“ When will the day come that the fact will be accepted that alcohol does not warm and protect the consumer, but actually lowers the temperature, and by this means, in cold weather, renders him a more ready prey to the effects of exposure. When will the value of good work cease to be measured by the exhaustion it brings about or the breakdown to which it conduces? Is it not, time that the housewife should be abashed rather than self-commiserating when a bad cold runs through her household, for observation of certain elementary principles of disinfection would go far to avert such a catastrophe? ”

“ The most striking, and also the most radical and pervasive, characteristic of our time is, of course, the progress made in scientific knowledge. Month by month enormous numbers of facts are, in every department, added to the knowledge already acquired. To let one’s imagination range, even in a cursory way, over the work that is being done in 38 chemistry and physics merely as they concern biology—to enumerate the subdivisions of these sciences, or to look down a list of recent publications relating to research carried on in them, is enough to make one’s brain reel. ”

“ The care of the children is considered by all shades of opinion to be the clou of a woman’s life, and every day more and more responsibility is cast upon her in this respect. How can she, then, fulfil these duties as they should be fulfilled if she is utterly ignorant of the laws of health and of child-life, and how both are affected by environment and all the other grave and fundamental truths which lie at the root of the successful up-bringing and development of the child? ”

“ Even here it is curtailed in a vast number of species; but wherever it exists it stands for power to progress, and represents capacity for benefiting by, indeed depending upon, education, if only in the simple form of learning by imitation—a form familiar to readers of such books as Long’s “Schools of the Woods.”
Plasticity is the hall-mark of progress; educability indicates a brain more or less competent to assimilate, to remember, to compare, to discriminate. This door of progress has been merely set ajar for even the higher apes; it is open to man only. ”

“ It must be clear how many reforms—impossible to the nominally educated women of the present day—would flow easily from this better training of women; for those so trained could certainly not endure the futility of some of our educational ideals, nor that haphazard disregard of the nature and needs of the child, which still characterises so much of our educational method. They could not support the continuance of many of the common evils of modern life—the noise and dirt, the brutality of manners, the scamping of work, the rush for pleasure. ”

“ With admirable patience and infinite skill, the scientific craftsmen of recent times have laboriously pieced together the scattered chips of biological research, of human tradition, of tribal customs and of world-wide folklore, until the dignity and power, the beauty and the possibilities of human nature have emerged from the dust of ignorance and the veil of superstition. The result is that it is no longer permissible to deplore in pessimistic tones the inevitable degradation of the race, nor to accept with supineness the threatened deterioration of a population. ”

“ Household economics has been well said “to rest on two chief cornerstones, the economy of wealth and the economy of health, and encloses the groundwork of human happiness and human aspirations ... even all departments of science must contribute to its development.”
But a mere knowledge of biology and economics is useless without bodily efficiency, and true bodily efficiency is only possible where the environment is favourable to growth and life. ”

“ To stand over a wash-tub rubbing each article by hand; to strain every muscle emptying that tub; to dry garments on a rail across a kitchen and iron them near a blazing fire is not intelligent, and can only be followed by women driven by custom to wash clothes at all. Perhaps in no section of household work are scientific methods within reach as in the laundry; the existence of the public laundry and the rivalry of different firms has produced an open market for appliances of all kinds, and the exhibition of laundry utensils, machines, &c., has become an annual event. ”

“ What is true of such arts as music and poetry is at least equally true of the art of living. The rich and well-harmonised subconsciousness is the proximate source whence all that is strongest and most beautiful in human activity is derived. The domestic arts, conversation, power of rapid judgment 52 at a crisis, the care of the sick, the care of children, tactful daily dealing with one’s fellows, all these, and so much else, we recognise to be dependent for perfection upon practice; and that is only another way of saying that they depend on the efficiency and the character of the subconscious. ”

“ Great may still be our ignorance and great the need for a more adequate service, especially in the homes of the poor, but taken as a whole the care of the sick has been raised to what we may, without ambiguity, call a scientific art. Nursing may be popular from a love of such work and from its financial return, but the real strength of the nursing world lies in its organised provision of skilled women sent out to their work with a knowledge of its detail and a training in routine, paid for by service during years of apprenticeship. ”

