Stories from Everybody's Magazine

Part 5 out of 8

the two shots repeated, and at the end of a little more than half
an hour all the members of the drive were gathered on the
hillside below the crest.

Then the Colonel explained the reason for his signal. The rhino
was not there. We might still find him, and we might not. The
chances were now that we should not. He had probably left the
country for good and was already miles away. In the meanwhile a
good opportunity offered for rounding up the herd of hartebeests
in the plain below and driving them up the hillside to the
cameras.

On top of the hill was a small clearing, the edges of which were
fringed with scrub. While the Colonel and the cowboys maneuvered
to circle the herd, Kearton placed the cameras in the clearing,
with the northern line of scrub as a background for the intended
picture.

For a long time there was silence. Then suddenly the scrub sprang
into life, and the next instant the herd dashed into the clearing
in a cloud of dust that was pierced by a hundred startled eyes
and tossing horns. At the sight of the cameras the herd broke and
scattered in every direction; but the horsemen, pressing them
close, roped one in the open, and held him to have his picture
taken, and then let him go.

On the second drive, over the lowlands to the east, the porters
worked better; but, although we covered a far greater territory,
the total result was the roping and photographing of a serval-cat
that we flushed on the way back to camp.

The third drive carried us well out toward the southern volcano
where we had seen the lions on the march from Rugged Rocks, but
this time there was no trace of them anywhere in the land. Means,
however, found a cheetah, and the two faint reports of his signal
brought us together on the run.

We came upon Means seated on his horse in a bit of the veldt that
was covered all over with tufts of rank grass, so that it looked
like a swamp that had been dry for ages. Near by ran a small,
shallow donga.

When the rest of us rode up to him, he merely pointed at one of
the tufts of grass behind which the cheetah lay crouched.

There followed a brief delay, while a plan of maneuver was made
and expounded, while the tripods were set up, the cameras screwed
on, and the ropers moved out to their appointed places.

Then all at once the cheetah started, and, instead of breaking
away, as we had calculated he would, he doubled on his tracks and
made for the shelter of the donga. It was a quick, sharp
race--and the cheetah won. He hid in the scrub at the bottom of
the ditch. The native porters collected there and complacently
regarded the scene, and the members of the drive ranged
themselves on either bank and offered innumerable suggestions as
to what had better be done next.

But in the midst of it all the Colonel put an emphatic end to the
discussion. He rode into the donga with his rope swinging free,
and when the cheetah failed to spring at him, he dropped the
noose over the animal's head and dragged him out on to the open
veldt, where his picture could be properly taken.

The black porters looking on commenced speaking in low tones in
their native tongue, and nodded and grinned at each other as they
had done before. But this time Mac was among them. Mac was
Kearton's tent-boy. He originally came from Somaliland and spoke
English. He was called upon to explain what the porters said.

"Please," he began. "They are very bad men, these people, but
don't be sorry. They say--they say that, of course, the white
gentlemen are able to do what they want to do, but just the same
they are all crazy."

That night we held our second consultation. Ulyate had returned
from Kijabe with the extra wagonload of supplies, which placed us
in a position to move again immediately. The question now arose
as to whether it would be best to remain where we were a few days
longer to gain more experience, or to trek at once over the Mau,
with a chance at giraffe on the way, and so on into the Sotik
country, with its alluring promises of both rhino and lion.

By this time we had hunted the Rift Valley thoroughly. During the
seven days since we had left Kijabe, the expedition had roped and
photographed a cheetah, a serval-cat, a hartebeest, an eland, and
a wart-hog. Although we had been given no opportunity yet to find
out how we were going to hold a rhino or what we would do when
the lion charged, still, in addition to our success with the
lesser animals, we had acquired something else of value. All the
members of the expedition had learned to work well together--in
all the usual emergencies each man knew what was expected of him
and could likewise make a ready guess as to what the others
intended doing. Thus, in spite of the fact that on an expedition
of this kind it is the unexpected that always happens, our
experience only added to our confidence that when we eventually
encountered one of the larger beasts we should get him.

The consultation ended with the unanimous decision to start for
the Sotik at dawn.

In the October number Mr. Scull will relate the; adventures of
the Buffalo Jones African Expedition in Lassoing Giraffe and
Rhinoceros.

*****************************************************************
VOL. XXIII September 1910 NO. 3

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 368-379 part 2.}

By WILLIAM HARD

II

THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT.

Dear General Reader, please let that sentence stand for the
thousand words (much like those of a competent barker at the door
of a show-tent) which you usually oblige an author to expend on
enticing you into reading his article. Think how much time you
save by walking straight into the tent and observing that--

THE First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was
held in 1908 at Freiburg in Switzerland. It as no improvised
amateur uplift, private-theatricals affair.

The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of
Freiburg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics
were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members
numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the
characteristic points of the three rival breeds of household-arts
instruction--the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were
made to the normal schools of Freiburg, Berne, and Zurich, in
each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of
household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and
ideas about the education of girls for their duties as
house-keepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted to
establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent
International Information Committee.

Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have
almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which
even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample
empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those
barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and
ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies
fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs
the spectators to say "thumbs-down" and let her put it out of its
agony altogether--in such an age there comes, at Freiburg, in
this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts,
the most serious, the most notable, recognition. ever given in
any age to the home's economic value.

A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the
fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's
own as well as Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles--not
always all that they are cranked up to be.

Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds
to the mourners' bench every year.

At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in Home
Economics was gathered this last spring. They were seven. And as
most of them took likewise a degree in Education, it may be
assumed that they will go forth to spread the gospel.

Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who next year will head the
just-organized Department of Home Economics in the University of
Kansas, is a novel type of new woman in that she has earned the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took
graduate work in the Department of Home Administration in the
University of Chicago and achieved her doctorate with an
investigation into "The Effect of Cooling on the Digestibility of
Starch." What she found out was subsequently printed as a
bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture.

In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over The Home,
it perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic
science bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture
excite a demand for a million copies.

It is a wake like Mike McCarthy's.

Mike was lookin' iligant
As he rested there in state.

But

When the fun was at its height
McCarthy sat up straight.

The ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary
successes) goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has
been in this case--great enough to be felt all the way around the
world.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the East. Miss Ume
Tsuda's Institute at Tokyo (which stands so high that its
graduates are allowed to teach in secondary schools without
further government examination) has installed courses in English
domestic science as well as in the domestic science of Japan.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the West. King's
College, of the University of London, has organized a three-year
course leading to the degree of Mistress of Home Science, and has
also established a "Post-Graduates' Course in Home Science," in
which out of fourteen students (in this its first year of
existence) four are graduates of the courses of academic study of
Oxford or Cambridge.

It is being felt in the United States at every educational level.

It has familiarized us with household arts in the public schools,
and we are not astonished to learn that in the public schools of
Boston in every grade above the third, there is sewing or
cooking, or both, for 120 minutes every week for every girl.

It has accustomed us to such news as that in Illinois there are
fifty-eight public high schools in which instruction is offered
in one or more of the three following subjects: Food, Clothing,
or The Home.

It has brought us to the point of expecting domestic science in
all schools of agriculture and of regarding it as natural for the
legislature of Montana to appropriate $50,000 to the State
Agricultural College for a woman's dormitory.

It has cushioned the shock of the tidings from the University of
California to the effect that entrance credit will this fall be
given for high school domestic science work.

We are reduced to equanimity in the face of the fact (which might
have frenzied Alexander Hamilton) that Columbia University,
through its Teachers College, is offering courses in Elementary
Cookery, in Shirt-waists, in Domestic Laundering, and in
Housewifery.

And at last, when we see the resuscitated home making its way
even into the really-truly, more-than-masculinely, academic
Eastern women's colleges, we rush up to the Mike McCarthy of this
case and assure him warmly that we were not deceived for a moment
by his apparent demise, having just learned that President Hazard
of Wellesley College, in her latest commencement address, said:
"I hope the time may soon come when we can have a department of
domestic science, which shall give a sound basis for the problems
of the household "

What does it all mean?

