Ellen H. Richards

“ The loss of faith brings us by a short cut straight to the loss of purpose in life—of any purpose, at least, beyond purely material ones. To those who need money the duty of getting it first and above anything else becomes the gospel of life. To those who feel the need of position, whether in society, business, or elsewhere, their gospel drives them to all means within the law to attain that. To those who have both money and position comes the only remaining purpose in life—that of using them for an existence of amusement and enjoyment. ”

“ It is not impossible to furnish a decent habitation for every productive laborer in all our great cities. Many really humane people are overawed by the authority, the pompous and powerful assertions of “successful” men of affairs; and they often sleep while such men are forming secret conspiracies against national health and morality with the aid of legal talent hired to kill. Only when the social mind and conscience is educated and the entire community becomes intelligent and alert can legislation be secured which places all competitors on a level where humanity is possible. ”

“ THE HOME AND THE SCHOOL One must not displace the other, for one cannot replace the other, but rather the home and the school must react on each other. The home is the place in which to gain the experience, and the school the place in which to acquire the knowledge that shall illuminate and crystallize the experience. The child should go out to the school with enthusiasm, and return to the home filled with a deeper interest and desire to realize things.
In morals and manners the school can only give tendency or direction to the child’s life. The school is not the best place to teach ethics. ”

“ To the student of biological evolution, the individual is as a mere pin point on the chart of community advance, for surely society grows according to evolutionary law. “As certainly as Nature gives the poor child its chance of a good life, so certainly do the circumstances of slum environment rob it forthwith of its birthright—it is not uncommon to find more than half the children of three years of age hanging on to life with marks of disease and undergrowth firmly implanted on their tender frames. ”

“ But the written word, however clearly put, can never reach the untrained as can the voice and personality of an earnest speaker with a compelling vitality. Lectures by those who have been engaged in research themselves, so that they have absorbed the spirit of the laboratory—not by those who have merely smelled the odors of the waste jars—are ten times more valuable than even the most attractively illustrated articles. It is well that the personality of the human being is an asset, and that there is a stimulus in hearing and seeing the person who has accomplished things. ”

“ Amusement and exercise may be taken together; exercise and sleep may be somewhat interchangeable.
The task, or daily work, is a necessity for mental and physical health. It should be accepted as a part of human life and the will and energy should be directed to doing it well. It may be a pure delight, the most entertaining thing that happens; it should be interesting. It is astonishing how interesting a dull piece of work may become if one sets one’s self to doing it well. That which one subconsciously knows one is doing badly is drudgery. ”

“ When you ask how it is to be rendered, one cannot be mistaken in turning first to those priceless qualities in any sound national life whose tendency to decay we noted at the outset. Give back to us our faith. Give back to us a serious and worthy purpose. Restore sane views of life, of our own relations to it, and of our relations to those who share it with us. ”

“ But civilization must not spell disease and ruin.
The economic factor must not be lost sight of. To tell the boy and girl that they are as good as any does not give them the right to the most expensive food and clothing they see. How shall they choose wisely in the multitude of new things? They wish the best, naturally, and all America is honeycombed with the wrong idea that the best costs the most. ”

“ America’s thought could be translated into the word efficiency. Yes, we might almost say she worships efficiency. If, then, efficiency is to be the goal, what are the means to develop it? Efficiency depends chiefly upon good health, and to maintain this we must first consider in the scheme of education the physical aids—food, air, water, clothing and shelter, exercise and rest—and with this goal in view must come also recreation, play or amusement, and beauty to develop the mental and the spiritual. ”

“ Has any better means of giving experience ever been devised than these small, daily tasks which differentiate men from animals? The care of the fixed habitation, the foresight needed to prepare the things for the family life in the weeks and months to come, the coöperation of all the members of the family toward one common end—all tend toward high human ideals. If the wise mother only realized the value to the child of helping in such portions as are not too heavy, of being a part of the life, she would let nothing stand in the way of using this natural means of development. ”

“ If ever there was a mission in the world worthy of the most strenuous service, it is to wrest back this victory, be it out of pity for suffering children or for the very welfare and existence of the nation.
“The schools have made their beginning; the homes have not yet started; they wait the impulse from without. It is for voluntary, intelligent opinion to get to work on the home, and never to relax until a race [81] of parents has arisen which knows no other duty to the state than to rear with heart and brain the children which have been given to them. ”

