THE "NEW WOMAN" AND HER DEBTS. 671 



dexterity re-enforced by art. However we pride ourselves on 

 mere material resources, without industrial power and technique 

 the rest of the world will beat us. Japan and China have de- 

 veloped their exquisite textiles, bronzes, and faience for four 

 thousand years. Russia has greater oil fields than America. If 

 Egypt and India fail to out-acre us in cotton, Africa could be 

 turned into one vast cotton field where the three economic fac- 

 tors food, shelter, and raiment would be minimized, since the 

 cultivator would wear no clothes, would sleep under a tree, and, 

 when he wanted food, would climb the tree and get it. 



Clearly, too, we shall continue at an ethical as well as a com- 

 mercial disadvantage unless we replace the handicrafts of the 

 primitive woman and build up the industrial arts the all-impor- 

 tant, ever-dignified and beautiful pursuits of cooking and sewing, 

 cleaning and repairing, needlework, embroidery, carving, coloring, 

 and house decoration. The most unlovely homes in the world 

 are the bare, untidy homes of our working population. The most 

 wasteful housewife on earth is the thriftless American housewife. 

 To reinstate the skilled industries, to weave in beauty with the 

 life of the people, we must carry manual and technical training 

 and applied art to the point of action, as it were, down among 

 the degraded, the belated, the neglected, the submerged. In the 

 " slums," where ignorance revels, crime festers, and decent pov- 

 erty hides, we should found cooking, sewing, and housekeeping 

 schools, with carpentry centers, wood-carving, brass-hammering, 

 drawing, modeling, and other creative pursuits that will fasci- 

 nate the roughest street girl and transform the boy "tough" 

 into an eager, industrious artisan. Belgium and France, whose 

 products we in vain try to equal, have planted industrial and 

 domestic science schools in every hamlet, technical schools in all 

 the manufacturing towns, dairy and farm schools in the agri- 

 cultural districts. The teaching is adapted to local industries; 

 on the coast, to shipbuilding and fisheries ; in the quarries, to 

 stone-cutting ; around textile mills, to weaving and dyeing ; with 

 drawing everywhere. Hence the industrial supremacy of these 

 countries, their excellent food, absence of waste, national thrift, 

 and the love of art that pervades even the humblest classes. To 

 educate by the same methods the children of America, to im- 

 prove our homes, to bring order, skill, and beauty into the bar- 

 renest lives, to carry on the propaganda for universal industrial 

 and art training, is the privilege and duty of the " new woman." 



Two words of warning. Even to dabble in handicrafts and 

 aesthetics is a sign of the crude and amateurish but noble up- 

 striving of our times, just as it indicates awakened civic con- 

 science that club women settle in one hour's discussion the most 

 far-reaching municipal problems and the gravest financial issues. 