"Fellow-Citizens," said the colored orator reported by Dr. Paul
Monroe of Columbia, "what am education? Education am the
palladium of our liberties and the grand pandemonium of
civilization."

But it does mean something, this Home Economics disturbance. AND
SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IT SEEMS TO.

II

Mr. Edward T. Devine. of the New York Charity Organization
Society, has distinguished himself in the field of economic
thought as well as in the field of active social reform. Among
his works is a minute but momentous treatise on "The Economic
Function of Women." It is really a plea for the proposition that
to-day the art of consuming wealth is just as important a study
as the art of producing it.

"If acquisition," says Mr. Devine, "has been the idea which in
the past history of economics has been unduly emphasized,
expenditure is the idea which the future history of the science
will place beside it."

We have used our brains while getting hold of money. We are going
to use our brains while getting rid of it. We have studied
banking, engineering, shop practice, cost systems, salesmanship.
We are going to study food values, the hygiene of clothing, the
sanitary construction and operation of living quarters, the
mental reaction of amusements, the distribution of income, the
art of making choices, according to our means, from among the
millions of things, harmful and helpful, ugly and beautiful,
offered to us by the producing world.

Mr. Devine ventures to hope that "we may look for a radical
improvement in general economic conditions from a wiser use of
the wealth which we have chosen to produce."

This enlarged view of the economic importance of Consumption
brings with it a correspondingly enlarged view of the economic
importance of the Home. "If the Factory," says Mr. Devine, "has
been the center of the economics which has had to do with
production, the Home will displace the Factory as the center of
interest in a system which gives due prominence to Enjoyment and
Use."

"There will result," continues Mr. Devine, "an increased respect
on the part of economists for the industrial function which woman
performs," for "there is no economic function higher than that of
determining how wealth shall be used," so that "even if man
remain the chief producer of wealth and woman remain the chief
factor in determining how wealth shall be used, the economic
position of woman will not be considered by those who judge with
discrimination to be inferior to that of man."

Mr. Devine then lays out for the economist a task in the
discharge of which the innocent bystander will sincerely wish him
a pleasant trip and a safe return.

"It is the present duty of the economist," says Mr. Devine, "to
accompany the wealth expender to the very threshold of the home,
that he may point out, with untiring vigilance, its emptiness,
caused not so much by lack of income as by lack of knowledge of
how to spend wisely."

Mr. Deville's proposition therefore would seem finally to
sanction some such conclusion as this:

Physical science and social science (and common sense) are making
such important contributions to the subject of the rearing of
children and to the subject of the maintenance of wholesome and
beautiful living conditions and to the subject of the use of
leisure that, while the home woman has lost almost all of the
productive industries which she once controlled, she has
simultaneously gained a whole new field of labor. Consumption has
ceased to be merely PASSIVE and has become ACTIVE. It has ceased
to be mere ABSORPTION and has become CHOICE. And the active
choosing of the products of the world (both spiritual and
material) in connection with her children, her house, and her
spare time has developed for the home woman into a task so broad,
into an art so difficult, as to require serious study.

We have quoted at length from Mr. Devine's discourse because it
is recognized as the classic statement of the case and because it
is warmly commended by such women as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as
scientist and vision as philosopher have made her the most
authoritative personality in the American Home Economics
Association. (That association, by the way, has some fifteen
hundred due-paying members.)

The scales fall from our eyes now and we see at least one thing
which we had not seen before. We had supposed that sewing and
cooking were the vitals of the Home Economics movement. Not at
all! The home woman might cease altogether to sew and to cook
(just as she has ceased altogether to spin, weave, brew, etc.)
without depriving the Home Economics movement of any considerable
part of its driving power. Sewing and cooking are productive
processes. They add economic value to certain commodities;
namely, cloth and food. But it is not Production, it is
Consumption, which the Home Economics movement is at heart
devoted to.

This is plainly set forth by some of its most zealous workers.
Thus Edna D. Day, at the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics
in 1908, was more or less sorry that "domestic science has come
to be so largely sewing and cooking in our schools," was quite
willing to look at the white of the eye of the fact that "more
and more we are buying ready-made clothes and ready-cooked
foods," and marked out the policy of her "Survey Course in Home
Economics" at the University of Missouri in the statement that
"sewing and cooking are decreasingly home problems, while the
problems of wise buying, of adjusting standards of living to
income, and of developing right feelings in regard to family
responsibilities are increasingly difficult."

To choose and use the world's resources intelligently on behalf
of family and community--in this Mr. Devine sees a new field of
action, in this Mrs. Richards sees a new field of education.

Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else
continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced
upon them by Florence Nightingale. "Three-fourths of the mischief
in women's lives," said she, "arises from their excepting
themselves from the rule of training considered necessary for
men."

But what, in this case, is the training proposed?

The answer to that question will cause some more scales to fall
from our eyes. Just as we have seen that Home Economics does not
consist essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that
Consumption is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in
which electrical engineering, department store buying,
railroading, cotton manufacturing, medicine, and the other
occupations of the outside world are specialized technigues. Home
Economics will not narrow women's education but in the end will
enlarge it, because Consumption, instead of being a specialty, is
a generality so broad as almost to glitter.

III

AT Menomonie, Wisconsin, Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of
the National Education Association, has established a Homemakers'
School. It does not turn out teachers. Its course of instruction
is solely for the prospective housewife.

The first grand division of study is The House.

We here observe that the housewife is going to be something of a
Sanitary Engineer, since she studies Chemistry, Physics, and
Bacteriology in their "application to such subjects as the
heating, lighting, ventilation, and plumbing of a house." It is
thought that knowledge of this sort "will go a long way toward
improving the health conditions of the country."

We also observe that the housewife is going to be something of an
Interior Decorator, since she studies "design, color, house
planning and furnishing."

She also acquires some skill as Purchasing Agent, Bookkeeper, and
Employer of Labor when she takes the course on Household
Management and studies "the proper apportioning of income among
the different lines of home expenditures, the systematizing and
keeping of household accounts, and the question of domestic
service."

The second grand division is Food Study and Preparation.

Here the housewife becomes, to some extent, a Dietitian, studying
"the chemical processes in the preparation and digestion of
foods," and considering the question "how she shall secure for
the family the foods best suited to the various activities of
each individual."

Here, likewise, she makes a start toward being a Pure Food
Expert, through a study of "physical and chemical changes induced
in food products by the growth of molds, yeasts, and bacteria,"
and a start toward being a Health Officer, through a study of
"bacteria in their relation to disease, sources of infection,
personal and household disinfection."

Nor does she omit to acquire some of the technique of the
Physical Director through a course in Physiology bearing on
"digestion, storage of energy, rest, sleep, exercise, and
regularity of habits."

Of course, in her work in cookery, she pays some attention to
special cookery for invalids.

The third grand division, that of Clothing and Household Fabrics,
produces a Dressmaker, a Milliner, and an Embroiderer, as well as
a person trained to see to it that "the expenditure for clothing
shall be correct in proportion to the expenditure for other
purposes."

The fourth grand division, the Care of Children, is of course
limitless. The rearing of the human young is, as we all know and
as Mr. Eliot of Harvard has insisted, the most intellectual
occupation in the world. Here the homemaker applies all the
knowledge she has gained from her study of the hygiene of foods
and of the hygiene of clothes, and also makes some progress
toward becoming a Trained Nurse and a Kindergartner by means of
researches into "infant diseases and emergencies," "the stages of
the mental development of the child," "the child's imagination
with regard to truth-telling and deceit," "the history of
children's books," and "the art of story-telling."

Passing over the fifth grand division, Home Nursing and
Emergencies (in which the pupil learns simply "the use of
household remedies," "the care of the sick-room," etc.), we come
to the wide expanse of the sixth grand division, Home and Social
Economics.

The work in this division begins with a study of the primitive
evolution of the home and comes on down to the present time, when
"the passing of many of the former lines of woman's work into the
factory has brought to many women leisure time which should be
spent in social service."

Note that last fact carefully. Home Economics is no attempt to
drive women back into home seclusion. On the contrary, it is an
attempt to bring the home and its occupants into the scientific
and sociological developments of the outside world.

