shrine, a thing apart, an end in itself. She does not see it as a part of the great factory for the production of citizens, nor understand that her job is exactly the same as that of any other factory manager — to turn out the product. Shall she preserve the white hands of her sensibilities at the expense of the race. ^ The things with which the on-coming citizens are to be fed and clothed and educated and launched are no longer within the gates of the home. The industrial revolution in sweeping the loom and the distaif into the factory, in trustifying the pro- duction of cloth and food, in substituting the tele- phone and telegraph for the village crier and the neighborhood gossip, the railroad and trolley for the democrat and prairie schooner, the public school for the itinerant pedagogue, has dropped such a boulder into the "circle of woman's in- fluence" as has spread waves to the ends of the earth. So long as women content themselves with fluttering about inside four walls under the delusion that these mark their proper sphere of activity, they cannot so much as grapple the prob- lem of home efficiency. They must do their work where it is to be done if they do it at all. Woman the idler, must become woman the worker. She must do the same work she did before the invention of steam engine and power loom left One Answer to Many Questions 291 her sitting empty handed. She must do the same work her greatgrandmother did, but by the new and improved methods. She must follow her tools of production into the mine, the mill and the factory. It is as much her duty today to see to it that her tools are wisely used in the interest of her home and in fairness to the workers as it ever was. And since production without adequate distribution is vain, it is as much her business as it ever was to control the means of distribution. The evi- dent fact that no woman can do any of these things single handed, is but another proof that she must fit the manner of her work to the new condi- tions. XShe must get out of the individualistic groove in which she is helpless, she must see her home as part of a greater unit to be controlled only by the greater power of many people working together. She must democratize industry as we are striving to democratize government. If the truth were knQwn Politics and Parenthood are pretty close kinT/ In a word th^^one ansv/er to many questions is that the middle-class mother must stop soldiering on her job; she must follow the spinning wheel into the world; she must take up her share of the duties of citizenship. For after all what is the home but a flower pot in which to grow the family tree.f* What are all the family trees for but to furnish the timber for the social building.^ And yet today industry and the home are in a state of abnormal and immoral divorce. The health goes out of industry when it forgets that its only nor- 292 Increasing Home Efficiency mal purpose Is to cooperate with the home, not as equal but as servant, in the perpetuation of the race and the nurture of good citizens. So long as women do not do the work set for them to do, and men make business a gamble and a sport, our homes cannot be efficient. Business is woman's affair as much as man's. The home is man's affair as much as woman's. What we need most today is the domestication of business and the socializa- tion of the home. We have found that the goddess of the Home is Our Lady of Public Service, — not the hired girl. That the altar of the home isn't the cook-stove but the factory furnace, and that when God made homemakers, male and female created He them!^ APPENDIX Individual and Group Budgets A I AHE following budgets have been selected from those we have collected because in 1 every case we have reason to believe that they are correct. In the group budgets, classified by income, occupation and locality we have used some additional budgets which came into our hands after the series printed here was compiled. We have classified the expenditures under seven headings: food, shelter, clothing, operation, ad- vancement, incidentals and deficit. Food includes not only the amount spent in money, but also the estimated value of the food raised. We believe that the minimum expenditure for health is approximately 35c. per adult man per day under the present prices of food stuffs. With this as a basis we have used the scale