672 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



One fault, however, of modern industrialism is that girls rush 

 hastily, blindly, and sometimes unnecessarily into self-supporting 

 pursuits for which they are unfitted, and to the neglect of a legion 

 of home duties. The desire for pin money, for more to spend on 

 dress than clerks or mechanics can afford their daughters, sweeps 

 into the ranks of competition a whole army of frivolous work- 

 ers too young to understand the responsibility of the industrial 

 career, untrained for it, and determined to end it by marrying 

 the first bona-fide suitor. Such young women, half maintained 

 at home, fond of excitement and of the crowd that congregates in 

 shops and factories, thinking chiefly of self, unidentified with the 

 interests of persisting labor, enter the economic market not on a 

 fair business basis, but accepting any pittance that will supply 

 pocket money and gratify their natural and in some respects com- 

 mendable desire to make a good appearance. Then, having cut 

 down pay below the life line for the self-supporting toiler, these 

 transients join in condemning merchant and manufacturer for 

 offering no more than starvation wages. Better economic con- 

 ditions for women will not come until they enter the field less 

 hastily and on strictly business terms; until they are trained 

 enough, stable and responsible enough to deserve these ameliora- 

 tions, and capable of the concerted and unselfish action required 

 to win them. 



Again, the true, the ultimate aim of education is not to pre- 

 pare for mere self-seeking skill and the acquisition of wealth or 

 social pre-eminence, but for life and a choice between difficult 

 distinctions of right and wrong. The highest life consists in 

 constant development of new aptitudes for usefulness and new 

 faculties for enjoyment ; and of this intellectual and moral life 

 woman is the creator and the guardian. Its stage, if she be but 

 a mortal, its altar, if she be a divinity, is the home. 



The noblest use for the industrial arts and domestic sciences 

 is to raise our daily living to loftier hygienic and ethical stand- 

 ards. Whether or not outside vocations offer for the sex, or a 

 career independent of marriage be chosen, the true apostle of cul- 

 ture and promoter of industrial skill will strive to lift the popular 

 ideas of sanitation, nursing, food preparation, ornament, beauty, 

 education, and physical development. The * new woman " threat- 

 ens to turn her back on the home which the primitive woman 

 evolved. But, in reality, all paths revert to it, wherever the ra- 

 tionale of progress may lead her whether to become sociologist, 

 teacher, artist, writer, practical worker, reformer, or even voter. 

 Only in the restful, well-ordered home does "earth reach its 

 earthly best/' 



