No. 7. DEPARTMENT QF AGRICULTURE. 295 



girl who does housework nowadays isn't considered anybody." This, 

 I find, is the prevailing opinion of our American working girls, but 

 how or why such an idea could have originated, I have not time to 

 discuss. The fact is, this idea prevails, and has become so deep- 

 rooted that it will prevail until the state takes it up, and the house- 

 hold arts a:nd sciences are added to every public school curriculum 

 in the land. 



Domestic science is being taught to some extent in the public 

 schools of our larger cities, and in some of our colleges and univer- 

 sities, but the hundreds of thousands of girls in the country need 

 the instruction, and must have it. You say, ''how can we reach 

 them; how can these things be taught in our isolated rural schools?" 

 Let me tell you. As most of the members of this institute know, I 

 am an ardent advocate of the consolidation of the rural schools. 

 That little children must walk a mile and a half or two miles to 

 school through all sorts of weather, often the thermometer below 

 zero, is a blot on our twentieth century civilization. But if our 

 schools were effective, if they gave our children a practical educa- 

 tion, we would not have so much to complain of, but you know they 

 are not what they should be — what they can be made. 



Many of you here tonight remember the blast furnaces down the 

 Beaver, one at Wampum, and the other a short distance below Rock 

 Point, and there were others throughout the country. These fur- 

 naces were considered great in their day, but they have disappeared, 

 and grass grows over their ruins. The larger furnaces along the 

 cities and towns along the railroad can do better and cheaper work. 

 They can economize and conserve all the forces that go to make a 

 good furnace. 



So will it be with the district schools. They will pass away, and 

 their isolated forces will be concentrated in the consolidated school, 

 in which manual training, nature study, agriculture, the household 

 arts, and other vital things, necessary to make a practical education, 

 will be taught effectively. This thought, friends, I would impress 

 upon every one of you, and earnestly ask your i)est work and in- 

 fluence along the line of consolidation. The children of the country 

 deserve, and must have, as nearly as possible, the same advantages 

 as the children of the city. I trust you will pardon this seeming 

 digression from my subject, for really it was not. The rural school 

 and the farm home are inseparable. The influence of one is felt 

 upon the other, and therefore, is it not most important that the 

 influence of the school shall make for the betterment of the 

 home, not only the homes of today, but those of the future. 



DRUDGERY. , 



Almost the first thing the housemother should do is to transform 

 drudgery into pleasant work. Indeed, the one thing that all work- 

 ers need to do, and perhaps farm folk more than any other, is to 

 keep above the thought of drudgery, to look beyond the toiling to 

 the results. To illustrate this thought, I will read a letter written 

 by Mrs. Garfield to her husband before he became president, in the 

 hope that it may prove an incentive to more exalted work in the 

 home. She wrote: "I am glad to tell you that out of all the toil 

 and disappointment of the summer just ended, I have risen up to 



