734 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
MOV SS 
abundant means. They are the ones to show 
by example what homes should be and to fur¬ 
nish means to the needy; to use their influence 
to lift them out of their degradation into a 
sense of their duty, by word of mouth and 
deed of pocket. 
It is not to be forgotten, either, that some 
of the outside womeu workers perform home 
duties also. 
Woman “superior!” If so then why not be 
willing to give her the lighter position, and 
pay her for it the same as the man. Don’t 
call her superior and by action make her in¬ 
ferior. It is not necessary- to unduly exalt. 
There are superior and inferior representatives 
of both sexes. Be but just.. In the province 
of home women need self-reliance to sustain 
them in the hard work and burden-bearing 
that come to many. The service, a willing 
and happy one, if the spirits are congenial. 
As to the treatment of women not following 
an imaginary law; man will lose much more 
than woman if he ceases to be gentlemanly m 
her presence. A gentleman does not cod fine 
his courtesy; be dispenses it to man or woman, 
and when he fails to be polite he detracts from 
his character. If he slights or insults, he 
degrades himself, not them. Woman is en¬ 
titled to “adoration, courtesy, protection.” 
If she is, she does not always get her dues, not¬ 
withstanding the thought and inclination of 
mauy,men to that, effect. 
“Anarchy, socialism, &c.,”— more Ameri¬ 
canism in government, purer aud more gen 
erous men and women, less rum, such a con¬ 
coction would bo a better antidote than “old 
maids.” More of the spirit of the Master is 
w hat w r e need to guide us in all relations. 
TO J. H. G. 
MARGARET B. HARVEY. 
“A woman must elect early in life whether 
she will serve God or Mammon. Whether 
she will stay at home and help mother, aud 
finally establish a home of her own, or whether 
she will qualify herself for some special pro¬ 
fession or employment.” 
The quotation with which I open is taken 
from au article written by J. H. G. I quote 
this not because there is notbiug else iu the 
article needing comment, but because this 
paragraph is so astounding that it throws 
everything else into annihilating insignifi¬ 
cance. It is astounding in several ways. In 
one, by reason of the narrowness and igno¬ 
rance displayed. In another, by reason of 
the heartless manner in which it gratuitously 
insults thousands of good women. 
J. H. G. is taking upon himself the office 
and authority of Jesus Christ, the first true 
friend of women. He it was who used the ex¬ 
pression “serve God and Mammon,” But He 
did not use it in auy such conuection as this— 
although He did distinctly tell us what serv¬ 
ing God aud Mammon was. Had He applied 
it as J. H. G. does—that is, in talking about 
housekeeping, etc.—He would have com¬ 
mended Martha rattier than Mary, but Mar¬ 
tha, the careful housekeeper, was the oue who 
hail not chosen the better part. 
According to J. H. G., any woman who is 
earning her own living cannot possibly be a 
Cbristiau—she has forfeited salvation. Aud, 
any woman who stay sat home is necessarily 
serving God. 
Does J. H. G. suppose that every woman 
has a home or a mother? Or, if she has, that 
her mother is always able or willing to k°ep 
her? Or, does he ibiuk that a woman may 
not need to go out into the world m order to 
earu a home or support a mother? It is not 
always that a girl is unwilling to be support¬ 
ed, but it may lie that she has nobody who 
van support her. As to the “finally establish¬ 
ing a home of her own”—may I ask how? By 
marrying some man? Suppose no man asks 
her, shall she ask the man? Or, suppose a 
man should happen to ask her, after she had 
adopted a profession—a muu whom she would 
probably not have met had she stayed home. 
It wogJ.il seem a little awkward if a slight 
change in her circumstances should put her on 
tne road to heaven after she Had elected to 
serve Mamrnou, or on the road to perdition 
after she had elected to serve God! How 
could God and Mammon manage to get then- 
own if a girl’s mother died and didu’t need 
her help, aud thus compelled her.to work iu a 
factory, or, it' a woman doctor married and 
could afford to have a home? 1 pity the wo¬ 
man whose chances of heaven depend upon 
the possibility of other people’s living or 
dyiug! 
Staying at home, whether to help mother or 
to suck one’s fingers, is an expensive luxury. 
