When I say a book is good or bad I am not referring to its morals but to its merit as literature. A hopelessly poor piece of literature may have excellent morals, and a book that is good literature may be very unsafe from a moral point of view. The relation of literature to morals is too big a question for me to discuss. Each of us must steer her own course in regard to this question. It is, however, helpful to remember that if the purpose and main lesson of a book are morally good, even though it may deal a little with questionable subjects, its reading may tend toward good rather than evil.
SHOULD WOMEN BE INTERESTED IN POLITICS?
Next month in the April number we will take up woman’s interest in politics. Is there any reason for her being interested in them? What effect do city, state and national laws and law-makers have on her own personal welfare or that of her family? If she raises children what effect does that have on future politics? What two great questions now before the country bear directly on the price she pays for food and clothing and on the price her husband receives for what he sells or for his labor? What about the men the voting members of your family help elect to the state legislature or the national Congress or White House? (Perhaps if you live in Colorado, you vote for President yourself.) What about the wives and children of these men? What about the candidates who were not elected and their families? If there is an election on, ought you to know which of the candidates are rascals, which represent wrong principles, which will vote for measures that will make the things you buy more expensive? Ought you to use your influence against such men?
Let us each see who can send in the best reason for a woman’s being interested in politics. The answers must be very short, and they must reach our office before March 10, for the April number, as you know, appears March 25, and by March 10, at the very latest the printer should be working on whatever is to go in it. This seems like working a long ways ahead of time, but the Editor tells me that most magazines by that time, will be all done with the April number and working on May or June! So you see you will have to write very quickly to be in time.
THE INTEREST OF EVERYDAY THINGS.
We had a glimpse last month at some of the interesting things connected with bread and bread-making. The house is full of things we have known so long that we scarcely think of them except as parts of the daily routine, but which, if we turn our attention to them, prove veritable mines of information, history, travel and even romance. This month we’ll consider some of the things concerned in bread-making.
Wheat
Wheat, for example, takes us all over the earth and back to the days before there was any history at all. Wheat, like our other grains, belongs to the Grass Family and its scientific name is Triticum vulgare. It is the most valuable of all the cereal grasses and, next to maize, or Indian corn, the most productive. Rice is really its only rival as a human food. It is generally supposed that it originally came, like so many of our grains and fruits, from the plains of Central Asia, but it has been found that a certain wild grass of Western Asia and the Mediterranean regions, can be cultivated into what we call wheat. It is the bread-food of most European nations (who, by the way, call it corn) and is supplanting maize in America. In our country alone 40 or 50 million acres are devoted to it every year, and the yield is a million or so over half a billion bushels. Generally, one-fifth to two-fifths of this is sent to other countries. Russia, Canada and other countries produce large quantities of it.
Wheat was widely grown in the pre-historic world. As far back as there is any record of languages there was a word for wheat. We know that the Chinese (who knew about gunpowder, printing, glass, spectacles and many other things centuries before we “invented” them) cultivated wheat as far back as 2,700 B. C., and regarded it as a direct gift from heaven. The Egyptians attributed wheat to their heathen goddess Isis. The Greeks believed that Ceres, their goddess of agriculture, gave it to her favorite, Triptolemus, and lent him her miraculous chariot to drive over the earth and distribute the new grain to the sons of men. There is a pyramid in Egypt, which scientists estimate was built 3,359 years before Christ was born, more than 5,000 years ago, and in one of the bricks of this pyramid they found imbedded a little grain of wheat. How much that single grain told the world! The lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Italy also left traces showing they knew the use of wheat, as did the inhabitants of what is now Hungary, in the Stone Age.