For this reason, in traversing the division of Home and Social
Economics, the pupil encounters "an attempt to determine problems
in civic life which seem to be a part of the duties of women."

Seventhly and lastly, there is a division dedicated to
Literature, in which "a systematic course in reading is carried
on through the two years." Indispensable! No degree of
proficiency at inserting calories in correct numbers in to Little
Sally's stomach could atone for lack of skill at leading Little
Sally herself in morning strolls through the "Child's Garden of
Verses," with trowel in hand to dig up the gayest plants and
reset them in the memory.

Which brings us back to the observation that the Consumption of
Wealth is a generality.

The homemaker may happen to be a specialist in some one
direction, but it is clear that she cannot simultaneously know as
much about food values as the real dietitian, as much about the
physical care of her child as the real trained nurse, as much
about the wholesomeness of her living arrangements as the real
sanitarian, as much about music as the Thomas Orchestra, as much
about social service as Mr. Devine, and as much about poems as
Mr. Stevenson. Her peculiar equipment, if she is a good
homemaker, is a round of experience and a bent of mind which make
it possible for her to cooperate intelligently with the
dietitian, the trained nurse, the sanitarian, the Thomas
Orchestra, Mr. Devine, Mr. Stevenson, and the various other
representatives of the various other specialized techniques of
the outside world.

It follows that her school discipline cannot be too
comprehensive. No other occupation demands such breadth of sense
and sensibility. One could make a perfectly good cotton
manufacturer on the basis of a very narrow training. One cannot
make a good consumer without a really LIBERAL EDUCATION.

For this reason it becomes necessary to resist certain
narrownesses in certain phases of Home Economics.

One of these narrownesses is the assumption that because a thing
happens to be close to us it is therefore important. We have
heard lecturers insist that because a house contains drain-pipes
a woman should learn all about drain-pipes. But why? In most
communities drain-pipes are installed and repaired and in every
way controlled by gentlemen who are drain-pipe specialists. The
woman who lives in the house has no more real need of a knowledge
of the structural mysteries of drain-pipes than a reporter has of
a knowledge of the structural mysteries of his typewriting
machine. The office mechanic fixes all that for him, and, so far
as his efficiency as a reporter is concerned, an investigation of
his faithful keyboard's internal arrangements would be in most
cases an amiable waste of time.

Another possible narrowness is the attempt to manufacture
"cultural backgrounds" for various important but quite
safe-and-sane household tasks.

For instance, in the books and in the courses of instruction (of
college grade) on "The House" we have sometimes observed
elaborate accounts of the evolution of the human home, beginning
with the huts of the primitive Simianians. And in pursuing the
very essential subject of "Clothes and Fabrics" we have not
infrequently found ourselves in the midst of spacious preliminary
dissertations on the structure of the loom, beginning with that
which was used by the Anthropenguins.

Now we would not for the world speak disparagingly of looms or
huts. We have ourselves examined some of them in the Hull House
Museum in Chicago and in the woods of Canada, and have found them
instructive. We suggest only that college life is short, that the
college curriculum is crowded, and that (except possibly for
those students who are especially interested in anthropology or
in industrial evolution) it would surely be a misfortune to learn
the Simianian hut and to miss Rossetti's "House of Life," or to
get the impression that as a "cultural background" for
shirtwaists the Anthropengruinian loom can really compete with
Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."

If this occasional tendency toward exaggerating the importance of
drain-pipes, window-curtains, and door-mats were to grow strong,
and if girls, as a class, should be required to spend any large
proportion of their time on the specialized history and sociology
of feminine implements and tasks while the boys were still in the
current of the affairs of the race, we should indeed want
President Thomas of Bryn Mawr to repeat on a thousand lecture
platforms her indignant assertion of the fact that "nothing more
disastrous for women, or for men, can be conceived of than
specialized education of women as a sex."

These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the
expression of our personal opinion that Home Economics, like
every new idea, carries with it large quantities of dross which
will have to be refined out in the smelter of trial. The real
metal in it is its attempt to establish the principle that
intelligent Consumption is an important and difficult task. For
that reason it will not only desire but demand the utmost
equality of educational opportunity. And women, like men, will
continue to get their "cultural backgrounds" in the great
achievements of the whole race, where they can hold converse with
Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and
George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan
of Arc and St. John.

The woman voiced a great truth who said that the soul which can
irradiate the numberless pettinesses of home management (and it
is folly to deny that there ARE numberless pettinesses in it) is
the soul "nourished elsewhere." Think it over. It tells the
story. Whether that "elsewhere" is the deep recesses of her own
religious nature or the wide stretches of the great arts and
sciences, it is always an "elsewhere."

Let that be granted, as it must be granted. Let us say that there
shall be no abridgment of the offerings of so-called academic
education. What does a course of study like that of Mr. Harvey's
Homemakers' School attempt to add to academic education?

Principally three things.

First: Certain manual arts.

Second: Certain domestic applications of the physical and
sociological sciences.

Third: Money Sense in Expenditure (in the course on Household
Management).

The last of these three things is appearing in many places. At
the University of Illinois, for instance, Professor Kinley, now
delegate from the United States to the Pan-American Congress, has
given courses in Home Administration for women which he has
regarded as of equal importance with his courses in Business
Administration for men.

At the University of Chicago, in the Department of Household
Administration, Course 44 is on "The Administration of the House"
and includes "the proper apportionment of income."

The business man says: "My sales cost, or my manufacturing cost,
or my office-force cost, is such and such a per cent. of my total
cost. When it goes above that, I want to know why; and I find
out; and, if there isn't a mighty good reason for its going up, I
make it go down again to where it was." Shall we come to the day
when in spending the money which has been earned in business we
shall say: "Such and such a per cent. to food; and such and such
a per cent. to clothes; and such and such a per cent. to shelter;
and such and such a per cent. to health and recreation; and such
and such a per cent. to good works; and such and such other per
cents. to various other purposes?" Shall we come to the day when
we shall consume wealth with as much forethought and with as much
balance of judgment between conflicting claims as we now exhibit
in acquiring wealth?

They are trying to develop this "Costs System for Home
Expenditures" in many of the schools and departments of Home
Economics to-day. They believe that most people, because of not
looking ahead and because of not making definite plans based on
previous experience, come to the contemplation of their bills on
the first of each month with every reason to confess that they
have bought those things which they ought not to have bought and
have left unbought those things which they ought to have bought.
But it is not only a matter of reaching a systematic instead of a
helter-skelter enjoyment of the offerings of the world. It is
also a matter of reaching, by study of money values, a mental
habit of economy. And it comes at a time when that habit is
needed.

We are just beginning to realize in the United States that we
cannot spend all our annual earnings on living expenses and still
have a surplus for fresh capital for new industrial enterprises.
We are on the point of perceiving that we are cramping and
stunting the future industrial expansion of the country by our
personal extravagance. We shall soon really believe Mr. James J.
Hill when he says that "every dollar unprofitably spent is a
crime against posterity."

When international industrial competition reaches its climax,
that nation will have an advantage whose people feel most keenly
that the wise expenditure of income is a patriotic as well as a
personal duty.

But is this a matter for women alone? Do not men also consume?
Are there no vats in Milwaukee, no stills in Kentucky, no
factories wrapping paper-rings around bunches of dead leaves at
Tampa? Are there no men's tailors, gents' furnishing shops,
luncheons, clubs, banquets, athletics, celebrations? And as for
home expenditures themselves, is the man simply to bring the
plunder to the door, get patted on the head, and trot off in
search of more plunder? We must doubt if economy will be reached
by such a route. We find ourselves agreeing rather with the Home
Economics lecturer who said: "There never yet was a family income
really wisely expended without cooperation in all matters between
husband and wife."

The Massachusetts legislature has passed a law looking toward the
teaching of Thrift in the public schools. Boys and girls need it
equally. And we venture to surmise that in so far as the new art
and science of Consumption is concerned with wise spending, the
bulk of its teachings ultimately will be enjoyed by both sexes.
It will not be, to any great extent, a specialized education for
women.