“ Thus the instruments once at Kew Observatory have had to be transferred to the wilds of Scotland to ensure their perfect working—rendered impossible at Kew by the noise and vibrations of encroaching London. Thus, again, the mind of Darwin required for its proper functioning the quiet of a study at Down, in the heart of the country. A ray of light will spoil a delicate experiment: the presence in an observatory of one steel key will hinder the work of the instruments. A boy commits suicide because of the noise of the factory in which he is compelled to work. ”

“ Whether it be the instrument devised by man, or whether it be the human nervous system itself, that which we are looking at is a mechanism too delicate for the cruel exigencies of an unyielding gross environment. We have but to reflect on one organ alone—on the exceeding fineness of structure, and nicety of adjustment, and definiteness of sense-limit, of the eye—in order to realise that the comparison between the human nervous system and the most delicate of our delicate instruments is more than justifiable. ”

“ How do we know, when dealing with any given drunkard, that we have not before us a fine, fine nature, to which the harsh and low conditions of our Western civilisation have simply proved intolerable? How do we know that, instead of blaming him and trying to adjust him to the world, we ought not rather to blame the world, and try to make it a fit place for him to live in? ”

“ Her attitude towards housekeeping is not one of enthusiasm. The Lancashire mill-girl is proud to have a house of her own, but prefers her life at the mill to one spent in ordering that house; the elementary school teacher considers housekeeping of so little economic interest that she is injured if she may not devote her married life to a profession demanding the best of her energy; the university graduate pretends to a mind superior to physical comfort and welfare unless it can be produced by a creature less specialised than herself. ”

“ We have only been able to touch the skirt of a great subject, but our end will have been achieved if we have succeeded in pointing the way for a fuller realisation of the aims of earnest men and women for the saving of child-life and the mitigation of disease, and if we have shown how great that subject is—how much too great for anything but the most superficial treatment in a single article. ”

“ Up to the present time the conduct of the home has been regulated purely by rule of thumb methods; if however in the future it can only be administered with the same method and scientific exactitude as prevail in other great business enterprises, the drudgery of housekeeping will diminish and woman will cease to be a slave to household duties. She will have more time to devote to the cultivation of her own mind, and thus, while becoming a more real companion to man, she will be free to take a more enlightened interest in the education and development of her children. ”

“ And so it has come about that, with this ideal in view, the methods of modern hygiene are directed to awaken the nation’s sanitary conscience and to stimulate the growth of true civic freedom. These methods may be fairly defined as the working of common sense aided by the results of scientific research, in their turn supported by very carefully tested applications. Necessarily it is assumed that each individual will accord to them intelligent, personal support and, where necessary, will be willing to sink unreasonable likes and dislikes in the sea of social service. ”

“ Biology, when a knowledge of it is more widely spread among us, will assuredly work a change in public opinion. We have among us thousands of men and women whom we account failures in life; whose existence constitutes our gravest social problem. The drunkard, the wastrel, the thief, the prostitute—these are characters whom society thrusts out. They have proved themselves unfitted for their environment ”

“ In the care of the sick we have seen a complete revolution. Even so recently as the days of our grandparents “Sarah Gamp” was the general refuge—now her name is a byword. The work of nursing and the care of an invalid’s room, be it home or hospital, has been raised from mere manual labour. Intellect has established formulæ and dogma on which workers can be trained, and the work itself has been proved not alone a suitable means by which a woman can earn her living, but also a profession demanding a dignified respect and admiration. ”

“ It is not necessary—as it might have been a few years ago—to show that a training on these lines is better, as a preparation for life, than that offered by the ordinary school and university curriculum; but it may be worth while to show how far and why it is superior to a well-planned course in the analytical biology of the laboratory. The superiority is surely twofold: in that the kind of knowledge acquired is of greater practical utility; and, again, in that the development which it ensures, to the powers, bodily and mental of the student, is more varied, thorough, and effective. ”

“ If man be the producer and distributer of wealth, woman is certainly the director of consumption. On her rests the responsibility of expending wisely and well the money entrusted to her for the nutrition and clothing of her family, and how can this be adequately fulfilled if she have no real knowledge of the subject beyond what she is able to pick up as she goes along, a method detrimental to all concerned? ”

“ I am not suggesting here that the pioneers of women’s higher education were wrong in the attitude they adopted. To win for women intellectual freedom was the most important duty for them, and that could only be achieved by women submitting to the same intellectual tests as men. But the problems which call for solution by their successors of a later generation have assumed a new form. ”