1905.] QUESTIONS. 121 



Miss Van Rensselaer. I have rather old-fashioned ideas 

 in regard to that subject. I think that the fathers and mothers 

 are reheving their children too much, that the burden is coming 

 upon the father and the mother when the child ought to be 

 taught to do for his father and his mother. It never hurts a 

 boy to relieve his father. It never hurts a boy to relieve his 

 mother in any kind of work, and that is the greatest blessing 

 which you can confer upon a boy when you teach him, if he 

 needs to be taught, to do things for his father and mother. 

 Give a boy or girl his strength, which we will assume the boy 

 and girl of whom we are speaking has, and I would say that 

 you train him to do those things. They are not going to hurt 

 him, and if you do these things for him and thrust him about 

 upon the world, he is helpless, and the world has got to teach 

 him a great many lessons that the father and mother should 

 teach him. Therefore, I cannot sympathize with that condi- 

 tion. I cannot sympathize at all with the boy or girl growing 

 up in a home not kfiowing how to build a fire. A boy in my 

 class the other day said, '* My mother never let me build a fire, 

 she thought I couldn't." There he was, a boy in the twenties, 

 who owned up before those young women that he didn't know 

 how to build a fire. Do you suppose anybody would choose 

 him ? No. I feel that one of the things in this world that we 

 need nowadays is to teach boys and girls to wait upon their 

 elders ; it won't hurt them. I cannot comprehend how men 

 who have made themselves and become the great men that they 

 are, through self exertion, through self-sacrifice, can shut their 

 sons off from that same privilege. Paying their bills, letting 

 them not w^ork their way through but satisfying every possible 

 want, is a great misfortune to the children. 



This question has been asked : " Do you believe cooperation 

 in domestic affairs to be possible in farming communities to 

 help the housewife?" 



It hasn't, it seems to me, been tried very much, but it seems 

 to me possible, and this question comes at once : " Can we have 



