Knowing, too, as she will, more accurately and scientifically than women to-day generally know, how largely energy and depression, irritability and calm strength are questions of right or wrong food, the educated woman may be trusted to find a means to put an end to the crying iniquity of adulteration. Directly or indirectly, by the pressure of her determination that the race shall no longer be offered a sacrifice to Mammon, she will assuredly find a way to put an end to all not absolutely necessary dangerous trades.
The opposition of such women to what is wrong in social custom, in government, in education, will be a very different thing from the opposition of well-meaning but imperfectly instructed women on the one hand; or, on the other, that of a few thoroughly trained and informed ones working more or less in isolation, scattered over the country. It would mean a body of sound, enlightened, disinterested public opinion, so vast, so far-reaching, yet so intimately cognisant of all the little daily details of life in the home, that it is difficult to see what other body of opinion could be found mighty enough to resist it.
If, unhappily, this advance should not be made—if our present Western civilisation be allowed to run unchecked down the groove into which it has sunk—there seems nothing before it but destruction.
FOOTNOTES:
“The Electrical Resistance of the Human Body.” Gee and Brotherton, Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc., 1910.
SCIENCE IN THE HOUSEHOLD
By Mrs. W. N. SHAW
The slow development of the demand for the training of girls of the middle and upper classes in the details of household management has been to a great extent due to the common observation that persons of imperfect education are frequently proficient in the domestic arts, and to the assumption that good housekeeping consists entirely in the efficient exercise of those arts.