Unless one is very rich, to indulge in such a 
luxury means to do without something else 1 — 
which may make it in the end very expensive 
indeed. I should like to stay home, too, if 
ray conscience allowed me to put ujkui some¬ 
body else the care about house rent aud mar¬ 
keting aud gas bills. The “fireside angel,” 
etc., is mV of date, because the angel of to-day 
has found out that in many cases the old- 
fashioned being was a shirk, only tolerated 
until somebody could marry her—missing 
marriage, she became one of the now obsolete 
race of miserable old maids. The angel of 
this dny r may be more angelic if she brings 
wood to make the fire, or something to put iu 
the pot. Thousands upon thousands of brave 
girls all over our land are nobly endeavoring 
to do what, their fathers aud brothers cannot, 
perhaps will not, do; now J. II G. dares to 
insult them all as though they had bartered 
away their honor or sold their souls to Satan. 
Mammon is understood to mean riches. Is 
it the touch of money that J. H G. fears? 
Alas! the great majority' of our women who 
earn their li ring do not get enough to bo con¬ 
sidered riches—not enough to make it worth 
while for his fears! Either the little that 
they get is not enough to tempt them to s»ll 
their souls, or else they make a very poor bar¬ 
gain when they do! They must take what 
they can get, then, simply because they need 
it. Now, if l have done nothing ebe, I think 
I have proved J. H. G. guilty of slander. It 
is slander like this which has caused mauy a 
woman to live a life of hollow preteuee, weak 
dependence, or contemptible shifts, because 
she dared not confess her poverty—she valued 
her good name, and to earn her bread in any 
but two or three conventional ways, was 
equivalent to forfeiting her reputation. I had 
supposed that talk of this kind was well-nigh 
dead. 
If J. H. G. will immediately' drop down 
upon his knees and ask the Lord to forgive 
him, then, if he will rise auil manfully ask 
every womau whose heart he has wounded if 
she will forgive him, I may in auother arti¬ 
cle, endeavor to tell him how this great, this 
tremendous woman question actually does 
stand. But if be will not do this—it will be 
labor iu vain for me to try—he is hopelessly 
reprobate. Now, to some these may sound 
like terrible words. But I moan them in the 
name of outraged womanhood, and of the Sav¬ 
iour, the sou of a woman, I meau them. No 
priest or prophet ever felt more than I do 
the solemn responsibility which I take upon 
my'self iu uttering them. If the Kural New- 
Yorker will only give them to the same pub¬ 
lic who have read the pagan utteraueesof J. H. 
G. I will absolve it from all complicity, if it 
so desires. I will take upon myself the duty 
of answering anything that J. H. G. may' 
choose to say, if he thinks 1 have done him in¬ 
justice. But he bad best pause before be says 
more, unless it be words of peuittnee, for if I 
have wronged or even misunderstood one 
mail, that is a small matter compared with 
the number of women whom he has libeled. 
God forgive him! If I attempted to write 
more, my paper would be wet with tears. 
******** 
As to “ woman’s allotted sphere,” etc. Who 
allotted it? Is it any man’s busine s? Sup¬ 
pose l set myself lip to tell a muu that because 
Adam worked iu a garden, hi* ought to be a 
farmer, whether he liked it or not! He would 
very soon tell me that he was capable of at¬ 
tending to his own affairs. A man has no 
more right to tell a woman what her pai ticu- 
lar sphere is than he has to tell her what kind 
of a hat or dress she shall wear 
1 might go on aud pick the whole article to 
pieces, paragraph by r paragraph. But a care¬ 
ful reading will show y r ou that the bulk of it is 
made up of a scarcely-concealed contempt for 
women, false assumptions about working wo¬ 
men in general, and outrageous slanders 
against womau suffragists. Now, we are dis¬ 
tinctly told that those who offend even the lit¬ 
tle ones—the weak oi*.-—in Christ, offend 
Him. It is plain, then, that J. H. G., in this 
last article, has put himself in the attitude of 
Juilas—for it is a rare tliiug to find any 
American woman who is not a follower of 
Christ, if only a weak one. 
as to the womau suffragists—I have been 
identified with them siuce I was 15 years old, 
and know all alwut them. Asa rule,they ure 
not. “Old Maids”—they are either bright, pret¬ 
ty young women, or they are middle-aged 
men and women who are happily married—to 
say nothing of the scores of haudsome, intelli¬ 
gent. young men who are joining the ranks 
every year. There is but one maiden lady of 
prominence among the suffragists—.Miss Su¬ 
san B. Anthony—a true, womanly' woman, as 
grand a figure in history as Wickliffe or Lu¬ 
sher ever was. Woman suffrage lo-day means 
what early Christianity or the later Reform¬ 
ation did—the Golden Rule put in practice, 
with hope and elevation for the poor and op¬ 
pressed. 