So much for the "Money Sense in Expenditure" which a full Home
Economics course adds to "academic" education. The more we admit
its value, the more convinced we must be that it ought to include
every kind of expenditure and both kinds of human being.

A precisely similar conviction arises with regard to those
"domestic applications of the physical and sociological sciences"
which a full Home Economics course adds to an "academic"
education.

Those "domestic" applications are most of them broadly "human"
applications. They bear on daily living, exercise, fresh air,
personal cleanliness, diet, sleep, the avoidance of contagion,
methods of fighting off disease, general physical efficiency.
They all amount to what Mrs. Ellen H. Richards calls Right
Living. She would have four R's instead of three: Reading,
Riting, Rithmetic, and Right Living.

Now is Right Living to be only for girls?

Mr. Eliot of Harvard does not think so. In a recent "Survey of
the Needs of Education," he said:

"Public instruction in preventive medicine must be provided for
all children and the hygienic method of living must be taught in
all schools. . . . To make this new knowledge and skill a
universal subject of instruction in our schools, colleges, and
universities is by no means impossible--indeed, it would not even
be difficult, for it is a subject full of natural history as well
as social interest. . . . American schools of every sort ought to
provide systematic instruction on public and private hygiene,
diet, sex hygiene, and the prevention of disease and premature
death, not only because these subjects profoundly affect human
affections and public happiness, but because they are of high
economic importance."

A large part of Home Economics is simply Living Conditions. It is
simply the lessons of Bacteriology, Chemistry, Physiology, and
Sociology about the common facts of daily physical and social
existence.

It may very well be, therefore, that what Mr. Eliot had in mind
will not only come to pass but will even exceed his expectations.
It may very well be that the educational policy of the future was
correctly search-lighted by Miss Henrietta I. Goodrich (who used
to direct the Boston School of Housekeeping before it was merged
into Simmons College) when she said:

"We need to have courage to break the present courses in
household arts and domestic science into their component parts
and begin again on the much broader basis of a study of living
conditions. Our plea would be this: that instruction in the facts
of daily living be incorporated in the state's educational system
from the primary grades through the graduate departments of the
universities, with a rank equal to that of any subject that is
taught, AS REQUIRED WORK FOR BOTH BOYS AND GIRLS."

We revert now finally to the "manual arts" which a full course in
Home Economics adds to an "academic" education. In this matter,
just as in the matter of Money Sense in Expenditure and in the
matter of Right Living, we observe that the ultimate issue of the
movement is not so much a specialized education for women as a
practical efficiency in the common things of life for men and
women both.

A reasonable proficiency in manual arts will some day be the
heritage of all educated people. Mr. Eliot, in his "Survey of the
Needs of Education," speaks appreciatingly of his father's having
caused him to learn carpentry and wood-turning. He goes on to
say:

"This I hold to be the great need of education in the United
States--the devoting of a much larger proportion of the total
school time to the training of the eye, ear, and hand."

It follows, then, that cooking and sewing for girls in the
elementary schools must be made just as rigorous a discipline for
eye and hand as wood-working is for boys. It even follows that
boys and girls will often get their manual training together.

It will not be a case of "household drudgery" for the girls while
the boys are studying civics.

Somewhere in this article (and as close to this paragraph as we
can get the Art Director to put it) the reader will find a
picture of the "living room" of the "model" house of the
Washington-Allston Elementary School in Boston. The boys and
girls of graduating grade in that school give four hours a week
to matters connected with the welfare of that house. They have
furnished it throughout with their own handiwork, the girls
making pillow-cases, wall-coverings, window-curtains, etc., and
the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards, etc. Succeeding
classes will furnish it again. THE REASON WHY MR. CRAWFORD, THE
MASTER OF THE SCHOOL, CHOSE TO HAVE A HOUSE FOR A MANUAL TRAINING
LABORATORY WAS SIMPLY THAT A HOUSE OFFERS AMPLER OPPORTUNITIES
THAN ANY OTHER KIND OF PLACE FOR INSTRUCTION IN THE PRACTICAL
EFFICIENCIES OF DAILY LIVING FOR BOTH SEXES.

The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training
in design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a
bigger training in diet by doing more of the cooking.

IV

LAST month's article ended with the inquiry whether the new
education for homemaking would clash seriously with the modern
young woman's necessary education for money-earning. We conclude
that it will not.

Such developments as the long, specialized, four-year course in
Household Economics at Simmons College in Boston are not here in
point. That Simmons course is more than an education for
home-making. It is an education for earning money by teaching
home-making or by becoming (among other things) a dietitian in a
hospital, or a manager of a lunch-room, or an interior decorator.

Our subject is not Home Economics as a money-earning occupation
for a few women, but Home Economics as part of the education of
all women.

In that aspect it does not seem likely to result in any "special
feminine education" of such bulk as to withdraw women, in any
serious degree, from the general education of the race. This is
undeniably true, provided our observations have been correct
that----

1. Home Economics is at heart Consumption, and must be so because
the home woman is more and more purely a consumer.

2. Consumption is the broadest of generalities, requiring the
broadest of liberal educations.

3. So far as manual arts are concerned, the "non-academic"
cookery of the girl is balanced by the "non-academic" carpentry
of the boy.

4. Right Living and Wise Spending will, to a great extent, get
diffused throughout the whole educational system for boys and
girls, men and women, alike.

If there remains (and there does remain) certain further
specialization which the average girl needs in order to be a good
wife, mother, and home-maker, she will get it in "finishing
courses" furnished at the various levels of the educational
system, when she leaves school, or else (better still) she will
get it in "continuation schools" for adults to which she may
resort when she is actually going to be a wife, mother, or
home-maker.

Why learn really technical specialized things years and years
before they are needed? Why learn them at a time when it is not
certain that they will be needed at all?

The modern postponement of marriage is here a controlling
element.

The fact that in Boston, among women from thirty to thirty-four
years of age, 297 out of every 1,000 (more than a quarter) are
still unmarried is usually put down to a scarcity of men. That
scarcity is exaggerated.

Observe the comparative numbers of unmarried women and of
unmarried men in that age-period in Boston:

Unmarried Women 8,081
Unmarried Men 10,651.

Observe further:

The total number of men of all conjugal conditions in the
age-period in question is 28,603.

A little work with pencil and paper will now still further weaken
the scarcity theory by revealing the fact that in Boston, among
men from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 372 out of every
1,000 are still single.

Social conditions in rural communities tend to approach those of
urban communities. Social conditions in the West tend to approach
those in the East. Boston is not eccentric. It is only ahead.

"Continuation School" instruction in Home Economics for engaged
and married women is a form of education beginning to appear in
every part of the world.

But it lies beyond the woman's period of money-earning. How long
is that period? And what are the social and racial consequences
of the fact that (speaking generally) the more highly prepared
modern men and women are to transmit intelligence to posterity,
the more steadily do they tend to give their most vigorous years
to singleness?

----I'LL NIVER GO HOME AGAIN!

By ARTHUR STRINGER

I'll niver go home again,
Home to the ould sad hills,
Home through the ould soft rain,
Where the curlew calls and thrills!

For I thought to find the ould wee house,
Wid the moss along the wall!
And I thought to hear the crackle-grouse,
And the brae-birds call!

And I sez, I'll find the glad wee burn,
And the bracken in the glen,
And the fairy-thorn beyont the turn,
And the same ould men!

But the ways I'd loved and walked, avick,
Were no more home to me,
Wid their sthreets and turns av starin' brick,
And no ould face to see!

And the ould glad ways I'd helt in mind,
Loike the home av Moira Bawn,
And the ould green turns I'd dreamt to find,
They all were lost and gone!

And the bairns that romped by Tullagh Burn
Whin they saw me sthopped their play--
Through a mist av tears I tried to turn
And ghost-like creep away!

And I'll niver go home again!
Home to the ould lost years,
Home where the soft warm rain
Drifts loike the drip av tears!

*****************************************************************
Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 486-496 part 3.}

By

WILLIAM HARD

III LOVE DEFERRED

Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away
on a career, he were going away on a comet.

She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time
she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't
got angry and insisted on marrying him.

Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance
put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama,
"Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any
other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a
thin, high note of fine pain.

We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too
professional. He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough
and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which
are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.

When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one
more year to go in engineering school.

How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the
last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen
months. The present professors require three years.

In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for
four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for
nine months in each of four years.

As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill
by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be
generally recognized that a four-year technical course following
the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those
who are to fill important positions; and the University would
urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies
over a period of five or six years."

John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in
the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique
courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of
Science.

He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two
biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the
assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard
wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen
cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total
income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he
was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of
Science.

The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of
those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John
didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so
often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font
nor so many to the cemetery.

Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.

Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at
random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The
class of 1671!

It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't
be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining
ten, four were married twice and two were married three times.
For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.

Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very
competently remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not
exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another
woman's children."

The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their
eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the
earth. They also filled the churchyards.

TWENTY-ONE OF THOSE SEVENTY-ONE CHILDREN DIED IN CHILDHOOD.

This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving
children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of
only 2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.

In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the
unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother
to help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of
young wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the
hideous frequency with which it killed them.

Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from
1701 to 1745.

The girls they took in marriage were most of them under
twenty-one and were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes
as far down as fourteen.

May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a
conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population?
They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman
had to have his soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and
smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels and other
industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going
to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost
money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.

Our young engineering friend, John, when HE looked forward to HIS
future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it
at all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very
little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to
"give" Mary a home.

Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages
of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of
things. On the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the
other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his
marriage except just Mary.

The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous
toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of
result:

Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701
to 1745, there were

Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;

Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;

Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.

Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age.
It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains
unabatedly sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial
college men, of the best-bred men of the times, are filled with
such details as:

"----First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children."

"----Eight children born within twelve years, two of them
feeble-minded."

"----First wife died at nineteen, leaving three children.

"----Fourteen children. First wife died at twenty-eight, having
borne eight children in ten years."

From that age of universal early marrying and of promiscuous
early dying we have come in two centuries to an age of delayed
(and even omitted) marrying and of a settled determination to
keep on living.

The women's colleges are so new and they attracted in their early
days so un-average a sort of girl that their records are not
conclusive. Nevertheless, here are some guiding facts from Smith
College, of Northampton, Massachusetts:

--> We are taking college facts not because this article is
confined in any respect to college people but merely because the
matrimonial histories in the records of the colleges are the most
complete we know of.)

In 1888, Smith College, in its first ten classes, had graduated
370 women.

In 1903, fifteen years later, among those 370 women there were
212 who were still single.

This record does not satisfy Mr. G. Stanley Hall, who figured it
out. The remaining facts, however, might be considered more
cheering:

The 158 Smith women who had married had borne 315 children. This
was two for each of them. And most of them were still in their
childbearing period. Compare this with the colonial records. But
don't take the number of children per colonial father. Be fair.
Take it per mother.

We have the matrimonial histories of colonial Yale and Harvard
men grouped and averaged according to the decade in which they
graduated. We will regard the graduates of each decade as
together constituting one case.

In no case does the average number of children per wife go higher
than 3.89. In one case it goes as low as 2.98.

Perhaps the modern wife's habit of going on living and thereby
protracting her period of childbearing will in time cause her
fertility record to compare not unfavorably with that of the
colonial wife, who made an early start but a quick finish.

In the year 1903, among all the 370 Smith graduates in those
first ten classes, only twenty-four had died. And among all the
315 children, only twenty-six had died. On the whole, between
being the wife of a Yale or Harvard colonial graduate and being a
member of one of the first ten Smith classes, a modern girl might
conclude that the chances of being a dead one matrimonially in
the latter case would be more than offset by the chances of being
a dead one actually in the former.

This deplorable flippancy would overlook the serious fact that
permanent or even prolonged celibacy on the part of large numbers
of young men and young women is a great social evil. The
consequences of that evil we shall observe later on.[1]

[1] In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not
at all to religious celibacy.

In the meantime we return to John and Mary.

While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary
did a year of technical study in the New York School of
Philanthropy, or in the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in
the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston
School for Social Workers.

They won't even let you start in "doing good" nowadays without
some training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm
doing good can do.

But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

Mary took a civil service examination and got a job with the
State Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the
Bureau at the same time when John finished his first year with
the electrical firm. She had earned $600. He had earned $480.

There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along
with John. When he thought of the next year's work at fifty a
month and when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors of
Science in which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.

"I must get out of the ruck," he said to himself. "I must get a
specialty. I must do some more preparing.

He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up,
intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a
tedious road he must travel before he could arrive at
maturity--and Mary!

But he had pluck. "I'll really prepare," he said, "and then I'll
really make good."

A western university offered a scholarship of $500 a year, the
holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain
specified technical subject. John tried for the scholarship and
got it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the
time when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when
they eventually sneaked back home again into the power-house,
after having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water
pipes, biting holes into them as they went.

It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he
was engaged as engineer by a street-car company which was being
sued by a gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas
company's property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He
was going strong.

One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less
than that. But John didn't even think of asking Mary to share it
with him.

Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance
with the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks
that about it, without really thinking about it at all. It's just
in him.

It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her
before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in
a store window.

Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it
could be laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.

"After all," thought Mary, "if we had only $1,000 a year we
couldn't live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut
off from being on daily intimate terms with people who could help
him; and if we had children--Well, there you are! We surely
couldn't give our children what our children ought to have. That
settles it."

The influence of social standards is greatly increased and
complicated in a world in which women earn their living before
marriage and have a chance to make social standards of their own
in place of the ones they were born to.

We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely
imagined--like Mary and John--but are individually (though
typically) existent in real life in one of the large American
cities:

R----J----. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever "real
sweet on" was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at
five a week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social
Dozen Pleasure Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on
Professor DeVere's dancing platform. At midnight he would give
her a joy-ride home in his employer's delivery wagon. He still
drives that wagon. She is in charge of suits and costumes and has
several assistant buyers under her. She has bought a cottage for
her father, who is an ingrain weaver in a carpet factory. She
wears a stick-pin recently presented to her by her teamster. "I
like him all right," is her notion about it, "but I ought to have
took him ten years ago. Now he can't support me."

S----V----. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a
man ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.

T----V----. Sister of S----V----, who doesn't think much of her.
She works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is
engaged to a glove cutter who makes eleven.

T----A----. Saleswoman. Thinks women ought to be paid as much as
men. "Then they wouldn't be so ready to marry ANYBODY." Works in
the cloak department. Is a star. Makes about eighteen dollars a
week. Says that most of the men she knows who could support her
would certainly get in a terrible row at home if they married a
cloak-department girl. Families are stuck up. "But I don't care;
let it run awhile. Tell you something. I was born in the
steerage. I've been right where the money isn't. I'm not taking
any chances on getting there again. Let Georgina do it."

R----B----. Sub-bookkeeper. Seven dollars a week. Engaged to
clerk who earns thirteen. Says: "Of course I'm not earning much,
but I'm living with my folks and when we're married I'll have to
give up a lot of things. Kinda wish I hadn't got used even to the
seven."

This last case, of the bookkeeper engaged to the clerk, is the
modern situation at its happiest normal. The modern marriage,
except among the rich, is a contraction of resources. It is just
the reverse, in that respect, of the colonial marriage.

The colonial bride, marrying into Industry, brought her full
economic value to her husband.

The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her
economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the
sharper is the shock of the contraction of resources.

Of course, the case of the department-store buyer and the
teamster is irrelevantly extreme. But aren't there thousands and
thousands of cases which, while less advanced, are pointed in the
same direction? The more a woman earns, the fewer become the men
who can support her. How can the clerk support the cloak
saleswoman who has had eighteen dollars a week of her own? How
can the barber support the manicurist who has had twelve?

The cloak saleswoman may talk flippantly about it, but, at heart,
isn't she seriously right? She has pulled herself up to a certain
level. Except in response to a grande passion she will not again
drop below it. She will bring up her children at a point as close
to her present level as she can. That is instinct.

Meanwhile, she isn't married. But what can you do about it? She
went to work, like almost every other working woman, because she
had to. And you can't pass a law prohibiting her from earning
more than five dollars a week.

