230 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



cook. I am an artist. Yoic are the cook." And it yrorked just 

 like every other law of supply and demand. I expected her to 

 cook, and she cooked.' 



Of the experience of the literary young lady, I know still 

 more. She has now been married more than ten years. She has 

 given every order for ever}' meal, kept all her expenses, kept them 

 rigidl}', too, within the limit fixed by her husband as permissible, 

 done all her marketing, and knows no more today how bread is 

 made or how meat should look to be tender or how to judge a 

 chicken or make a custard pie than if she had never kept a house." 



This with a large amount of other matter of the same tenor, in- 

 tended expressly to influence young ladies in their early domestic 

 education, appeared in a leading religious paper of this city with- 

 out one word of editorial comment, thus reaching the public with the 

 full force of the editorial influence of the paper. 



The writer of the article has announced that girls are all to 

 marry husbands who can keep two servants. She gives no thought 

 to the consideration that fortunes which have been inherited and 

 have furnished the basis of early housekeeping are often swept 

 away by some vicissitude of business relations, or by depreciation 

 in value of real or personal property ; that a young man who starts 

 out well to do in this world's goods, even though the property 

 has been accumulated by his own industry, may, by the fluctua- 

 tions of trade, or through misplaced confidence, or by the laws of 

 the elements over which he has no control, meet with reverses ; 

 and that he may not only become unable to keep two servants, but 

 he may be driven to the necessity of depending solely upon his 

 wife for all the domestic household labor. 



Nor does the writer of the article quoted take into consideration 

 the thousand and one young ladies destined to marry men who 

 will be unable to keep an}- servants to aid in the domestic work. 

 Yet any one of these young ladies is liable to read that article and 

 be influenced by it, and to have her ideas of her later life more 

 or less fashioned under its influence. Such an article publislied 

 by an eminently respectable religious paper, entering thousands of 

 homes, might have an influence as extensively pernicious as any 

 of the hundreds of dime novels which would not be allowed place 

 in the family library. 



To teach the young women that the necessary practical labor of 

 the household is so uninviting that it should be shunned and that 