It is the woman suffragists who, for forty 
years past, have worked to protect the 
American home., as it has never yet been pro¬ 
tected. Little by little unjust laws Ix-aring 
upon women have been repealed; little by little 
more, opportunities for work aud edueutiou 
have been granted women; little by little bar¬ 
barous social customs have been modified—in 
short, everything good which has come to 
woman in the last forty years is the direct 
result of the suffrage agitation. (Don’t con¬ 
tradict me anybody; the fact can be proved, 
absolutely.) It was woman suffragists who 
worked to raise fallen women—to provide 
honest work for poor women to keep them from 
falling—to give women their own earnings 
aud the right to hold their own property, and 
be guardians to their own children. From the 
woman suffrage associations have grown the 
children’s country weeks, the cooking schools, 
the colleges for women, the kmder-gartens 
and kitchen-gardens for the poor, the hygienic 
lectures for women, the pamphlets on enlight¬ 
ened motherhood, moral education aud proper 
inodes of dressing, the peace congresses, the 
petitions for police matrons, the appoint¬ 
ment of woman physicians in hospitals and 
asylums for women. The latest phase of 
woman suffrage is its identification with 
womau’s temperance work aud the move¬ 
ments in favor of social purity—woman suf¬ 
fragists are always ready to lend a hand to 
help any good work. 
Thauks to this blessed gospel of women 
suffrage, the woman who once would have 
been driven to a vicious life can now earn a 
respectable living; aud she can have a home 
more artistically furnished, supplied with 
more hygienic cooking, and better kept in 
every way than her mother’s was. She is bet¬ 
ter educated, too, than her father was; if she 
marries, she will know how to rear her chil¬ 
dren, aud if she docs not, she will be too busy 
to have time to grow old-maidish. 
But suffragists are not content yet. They 
know that their work cannot be fully done 
until women have the ballot aud thus are able 
to protect themselves. With the ballot in the 
hands of women, the rum traffic and all social 
evils will be completely annihilated. Then, 
aud then only, can our homes be safe—then, 
and then only, can public morality flourish. 
As long as women are disfranchised, just so 
long will that heathenish idea of the inferior¬ 
ity of women linger in the minds of men like 
J. H. G. This is the cause of all the trouble 
for women iu the world. In law and govern¬ 
ment, they are still considered nonentities; 
aud it was only lately that their opinions were 
thought worthy of respect iu the ordinary af¬ 
fairs of life. 
GOLDEN GRAINS. 
It is the great art and philosophy of life to 
make the best of the present, whether it be 
good or bad; to bear the bad with resignation 
aud patience, and to enjoy the good with 
thankfulness and moderation. 
If you find a temper under perfect control, 
you do not infer that it has been unprovoked. 
The Collector at Bombay has among his 
curiosities a Chinese god marked; “Heathen 
Idol.”and next to it a gold dollar marked: 
“Christian Idol.”. 
Smiles says: “It is a common saying that 
’manners make the man;’and there is a sec¬ 
ond, that‘mind makes the man;’ hut truer 
than either is the third, that ‘home makes the 
man.’ For the home training includes not 
only manners and miud, but character.”. 
One moment! What an effect it produces 
upon years! One moment! Virtue, crime, 
glory, shame,woe, rapture rest up >n moments. 
Death is but a moment; yet eternity is its suc¬ 
cessor. ... 
Havergal says: “If we do not want ‘to 
speak of Him.’let us beware of plausibly per¬ 
suading ourselves that it is because we do not 
want to speak about ourselves, Let us be 
honest and own that the vessel does not over¬ 
flow because it is not very full of faith and 
love.”.... .... 
Laughter should dimple the cheek, not 
furrow the brow. A jest should be such that 
ail shall be able to join iu the laugh which it 
occasions; but it it bears hard upon one of the 
company, like the crack of a string, it makes 
a stop iii the music .. 
Domestic Ceonoimj 
CONDUCTED BY MRS. AGNES E. M. CARMAN. 
The thanksgiving of the contented poor — 
the thanksgiving of the contented rich. 
Which mil be more acceptable to <lod'/ 
The thanksgiving of the discontented poor 
—the thanksgiving of the discontented rich. 
Which will be More acceptable to God / 
If it is the proper thing for the men in yo ir 
employ to lift their hats in respectful recog¬ 
nition when meeting the female members of 
your family, why is it not right aud proper 
for you aud your sons to so acknowledge the 
female members of your employes’ families? 
THANKSGIVING ON THE PACIFIC 
SLOPE. 
