484 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



not but David Copperfield's poor little Dora would have been a more hopeful 

 case had her experience in accounts and purchases begun earlier in her 

 childhood home. 



In this matter of home practice a father can give his daughter a larger 

 experience by allowing her to do some of his own business. Trust her to 

 send a money order, buy a draft, deposit money, compute interest, or write a 

 receipt, and you will see her take a pride in the knowledge of forms and 

 principles which had heretofore seemed so dry and incomprehensible. A 

 parent with sufficient means can go still farther, by giving her some piece of 

 property for her own exclusive care and management, of course with parental 

 advice. 



I am pleased to see a tendency toward the practical in the teaching of arith- 

 metic in many of our schools. The little boys and girls in our own ward are 

 sent on imaginary errands with quite incredible sums of money to make pur- 

 chases at the various business places down town, to return with the requisite 

 change, and not a few of them supplement this pleasant practice by actual 

 errands where considerable mental effort is required. Oar superintendent 

 also puts such of her own business as is practicable in the hands of pupils, 

 acting upon the principle that an ounce of practice is better than a pound of 

 theory. 



lu Germany every girl is taught accounts as a part of her training toward 

 housekeeping, and more than this, every girl, rich and poor, serves one year's 

 apprenticeship in the family of some one of her own rank to learn every branch 

 of housekeeping, mending and plain sewing included. And these qualifica- 

 tions do not stand second to business habits as a basis of education. The large 

 majority of girls will become mistresses of homes, and whether they do or not, 

 or whether they do their own housework or not, in the latter case it is a safe- 

 guard in the emergency of no help or incompetent help, and in the former a 

 means for self-support in time of need. The idea that anyone can do house- 

 work or that no special preparation for it is needed has led to a deplorable 

 condition of affairs generally, in nerve-worn women, poorly regulated homes, 

 cross husbands, family jars, inefficient domestic service and the spread of that 

 false sentiment which is abroad in the land that housework is degrading. Any 

 young lady of intelligence and efficiency can command respect and honor in 

 any family where respect is worth having at housework. 



There are families in this town, and in every town, whose inflaence, by way 

 of association, is a liberal education to their conscientious housemaid. 



A rising author has said that Elizabeth Peabody (author of the Ameri- 

 can Kindergarten, and sister-in-law to Horace Mann) has done more for him 

 than Harvard College. So I say that the helpful influence of an ideal home 

 wherein reign love, harmony, culture, system, has done more for many a poor 

 girl than all she ever learned in school. Their remuneration is not simply 

 two dollars a week and board but an apprenticeship to ''good housekeeping" 

 in an earthly heaven. 



I know whereof I sjieak, and if my daughter were compelled by necessity to 

 go out from home to earn her living I would a thousand times rather see her 

 safely harbored in such a home, in healthful employment, noble associations, 

 with access to good reading and time to read, than unsheltered from any home, 

 with one or two miserably comfortless rooms, to eke out a living behind some 

 counter, or in a dark or poorly ventilated milliner or dressmaking shop, bent 

 over work from dawn till dark, poorly paid, in the mistaken notion that she 

 was thereby preserving respectability or following a higher calling. 