"It's all economic," thought Mary. "Nothing else." She had much
reason for thinking so.

Did you ever see Meitzen's diagram showing the relation between
the price of rye and the number of marriages in Prussia during a
period of twenty-five years?

Cheap rye, easy living conditions--number of marriages rises.
Dear rye, hard living conditions--number of marriages drops. The
fluctuations are strictly proportional. In the twenty-sixth year,
given the price of rye, you could predict very closely the number
of marriages.

It's like suicides. It's the easiest thing in the world to
predict the number of men and women who will next year "decide"
to take their own lives.

The marriage rate responds not only to the economic conditions of
a whole country but to the economic conditions of its various
parts.

You live in Vermont. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five
and thirty in Vermont, there will be 279 out of every 1,000 of
you who will still be single.

But you live in the state of New York. Very well. Between the
ages of twenty-five and thirty there will be 430 of you out of
every thousand who will still be single.

In Vermont, 279. In New York, 430. A difference of 151 in every
1,000.

For those 151 persons, is it human volition? Is it a perverse
aversion to the other sex?

Even at that, on the face of it, those who try to argue New
Yorkers into marrying young are clearly taking the difficult
route to their purpose. It would be more adroit simply to urge
them to live in Vermont.

But isn't the real reason this--that New York, with its large
cities, is farther removed than Vermont, with no large cities,
from the primitive industrial conditions of colonial times?

The North Atlantic states, as a whole, are industrially more
advanced than the South Central states. Compare them in this
marriage matter:

Among all the wives in the South Central states, there are 543
out of every 1,000 who are under thirty-five years of age.

Among all the wives in the North Atlantic states those who are
under thirty-five years of age are, in each thousand, only 428.

In the South Central states, 543. In the North Atlantic states,
428. A difference of 115!

Getting married early is imputed unto us for actual personal
righteousness by innumerable clergymen, essayists, and editorial
writers. Are there so many more righteous women along the Gulf of
Mexico than along the Atlantic coast? One hundred and fifteen
more out of every thousand? We cannot quite credit so great a
discrepancy in relative human virtue.

You can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in
your vicinity.

Live on the Gold Coast of Africa. When you're thirteen, if you're
a girl, they'll boil a yam and mash it and mix it with palm oil
and scatter it on the banks of the stream and wash you in the
stream and streak your body with white clay in fine lines and
lead you down the street under an umbrella and announce your
readiness to be a bride. Which you will be in a day or two.

Live in Russia, and if you're a girl you'll get married before
you're twenty in more than fifty cases out of a hundred. It's the
most primitive of civilized countries. It's half way between
Africa and, say, Rhode Island.

These marriages before twenty tend to fall off rapidly in a
rapidly developing industrial region like Rhode Island.

In 1860 the married persons in Rhode Island who had married
before they were twenty were twenty-one in every 100.

In 1900 they were only nine in every 100.

A drop from twenty-one to nine in forty years!

And if you can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which
reigns in your vicinity, neither can you escape, in any numbers,
from the law which reigns in your social set.

Here's Bailey's book on "Social Conditions":

Live in England and be a girl and belong to the class of people
that miners come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the
average, twenty-two. But belong to the class of people that
professional men come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the
average, twenty-six.

This difference exists also in the United States. It is in the
direct line of social and economic development.

The professional man is a farther developed type of man than the
miner. It takes him longer to get through his educational
infancy--longer to arrive at his mental and financial maturity.
The professional man's wife is a farther developed type than the
miner's wife. She has much more economic value (if she works)
before marriage and much LESS economic value (in any case) after
marriage.

Where these two lines of development, male and female, come to a
meeting point; where the man's infancy is longest and the woman's
economic value as a wife is least, there is, necessarily,
altogether apart from personal preferences, the greatest
postponement of marriage.

The United States, except possibly in certain sections, has not
come to the end of its growth toward postponed marriage.

It is true that in Massachusetts, within the past forty-five
years, the average age of women at marriage has risen from 20.7
to 24.6. That is a very "modern" and "developed" marriage age.
But many of the older countries surpass it. In Belgium, for
instance, which is a most intensely industrialized country, the
average age of women at marriage is 28.19.

It is hard, indeed, to look at the advancing marriage age and to
compare its varying rate of progress in different continents,
different countries, different localities, and different social
circles without admitting that, whatever whirling, nebulous mists
of personal preferences it may create and carry with it, its
nucleus is purely economic.

Early marriage was made by economic advantages. It was destroyed
by economic changes. It will not be restored except by economic
adjustments.

"Nevertheless," said Mary, "I want John."

John had finished being engineer for the electric railway
company.

Out of his two years' experience he had saved a few hundred
dollars. No, he hadn't. That isn't probable. The way he made his
start into the next phase of his career was not by having any
ready money. Having ready money is far from being characteristic
of the young man of to-day.

John opened his office as a consulting electrical engineer not on
his own resources but as an agent for an electrical supply
company. Being agent for that company assured him enough money to
pay the office rent and stenographer. For the rest, for his meals
and his bed, he depended on his clients. Whom he didn't have. But
he started out to get them.

He opened his office in the city in which Mary was.

And then a strange but normal thing occurred. They spent enough
money on theatres and boat rides and candy in the next three
months to have paid the rent on a flat. It is true John's net
income was too small and uncertain to have justified the founding
of a family. But it was also true that they spent every cent they
had. The celibate life is an extravagant life. One of the
innumerable sources of modern extravagance is found just there.

Mary reflected on it. She didn't like it. And she began to see
other things she didn't like in this protraction of the period of
singleness.

Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places,
among all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular
living which is inevitably associated with a system of late
marriages.

Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that
if we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find
that the female was the only sex then existent, being original
life itself, reproducing itself by division of itself, and that
the male was created as an afterthought of nature's for the
purpose of introducing greater variation into the development of
living things. The male, to begin with, had only one function.
That was to be a male. He was purely a sex-thing.

Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain
that it squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex
which originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.

There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis
Stevenson who made many researches into the psychology of the
human race. While on his "Inland Voyage" he observed in this
matter that "it is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know
him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago and had a pitiful time
of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, that
they suffice to themselves and can walk in a high and cold zone
without the countenance of any trousered being."

The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If
it were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by
this time have demolished the ethical code.

Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she
saw it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in
modern days. Both have always existed, but now they are
increasing very rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding
development.

In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain
unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even
at that latter age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like,
say, Providence, Rhode Island, in the age period from thirty-five
to forty-five, twenty out of every hundred women are still
single.

In the other column is the enormous army of young women who,
outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional
sex life, venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which
has existed since the beginning of time but which every
postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in
relative numbers and to gain new strength for poisoning the blood
of life.

Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window.
Angel or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between
its guises.

Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in
stores and in their apartments and in their boarding houses,
women celibates five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into
the period when nature has by irrepealable edict ordained love.
It was surely unnatural, for the mass of them. They were not
vowed nuns. They were not devoted to any Great Cause. They were
just ordinary, normal young women, thousands and thousands and
thousands and thousands of them.

Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women
in the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated
quarters--women who, however they may be sentimentalized about
and however irresponsible they may be for their own condition,
are, as a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet
on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of young
men.

On the one side--intelligent, capable, effective young women,
leading lives of emotional sterility. On the other side--inferior
women blasted and withered by their specialization in the
emotional life of youth!

The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity
of living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face
facts and who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of
letting facts lie, we face them and fight them we can make a
better race.

The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in
the Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as
one of the biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony
that "among highly civilized peoples marriage and REGLULAR unions
are impossible at the RIGHT TIME."

And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the
Committee of Fifteen on the Social Evil, notes the parallel
increase of "young unmarried men" and of a city's "volume of
vice."

He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic
facts of the case.

"As a rule," he says, "the income which a young man earns, while
sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does
not suffice for founding a family."

He cannot found a family at the right time. He goes unmarried
through the romantic period of his development, when the senses
are at their keenest and when the other sex in its most vividly
idealized perfection, is most poignantly desired.

Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then
marriage may become more feasible. But then romance is waning.
Then, as Mr. Johnson says, "his standard of personal comfort
rises." Romance has been succeeded by calculation. "Accordingly
he postpones marriage to a date in the indefinite future or
abandons expectation of it altogether."

Celibacy through the age of romance! It's emotionally wrong.
Sexlessness for a score of years after sex has awakened! It's
biologically wrong. It's a defiance of nature. And nature
responds, as she does to every defiance, with a scourge of
physical and social ills.

"But what of all that?" thought Mary. "Those things are just
observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John."

At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.

SHE BECAME A WOMAN OF THE FUTURE.

"Look here," she said to John, "I'm working. You're working.
We're single. Very well. We'll change it. I'm working. You're
working. We're married. Have we lost anything? And we've gained
each other."

Two years later she stopped working.

In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She
couldn't operate soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and
smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels for him. But she
brought him an equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to
$1000 a year.

Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of
her earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on
extending his business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective
clients, on making acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute
some of her own money to his expense accounts. That was the
fortune of war. She helped him pursue success.

"I wouldn't give up the memory of these two years," Mary used to
say, as she sat and stitched for her children, "for anything. I
shared at least a part of my husband's youth."

By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise
unattainable. They had come to know each other and to help form
each other's characters and to share each other's difficulties in
the years when only there is real joy in the struggle of life.
They had not postponed their love till, with a settled income,
John could support her in comfort and they could look back like
Browning's middle-aged estranged lovers to say:

We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy.

"It used to take two to start a home in colonial days," Mary
would say. "I am really an old-fashioned woman. I helped to make
this home. We had twelve hundred dollars in the bank when I
stopped working, and John was pretty well established.

"I don't regret it," she went on, still speaking as a woman of
the future, "even for the children. Of course I do wish we had
started earlier. But I would have wanted to wait a while for the
children in any case. People risk too much when they start a
family before they become sufficiently used to marriage and to
each other to know that they can keep on loving each other and to
know that they have in them through their mutual, continued
happiness the power to make a happy home, a noble home, for
children to live in."

As for the number of children she will have--we reserve that
subject to a future article. We call attention here only to this:

That the facts which were cited from the Smith College records
are harmonious with many other facts and records tending to show
that the fertility of the modern wife has been considerably
underrated, just as the fertility of the colonial wife has been
considerably exaggerated.

And this:

That Mary got to her childbearing period sooner than she would
have if she hadn't insisted on marrying John before he was ready
to support her. Those two years would have been childless years
in any case. But they would probably, if it hadn't been for
Mary's money, have been lengthened into four or five.

Of course, later marriages in themselves tend to reduce the
number of children. As to quality, however, the evidence is not
clear. There is even some reason to think that a moderate
postponement is conducive to an improvement in quality.

Did you ever read Havelock Ellis's book called "A Study of
British Genius"?

He made a list of the most distinguished of Eminent British
Persons and studied everything about them from their religious
opinions to the color of their hair.

In the matter of the age of their parents, he finds that the
average age of the father at the birth of the person of genius
was thirty-seven years, while the average of the mother was
thirty-one. His conclusion is: "On the whole it would appear, so
far as the evidence goes, that the fathers of our eminent persons
have been predominantly middle-aged and to a marked extent
elderly at the time of the distinguished son's birth; while the
mothers have been predominantly at the period of greatest vigor
and maturity and to a somewhat unusual extent elderly. There has
been a notable deficiency of young fathers and, still more
notably, of young mothers."

And did you ever see the study which Mr. R. S. Holway made for
the Department of Education of Leland Stanford University on "The
Age of Parents: Its Effects upon Children"? His conclusions are:

"In most physical qualities the children of mature parents tend
to come out best.

"In mental ability the children of young parents show best at an
early age but rapidly lose their precocity.

"The elder children who show best tend to be the children of
mature and old parents.

"The children of elderly mothers show a tendency to superiority
throughout."

Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong
opinion to the effect that, in so far as the quality of her
children could be affected by their home training, she was glad
she had spent at least a few years earning her living.

"Every woman," said Mary, "ought to have some little time for
developing into an individual. Home won't do it altogether. Not
nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world.
But what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a
nook. It's something apart from the world. If a woman is going to
prepare her son for a knowledge of the real world, if she's going
to be able to give him a training which has in it an
understanding and an appreciation of the real world, if she's
going to be able to educate him into real living, she must
nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of
her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a
mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable
postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a
competent individual is a good thing."

"The trouble about that," said John, "is that it makes you too
independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your
living till you're pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn't marry
me till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?"

Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.

Isn't there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in
knowing, KNOWING, that Mary isn't cleaving unto him simply
because she can't shift for herself? Something exquisitely
gratifying in being certain, CERTAIN, that it isn't just
necessity that keeps her a home woman?

"If I were a man living in wedlock," said Mary, "I should want
the door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering
straight by it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should
want her wings to be strong, and I should want her to know that
if she went through the door she could fly.

"For keeping her," said Mary, "I should want to trust to my own
wings and not to bars.

"However," said Mary, going farther into the future, "the process
isn't complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children!
We want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to
unions which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all
uncleanness. Women will never be completely free till, besides
being able to earn their bread when they are NOT bearing
children, they are relieved of dependence on the individual
character of another human person while they ARE. Mr. H. G. Wells
is clearly right about it. When women bear children they perform
a service to the state. Children are important to the state. They
are its future life. To leave them to the eccentricities of the
economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The woman who is
bringing up children should receive from the state the equivalent
of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in the
union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right
relationship--love a necessity, money a welcome romance!

"It's remote, very remote," said Mary. "And we can't dream it out
in detail. But when it comes it won't come out of personal
sentiment. It will come because of being demanded by the economic
welfare of the community. It will come because it is the best way
to get serviceable children for the state. It will come because,
after all, it is the final answer to the postponement of
marriage."

In the November instalment of "The Women of To-morrow," Mr. Hard
will discuss "The Wasters."

*****************************************************************
Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

The Poison Bugaboo {pages 518-525}

By SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT AMERICAN FRAUD," "THE MYSTERY" (WITH STEWART
EDWARD WHITE), ETC.

ROMANCE revels in the peril of the unknown. Lapped about with the
armor-plate of civilization, the modern citizen muses
relishingly, like a child beguiling himself with ogre tales, upon
the terrors which lie just beyond his ken. To his mind,

A stone's throw out on either hand,
And all the world is wild and strange.

Avid for sensation, he peoples the remoteness of forest and
mountain with malign and destructive creatures, whence has grown
up an extensive and astonishing literature of snake and insect
poison lore.

"Deadly" is the master word of the cult. The rattlesnake is
"deadly." The copperhead and moccasin are "deadly." So is the
wholly mythical puff adder. In hardly less degree is the
tarantula "deadly," while varying lethal capacities are ascribed
to the centipede, the scorpion, the kissing-bug, and sundry other
forms of insect life. The whole matter is based upon the
slenderest foundations. I don't mean, by this, that these
ill-famed species are wholly innocuous. It would be highly
inadvisable to snatch a kiss from a copperhead or to stroke a
tarantula's fur the wrong way. But one could do it and live to
boast of the achievement. Pseudoscience to the contrary
notwithstanding, there is no living thing within the boundaries
of the United States of America whose bite or sting is sure death
or (with one possible exception) even probable death.

There are five varieties of venomous serpents in this country:
three of them Crotalids, and two belonging to the Elaps family.
The Elaps are rather rare. The Crotalids (rattlesnake, moccasin,
and copperhead) are common, and of the widest geographical
distribution. Yet, on the basis of actual evidence, the amazing
fact stands out that only about eighty persons, so far as is
ascertainable, have ever died from snake bite in the United
States. Nowhere in the Civil War records does a death from this
cause appear, though hundreds of thousands of men were living "on
the country," and at a time when the serpent clan was much more
numerous than now.

