It has brought us to the point of expecting domestic science in all schools of agriculture and of regarding it as natural for the legislature of Montana to appropriate $50,000 to the State Agricultural College for a woman's dormitory.
It has cushioned the shock of the tidings from the University of California to the effect that entrance credit will this fall be given for high school domestic science work.
We are reduced to equanimity in the face of the fact (which might have frenzied Alexander Hamilton) that Columbia University, through its Teachers College, is offering courses in Elementary Cookery, in Shirt-waists, in Domestic Laundering, and in Housewifery.
And at last, when we see the resuscitated home making its way even into the really-truly, more-than-masculinely, academic Eastern women's colleges, we rush up to the Mike McCarthy of this case and assure him warmly that we were not deceived for a moment by his apparent demise, having just learned that President Hazard of Wellesley College, in her latest commencement address, said: "I hope the time may soon come when we can have a department of domestic science, which shall give a sound basis for the problems of the household "
What does it all mean?
"Fellow-Citizens," said the colored orator reported by Dr. Paul Monroe of Columbia, "what am education? Education am the palladium of our liberties and the grand pandemonium of civilization."
But it does mean something, this Home Economics disturbance. AND
SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IT SEEMS TO.
II
Mr. Edward T. Devine. of the New York Charity Organization Society, has distinguished himself in the field of economic thought as well as in the field of active social reform. Among his works is a minute but momentous treatise on "The Economic Function of Women." It is really a plea for the proposition that to-day the art of consuming wealth is just as important a study as the art of producing it.
"If acquisition," says Mr. Devine, "has been the idea which in the past history of economics has been unduly emphasized, expenditure is the idea which the future history of the science will place beside it."