But we have been too long getting on with half-measures, makeshifts, contraptions of all sorts. The star we should now hitch our wagon to is an electric motor. The young woman who wishes to live on the farm would better enter some industrial field, make something commercially and with efficiency, sell it, and find in her hands the fifteen dollars for the fireless, the eleven for the double-decker wheeled-tray, and pretty soon the larger sum that will be needed to install a perfect kitchen, that will not only be a joy to herself but will be a lesson to her whole community, that will lift the whole region into a new realization of life, that will show how the time necessary to be spent on the drudgery of the household may be reduced from eighteen hours a day to two, and so release her energies as to give to the higher needs of the family and to the equally great needs of the community the services that she alone is fitted to give, and that are absolutely necessary to the well-being and the safeguarding of the life of the rural realm and therefore also of the whole people.
How can we get a kitchen like that? Well, that is the Gordian knot that the farm daughters will be able to cut. They can do it—they must do it. Every instinct of patriotism, every breathing of passion for the welfare of the future homes, every thought of affection for the home circle that will be theirs, calls for the most valiant struggle to gain the goal—a perfectly hygienic, perfectly fitted household plant, with all in it that can by scientific mechanism be placed there, to be the perfect working basis for that highest product, human happiness in a human home.
CHAPTER XIII
EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION
Scientific management is the application of the conservation principle to production.
The time, health and vitality of our people are as well worth conserving, at least, as our forests, minerals, and lands.
When we get efficiency in all our industries and commercial ventures, national efficiency will be a fact.