adopted by the United States Department of Agriculture which is as follows: An adult woman requires .8 as much as an adult man A boy of 15 to 16 " .9 " " " " " " A " " 13 " 14 " .8 " " " " " A " " 12 " .7 " " " " " " A " " 10 " II " .6 " " " " " " 293 294 Appendix A girl of 15 to 16 requires .8 as much as an adult man A " " 13 " 14 A " " 10 " 12 A child from 6 to 9 A " " 2 " 5 A " under 2 .7 " ' ' " " " ' " .6 " ( <( (( « ( " .5 " ' < u u u t " 4 " ' ( (( <( <( ( . .3 « « ( (( (( It ({ In the case of families who have gardens of their own we have used this scale to estimate the value of food raised which we have added to the, cost of food purchased. The cost of shelter in- cludes rent, or taxes, or payment on a mort- gage. Under the heading Operation, arc grouped the items light, heat, refurnishing, repairs, service (which includes laundry and the services of a barber) telephone, express and all other items connected with the running of the home plant. Advancement includes money spent for church, benevolence, health, insurance, savings, travel, recreation, entertainment, education, books, post- age, telegrams and other things not absolutely necessary to the continuance of the family. Where the family runs a deficit, the amount of it is added to the money income in estimating the total income, on the theory that the family has consumed goods to this amount whether they have paid for them or not. As in the case of the food which a farmer's family consumes, the real income is the sum of all the things the family has enjoyed rather than those they have paid for. Appendix 295 Key to items under Advancement "C"— Church "B"— Benevolence "H"— Health **!" — Insurance *'S''— Savings Q i^ 8 h %?= ^ a 8 ^ 8 6 8 8 o o 8 d w w a to 8 O M 8 d fS C4 lo in 8 0) « 5 bO pq 8 ^ 6 8 8 8 O 5 M 1 1 (2 u eg O 2S dl ^1^ a|2 ^1 2; o 1 1 M 6 5z: 8 6 00 i Q 6* 8 v5- ^ 8 8 M tr> O to t^ O OO ro § 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 O M w roso urn Kh- C/3 R 8 8 S^ rO u^ O «0 w t^ r^ T}- 1 s ^ § S > (/3 <^ 8 o M 00 8 o 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 eg 1 1 2 8 1 2 -S 3 M CO ^ tfl >* On 8 to 1 t: ri o lO »o CO 3 J c S2 d _ -1" 1 i 1 21 IS s 1 o •s o 0) o c 1 pq 1 00 1 - 8 6 8 6 00 o 6 "^ q «» «% d 00 1 «8 8.8 »o wo «i MM urn WhHC/3 8 1 O « 00 Ci O to t-l M s ^ 8 % i 55 O H O 8 ^ ^ 8 > 8 8 8 00 8 I So 8 lO Ci in 8 d »o W 8 M 8 8 8 d (S 04 o in ^ in ^ i § ^ lO »o R o a 8 PI M O >o ^1 C3 g a a flj ^1 s? g ■< 1 1 ^ i § CI 1" o 8 H 8 6 ^ 8 ::8 1"" % s «» o 8 00 u o S5 •< > 8 ^> o q «o 6 6 t^ Upq a w c/D 8 8 8 8 ^ 8 d d »A 8 8 UM hH c/: K < 1 § 3. 8 8 1 8 8 o6 8 1 8 i M 8 8 M 1 o 8 6 o 8 fa 1 1 8 i 8 M 8 8 1 ©9. 1 1 1 5 o 2 «o ^J| ^|1 a; 1 E^ 1 1 6 h 4 a i 8 6 8 1"" 8 i' ■ 8 '• 6 "^ 1 Q ^ Inciden- tals 69.00 8 8 CO 8 1 < § HI U PQ ffi »-i c/2 8 8 8 8 8 8 § 8 8 8 8 8 8 1 8 8 8 U PQ W h-i c/5 00000 rr o\ fo »^ U W K W C/3 10 ■^ en #^ 8 8 1^ 8 a si 8 8 8 M 8 a a K CO 8 8 8 8 8 IN CO fn 1 8 § % § 1 s e3 %% 1 1 11 00 VO CO CO a s i 1 to 1 c en j 1 3 z 8 4^ t^ 6 ^ 1^ 8 -A 6 " 12: 8 6 " 8 Q 0* 00 i^ F §8 o 9 CO CO VO H 1 ro VO OvoO VO CO M » to o U w ^ 1 ,. o t^ r^ t^O t^ to <> ^ t^ *^ 1 8 ^8 8 (J? > 8 8 8 8 to 1 O 1 w 8 to 8 eg 8 8 fO fe 1 8 S 1 8 1 ! ©9^ 1 M o" CO 5* M 2 1 >< < d c ^ a g Is CI ^1! ill 1 1 s 1 1 "1 1 H 8 6 " 8 -J 8 ^cg H D Eh Q «» k 00 00 8 j O O O Q w lo d o 00 fN M t^ M Ci o urn Kh^ CO 8 8 8 8 2 ^ S 8 UPQK^^c/5 8 1 1 888 82.8 O t^ *N. Qi O O ^0 t^ 8 8 o z 8 eg 8 00 eg 8 8 6 to (2 73 ■1 3. 8 2 bo § 1 5 ■ u - 4 J O 6 '^ 8 fO 6 " 8 CI Q ^0 O 6 ^" 0% is 8 to 8 w H Z u u z <: > ^ 8888 \0 O On lO ^ lO lO rt O W W w c/2 M IH in 8 8 8 U M W M CA) H 00 t^ rO •^- to t^ On to M 00 o lO M to to CO rO urn M WC/5 J? CO NO ueQ ffi »^ c/2 z o Oil O ^ s § 8 CO 8 d to 8 O Cloth- ing 8 6 8 td 8 8 to 1 8 Q 1 1 § v8 M in 1$ ^ 3 S. to O ^ 8 eg z >< s 8 10 t^ ts 10 Ov ■^ vo 1 § 8 »o t (/> 8 d 8 8 d 8 8 00 8 i on 8 eg 8 -I- 10 Q 1 4 8 i 1> 8 1 5 fcjO § pq &^ 1 s 1 i CO 1 8 M a: 2 c c 2 ^1 < 1 1 Ij § ° > "i i 8 •r" 8 =08 6 *^ 8 08 6 '^ 8 d s s «» «2 1^ -* 8 8 8 1 § 1 Upq Wwc/5 1 88888 « \o >o o d 8 o o 8 do d lO M o 8 1 O O fO 00 o 4 t^ MM 2; o H •< g o § M § 8 8 «9- 8 2 8 8 8 1 8 i 8 i C/3 8 8 8 1 8 vd M M 1 p< 8 1 8 5 8 in o o to ro vd « 5; O ©> 8 i S ** 4 oo 22 Hi 04 < i 8 c 8 6 "' 8 si 6 ^" c Q M g2 1^ £2S S M < 1 M M lO Ov 0. Tl- t>. t^ 8 1 8 8 A ^ s in 1 o H u a. 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