“ Just as the individual, if he is to do and be his best, accepts his limitations, obeys Nature’s law, and thrives in body and estate in consequence, and as the community banding together makes and carries out with penalties for deviation certain regulations for mutual benefit, so must the still larger groups—the state and the nation—use their larger wisdom and wider knowledge for the benefit of all. ”

“ Although all America has not become aroused to the undoubted fact of tendencies toward physical deterioration, it is on the verge of an awakening. The public school is the natural medium for the spread of better ideals, and if the teachers of cooking and of hygiene would coöperate and use all the material which sanitary science is heaping on the table before them, we should soon see a betterment of the physical status. ”

“ In like manner we call today for more faith in a way out of the slough of despond, more resolute endeavor to improve social and economic conditions. We beg the leaders of public opinion to pause before they condemn the efforts making to teach those means of social control which may build yet again a home life that will prove the nursery of good citizens and of efficient men and women with a sense of responsibility to God and man for the use they make of their lives. ”

“ Struggle, with all its attendant evils, seems the lever that moves the world. It is therefore in line that health, and whatever favors it, is to be gained at the expense of struggle. The one necessary element is that men should value it enough to struggle for it.
Sanitary science above all others, when applied, benefits the whole people, raises the level of productive life.
In the rapid development of our civilization, the laboratory, the shop, the school can be the quickest mediums of suggesting wants. ”

“ The work of creation, of transformation to desirable result, is the purest joy the human mind can experience. Fourteen hours a day is not too much for this kind of task. The difficulty is to gain skill of hand and eye, or training of mind, to this end. A fallacy, a canker at the heart of our social fabric today, is that the daily task is something to be rid of. ”

“ It is no disgrace to an individual or a city to have the national laboratory make discoveries, to have the national power put down epidemics, as it does civil rebellion, for the good of the whole nation. It is disgraceful, however, for the citizen to remain indifferent or obstructive, to grumble over the cost. ”

“ If the housewife would use wisely the information at her hand today, it is safe to say that in six cases out of ten she could cut in half the housekeeping budget and double the comfort of living.
As conditions are, the twentieth century sees a strange phenomenon—the most vital of all processes, the raising of children, carried on under adverse conditions; human labor and life being held of as little account as in the days of building the pyramids. ”

“ The essential fact in man’s history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of coöperation leading to scarce-dreamt-of collective powers, of a synthesis of the species, of the development of a common general idea, a common general purpose out of a present confusion. ”

“ No state can thrive while its citizens waste their resources of health, bodily energy, time, and brain power, any more than a nation may prosper which wastes its natural resources.
America today is wasting its human possibilities even more prodigally than its material wealth. The latter deficiency is being brought to a halt. Shall the human side receive less attention? A sharply divided line between home and school is no longer clearly drawn. Parents’ associations are being formed and are coöperating with the school-teacher. ”

“ The mechanical setting of life is become an important factor, and this new impulse which is showing itself so clearly today for the modified construction and operation of the family home is the final crown or seal of the conquest of the last stronghold of conservatism, the home-keeper.
Tomorrow, if not today, the woman who is to be really mistress of her house must be an engineer, so far as to be able to understand the use of machines and to believe what she is told. ”

“ The control of man’s environment for [132] his own good as a function of government is a comparatively new idea in republican democracy. The cry of paternalism is quickly raised, on the one hand, of socialism, on the other. Each gain has been at the cost of a hard-fought battle. But it is certain that the individual must delegate more or less of his so-called rights for the sake of the race, and since the only excuse for the existence of the individual is the race, he must so far relinquish his authority. ”

“ It is not fair that the parents should sit back and shift to the school the whole responsibility for the future citizen.
The little modifications can best be made in the home, permanent foundations can be laid and braced with habits so good and strong that nothing can shake them. Most powers are the result of habits. Let the furrows be plowed deeply enough while the brain cells are plastic, then human energies will result in efficiency and the line of least resistance will be the right line. Everything, therefore, which influences the child must be the best known to science. ”

“ RESPONSIBILITY The ideal of “home” is protection from dangers from within—bad habits, bad food, bad air, dirt and abuse,—shelter, in fact, from all stunting agencies, just as the gardener protects his tender plants until they become strong enough to stand by themselves. The child’s home environment is certainly a potent factor in his future efficiency. ”

“ Compulsory school attendance places responsibility for certain care, vaccination, decent clothing, good food, decent shelter. The thousand and one ways in which society is now protecting itself are all educating the newcomers to American ideals. They are all intended to make efficient, self-sustaining citizens who do not feel the pull of the law or the bond of outside care. It is the last conflict between the ideals of individualism and those of the community need, subordinating the individual preference. ”

