440 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



greatest profit to us ; but the thing that we have left to the last, the 

 thing we know the least about to-day is the balance ration for the 

 human individual. 



Oh, I know there are people here and those who have made a study 

 of this. I know that a wonderful start has been made upon it, but 

 I mean that as a people we know little or nothing to-day about the 

 science and art of right living, my friends. Our mothers were good 

 cooks, our wives are good cooks — many of them; but these wives of 

 ours and we ourselves know little or nothing about the balance ra- 

 tion we ought to eat, the ration which will enable us to keep in good 

 health, to perform the work we want to do; we have left that until 

 the last, and I believe the reason is because we can see some financial 

 lenumeration in feeding the hen a balance ration or in feeding the 

 hog or the steer or the dairy cow; we can see how that touches our 

 pocket-book, and for that reason we immediately get busy and make a 

 study of that. It does not, at first glance, seem to touch our pocket- 

 books quite so soon, the feeding of our boys and girls and ourselves, 

 and we have left that until the last, but I am glad to say that we 

 are making a start in this country and Pennsylvania is keeping step 

 with the other states along this line. I know there are some here 

 and there, some mothers, some good mothers, and some good fathers 

 of girls like these who say that it is unnecessary to teach girls how 

 to cook or how to sew, but, my friends, if you would make a careful 

 survey of the conditions in this State and find out just how many 

 girls, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and twenty years of age to-day 

 know anything or much about cooking, I'm afraid you would be sadly 

 disappointed. The slides I have just shown you are views in our 

 agricultural high schools. This is not a view of a dining-room in 

 some mansion in the city; this is the dining-room in the home-mak- 

 ing department of the Hickory Vocational School in Washington 

 county. We have several others just like it. Don't get the idea 

 that extravagance is being taught there; the very opposite is true — 

 plain simplicity. The girls enjoy work of this kind even though 

 there were some doubters at first, but even these doubters became ear- 

 nest believers after a while. I could show you many views right 

 along this line, but just one or two more is all I have time for, just 

 to give you some idea of what we are actually doing in Pennsylva- 

 nia. We have been at this three years ; we have been at it longer than 

 that in the teaching of Domestic Science, but we have been at the 

 teaching of agriculture on a vocational basis in the great State of 

 Pennsylvania for three years and we have been saying very little 

 about it. 



Some one has made a study of the process of carrying bricks from 

 the ground up to the scaffold, and the man who made that study dis- 

 covered that, simple though that operation is, yet a study of it will 

 make possible the simplification of the operation involved in putting 

 the bricks in the hod and the hod on the man's shoulder and the climb- 

 ing of the ladder and the dumping of the bricks on the scaffold. 

 This study enables a man to perform more work during a day with 

 less fatigue to himself and greater profit to his employer. I am not 

 so sure but what the simple process of laundering, if you wish to 

 call it simple, might not stand some inspecting in some things ; when 

 I examine some of my shirts that have come from the laundry, not 