Estimates vary as to the proportion of deaths to bites. Prentiss
Willson believes that something over ten per cent. of all persons
bitten by venomous snakes in the United States die. As to how
many of these succumb, not to the venom, but to the misdirected
efforts of misguided friends at treatment--an extremely important
differentiation--he lacks the data upon which to base a
reckoning. S. Weir Mitchell's figures indicate 8.7 per cent.
mortality for rattlesnake bite. This would make the venom about
as dangerous as the toxin of typhoid fever, which is not
generally regarded as a necessarily "deadly" disease. Other
writers go as high as fifteen per cent. for the rattlesnake and
as low as one per cent. for the copperhead.

All general estimates seem to me to leave one basic element out
of consideration--the unnoted, non-fatal snake bites. That a bite
resulting in death will eventually get itself reported is
reasonably certain. On the other hand, I am satisfied, from
talking with plantation owners in the South, with ranchmen in the
West, and with woodsmen and hunters all over the country, that,
in the remoter regions, many instances of poisoning by
copperheads and the smaller rattlesnakes never attain the dignity
of being listed, so insignificant are they in their effects. Were
all these to be recorded, I believe that the mortality ratio
would fall notably.

Although I have been interested in the subject for many years, I
have never met a man who has seen a fatal case of snake bite.
More than this, my friend Mr. Stewart Edward White, a noted
hunter and explorer of untrodden ground in regions infested by
reptiles, has known of but one case terminating in death which he
believes to be authentic. Dr. J. A. Mitchell, of Victoria, Texas,
one of the most experienced of field observers, has never met
with an instance of fatality from this cause. Dr. Mitchell
believes that horses always, and dogs almost always, recover from
rattlesnake bite. He confirms, from observation, the mysterious
fact that hogs exhibit absolute immunity from the venom.

WHISKY VS. SNAKEBITE

Be it remembered always that death following snake bite is not
necessarily the same thing as death from snake bite. Error in
treatment plays no small part in vitiating the statistics. For
"error" read "whisky." Whoever is primarily responsible for the
hoary superstition that liquor in huge doses is useful in snake
poisoning has many a life to answer for. Apart from any
adventitious aid whatsoever, whether from a snake or any other
source, a whole bottle of raw whisky forced down the throat of a
man unaccustomed to alcohol is pretty likely to kill him, and is
absolutely certain to cause grave poisoning. Add to this that it
is given, often, in such a manner that the reaction from it comes
contemporaneously with the heart collapse caused by the venom,
and a telling commentary upon the method is suggested. It is a
question whether alcohol should ever be given in such cases
without the advice of a physician. Certain it is that it should
not be poured into the victim in quantities limited only by the
flask-contents of the bystanders.

Several years ago I saw two interestingly contrasted cases of
copperhead bite. The first patient was a powerful, full-blooded,
temperate, Irish day-laborer who, while road-mending, was bitten
on the back of the hand between two fingers. His fellows hustled
him off to a room over a neighboring saloon, where they proceeded
to administer the classic treatment. Before the doctor arrived
they had introduced a quart and a half of whisky into a stomach
unused to anything stronger than beer in small quantities. Six
hours later, when I saw the man through the wreckage of chairs,
tables, and bedding, four battered friends were trying to hold
him down. They thought he was having convulsions from the snake
venom. He wasn't. He was having delirium tremens from the whisky.
His arm and shoulder were purple and swollen. Later he collapsed.

"Will he die?" I asked the doctor.

"He won't die of the bite, but I think he will of the whisky,"
replied the disgusted practitioner.

But he didn't. His splendid physique pulled him through. It was
long, however, before he wholly recovered from the effects of the
two poisons.

This was in a Hudson River town. Only a few miles away a negro
boy, shortly after, was struck by a copperhead on the bare leg.
The wound was a deep, double-fanged puncture. While the boy's
father rushed for whisky, his mother ran for the doctor. The
doctor got there first. He opened up the wound and rubbed in
permanganate of potash to oxidize the venom and destroy its toxic
properties. When I talked with the boy, two days later, he was
hobbling about on a crutch, and the swelling had almost subsided.
Setting the boy's lesser age and resistant power against the fact
of the laborer's being bitten in a worse place (for crotaline
venom is much more effective in an upper limb or extremity than
in a lower), we have a fairly illustrative instance of the
relative merits of alcoholic and non-alcoholic measures.

WHEN RATTLESNAKES KILL

Thirteen cases of death following rattlesnake and copperhead bite
in which satisfactory clinical data were obtainable, are given by
Prentiss Willson. Of the victims, five were young children, one
was a fourteen-year-old boy, one a chronic drunkard, and one a
leper who submitted to the stroke of a captive rattlesnake in the
mad hope that it would cure his affliction. It did--in
twenty-four hours. Of the remaining five, three were dosed with
alcohol in large quantities. In several of the cases, notably
those of the children, there seemed to be at least an even chance
of recovery, when the ligatures binding the affected limb were
loosened to relieve the pain, with quickly fatal results. Two of
the fatalities were attributed, not immediately to the venom, but
to the secondary blood-poisoning, this being the case with the
only copperhead bite in the list.

Death resulting typically from crotaline poisoning occurred in
two instances, one the fourteen-year-old boy, who was struck by a
large rattlesnake and died in six hours, despite skilled and
prompt medical attendance; the other, a Dr. Post, into whose
veins, it would appear, the poison entered immediately, since a
jet of blood spurted from the wound inflicted by the captive
rattlesnake. The man passed from great agony into coma, from
which he never rallied, death ensuing in five hours after the
bite. There is nothing in these data to indicate that a
full-grown man in normal health, and with proper treatment, will
succumb to crotaline poisoning unless the venom enters a vein,
direct.

In the matter of the comparative potency of snake poisons, there
are apparent contradictions. In the order of recorded fatalities,
the rattlesnake ranks easily first, with the water moccasin a
rather distant second, and the copperhead a very poor third. Yet
experiments upon animals indicate that moccasin venom is five
times as powerful as rattlesnake, though only three times as
powerful as copperhead. Taking the cobra as the basis of
estimate, it requires only twice as much moccasin venom as it
does cobra poison to kill a guinea pig, whereas it requires six
times as much copperhead and ten times as much rattlesnake virus.
Why, then, is the rattler pre-eminent over its more virulent
cousins? Probably for two reasons--the greater amount of venom
secreted, and the superior power with which the rattler drives
its fangs home.

NO VIPERS IN THIS COUNTRY

Fully as much terror attaches, in the country districts, to the
puff adder or sand viper as to the rattlesnake or copperhead.
This is a suggestive bit of superstition, since there's no such
thing as an adder or viper on the Western hemisphere and never
has been one, unless it came, carefully pickled, in a jar. What
passes for the supposedly deadly reptile is the common hog-nosed
or bull snake. It is about as dangerous as an infuriated rabbit.
But it puts up one of the best "bluffs" known to natural history.
When caught at its favorite occupation of basking in the open,
without convenient avenue of escape, it flattens its head, and
strikes right and left, blowing and hissing with an aspect much
more terrifying than that of the truly venomous species. Then,
when the objects of its fury have taken to trees or adjacent
fences, it glides quietly away into the grass and effaces itself.
Any one who has the nerve to look it between the eyes may uncover
its pretense. For by this token may be known the real Crotalids
from the mock: a small but distinct pit between eye and nostril.
Lacking this mark, no ventral crawler in the land of the free
need cause a flutter in the most timid breast, with one notable
exception.

BEWARE THE ELAPS

Shun, as you would a rabid dog, a pretty little red-and-black
banded serpent about as thick as your thumb. If any living
creature whose habitat is the United States deserves the epithet
"deadly," it is the Elaps. Two species are known; the harlequin
snake, which ranges throughout the Gulf states to Texas and up
the Mississippi River to Ohio, and the Sonoran coral snake, found
in the Southwest only. By a strange perversion of facts, while
the harmless hog-nosed snake enjoys a repute of terror, the
Elaps, most dangerous of all American reptiles, is commonly
regarded as harmless. Partly this is due to its slight and
graceful prettiness, partly to its innocent-appearing head, which
shows no flattening (the popularly understood mark of the
venomous species), and partly to its lethargic and peaceful
disposition. Experimenters wishing to secure the venom of the
Elaps often find it difficult to rouse the snake to striking
wrath.

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