After the warm reception of the “Bessie 
Brown” Company Dinner, I am almost afraid 
to write to you, dear Rural, of my last 
year’s Thanksgiving dinner on one of these 
same California ranches, where I shall again, 
Providence permitting, enjoy a repetition of 
that festive occasion, You have learned by 
this time, dear sisters, that Palmetto is a 
wanderer on the face of the earth, aud that 
she has here no “abiding city,” consequently 
when a few weeks since I was relegated to the 
foot-hills on account of my little one’s delicate 
health, it was only a matter of “moving on” 
ouce more, which it seems to me 1 have been 
doing, like “Poor Joe,” for so many years 
that I begin to long for the place where “the 
weary are at rest.” 
The fact remains, however, that I am at least 
in a very beautiful aud restful place. On this 
day in early November, tamsittiug at au open 
window, through which the air, although 
laden with the iutoxicatiug odors of the near¬ 
by vineyard, reminds me of a cool day in the 
far East iu early June. Roses of 211 varieties 
clamber over the cottage, and nod, and peep 
iu at this same casement. The merry voice 
of “Bey,” no longer on the invalid list, as he 
chatters with the li* tic- maidens of the “Moun¬ 
tain Ranch,” aud busily hulls the almonds and 
English walnuts, is balm to my anxious heart. 
Toward the south I catch a glimpse of a pretty 
winding road ascending the hillside, bordered 
on either hand with orange and pomegranate 
trees, and the graceful pendant foliage of the 
pepper tree. I hear the distant horn of the 
hunter, and down the mountain side, making 
a rare picture to my unaccustomed eyes, comes 
a train of men and dogs and horses, one of the 
latter with a fine deer slung across his back. 
My hostess tells me that the wife of the head 
hunter, herself a graceful horsewoman 
and daring Diana, is a rare cook of 
the venison, that is each year becom¬ 
ing more scarce in these beautiful Santa Cruz 
Mountains, I shall some day climb tho moun¬ 
tain to her house aud interview heron the sub¬ 
ject for the benefit of the Rural readers, and 
now', if Eunice Webster will bear with me, I 
shall give you my Thanksgiving dinner with¬ 
out roraauee or exaggeration, which although 
somewhat different, was notone whit better 
than mauy I have eaten in the little white 
Jersey farm-house w hen the snow was turning 
each twig into a thing of beauty, aud each 
fence and gate post into a shadowy ogre. 
The typical California farmer is generous to 
a fault, extravagant, and ofteu somewhat 
shiftless. The soil produces so abundantly 
and nature is so lavish with her gifts that he 
grows careless. The typical ranch is not a 
Brown ranch, but one as immeeut of a garden 
as if vegetables would uot ripen out-of-doors 
all the year round, aud depending for its sup¬ 
ply of such things upon the itinerant vender, 
in the less rural districts, anil iu the interior 
going without. Not so on this ranch of my 
hostess, a lovely white-haired old lady who 
came from France in early girlhood, and 
to the carefully instilled principles of the 
French peasant in agricultural districts, added 
ten years’hard experience on a bu m ij New 
York State before her thirty years spent in 
California. She deplores the want of thrift 
of her neighbors, anil says, “Wait until ibe 
Eastern farmers come out. here; they will 
show California people wlmt, cuu be done in 
their State!” 
But I shall never get to my dinner if I ram¬ 
ble on iu this wmy. 1 thiuk one easily becomes 
enervated, and gossipy, and shiftless iu this 
delicious atmosphere. 
First we had a purfe made of the Mexican 
frejole , a brown beau, which reminded me of 
the soup of the mock turtle beau, anil was 
made in much the same way. The beans wore 
pul ou in cold wutcr, with salt pork, a small 
ham bone, celery, leeks, onions, and carrots, 
and simmered slowly for three hours. Vege¬ 
tables and all were then pressed through a 
sieve, seasoned to taste with salt and pepper, 
diluted to the required consistency with boil¬ 
ing water, and served with little dice of fried 
bread. 
Stewed hare, which 1 was prepared to re¬ 
volt against with all the strength of my East¬ 
ern prejudices against furry animals as articles 
of food, w’as the next dish. 1 must confess 
that my prejudices vanished before the skill 
of the cook. Skin, clean, and trim t wo hares, 
but if you would bo thoroughly French, do 
not wash; lard them with shreadsof salt pork. 
1 thiuk there is no reader of the Rural who 
will need to have this process described to 
her. Fry the joints iu the fat made by frying 
out several slicesof fat pork, and when brown, 
cover with a bottle of red wine (cost ten ceuts 
idimUattfouja 
When Bahy was sick, we gave her Cantona 
When she was a Child, she cried for Castorla 
When she heoamu Miss, she clung to custorla. 
when *h<* had children, shs gave them Castorta. 