“ The citizens ought to be a gladder, sadder people, stirred and delighted and grateful for much that the city affords; sad and shocked by some of the forbidding, existing conditions. That is the power of an exhibit, so to visualize a condition that the mind [123] really conceives it, never again to recover from the shock, to be unmindful of such possibilities of degraded existence for human beings. ”

“ It is well recognized that in severe sicknesses of many kinds the will to get well is more powerful than drugs, that something which we call nerve force acting upon the physical machine sends a vital current through the arteries, coerces the heart to renewed pumping action, and life comes again to the blanched cheek and glazing eye. This more often happens by a mental stimulus than by any medicine. In like manner the improvement of the body’s shell, the home, like that of the soul’s shell, the body, comes more often from an inward impulse than from outward coercion. ”

“ The indifference of the people themselves is today almost the only stumbling block to national prosperity.
The time lost to the average worker by inefficient labor is a drain on the community largely avoidable, and is the cause of that other drain on the moral as well as physical vitality—charity.
Preventive medicine is a science by itself, [136] a combination of social and scientific forces guided by research quickly applied, and it must be accepted and upheld by those whom it benefits, namely, all the citizens. ”

“ FAITH The relation of environment to man’s efficiency is a vital consideration: how far it is responsible for his character, his views, and his health; what special elements in the environment are most potent and what are the most readily controlled, provided sufficient knowledge can be gained of the forces and conditions to be used.
To this end home life—in its relations to the child, the adult, and the community—is considered in connection with the effect on the home of the influences outside it, and the reaction of each on the other. ”

“ An awakening has come and the school is the leading factor in the upward movement. Education is coming to have a new meaning, or better, perhaps, is going back to the older meaning with new materials. No knowledge or power the youth may acquire will avail in real struggle for existence of the race without a definite aim to hold steady the eye fixed on a certain goal. ”

“ We have no standards for safety. Our enemies are no longer Indians and wild animals. Those were the days of big things. Today is the day of the infinitely little. To see our cruelest enemies, we must use the microscope. Of all our dangers, that of uncleanness leads—uncleanness of food and water and air—uncleanness due to unsanitary production and storage, to exposure to street dust, or to cooking and serving of food in unclean vessels. Such conditions result not only in actual disease, but in lowered vitality and lessened work power. ”

“ He is, to some degree at least, civilized, and yet human beings are of all animals the sickliest, and this in spite of the fact that human health is more important to man and to the world than the health of any other creature. And by health I do not mean simply existence, freedom from pain, or absence of disease, but rather organic power and efficiency, the maximum vital ability possible to the individual for the doing of all that seems most worth while in life. ”

“ Right living conditions comprise pure food and a safe water supply, a clean and disease-free atmosphere in which to live and work, proper shelter, and the adjustment of work, rest, and amusement. The attainment of these conditions calls for hearty coöperation between individual and community—effort on the part of the individual because the individual makes personality a power; effort on the part of the community because the strength of combined endeavor is required to meet all great problems. ”

“ Society is only just beginning to realize that it has at its command today for its own regeneration a great unused force in its army of housewives, teachers, mothers, conscious of power but uncertain how to use it. Perhaps the most progressive movement of the times is one led by women who see clearly that cleanness is above charity, that moral [151] support must be given to those who know but do not dare to do right, and that knowledge must be brought to the ignorant. ”

“ When an idea has won in a certain circle, it quickly spreads to the other members, thence to active communities. So the universal law of imitation may be the greatest help in the spread of ideas. The individual eats a certain food because his neighbor does. Boston determines to make an effort for a better city because Chicago has felt the stirrings of civic pride.
A gifted individual with a deep sense of the need of his community sees an ideal condition, which by his thought becomes a possibility. ”

“ The pedagogical world is now becoming convinced that physical defects are more often than not the basis of mental incompetence, and this leads logically to the teaching of the laws of right living in a practical way, not merely as lessons from books, but as daily practice. This practice must eventually go into the home, where the most of the child’s hours are spent. It is as useless to expect good health from unsanitary houses as good English from two hours’ school training diluted by twelve hours of slovenly language. ”

“ When civilization, as it is called, persuaded woman to give up manufacture and to become a buyer, the first step in the disintegration of the home as a center of information, as well as of industry, was taken. The housewife and mother were made to look to the dealer, and thus to feel their helplessness. This sense of ignorance, this subconscious loss of power over things, only increased the effect of that fatalism which the control of machinery was leading man out from under. ”