It is after all a difference of environment that makes the difference between mistress and maid, between master and man. The human being is as plastic as clay--is clay in the hands of circumstance. If his support of wife and children depended upon obsequiousness of bearing, the master might, like the butler, approximate Uriah Heep. If the mistress’s love of delicacy and color had not been cultivated by association with taste from childhood, her finery might be as vulgar as the maid’s which provokes her satire. It is after all a question of surroundings and education. And in this country, where Aladdin-fortunes spring into being by the rubbing of a lamp--where families of, for example, many centuries of the downtrodden life of European peasant jump from direst poverty to untold wealth--environment has often no opportunity to form the folk of gentle breeding. Many instances are not lacking where those who wait are more gently bred than those who are waited upon. In their larger discourse, then, up-to-date household books stand for the very essence of democracy and human-heartedness--which is also the very essence of aristocracy. After the old manner which Master Farley described, our women seem to have given their books to the public with the faith that they contain much other books have not touched--to stand for an absolutely equable humanity, for kindness and enduring courtesy between those who employ and those who are employed, the poor rich and the rich poor, the householders and the houseworkers--to state the relations between master and man and mistress and maid more explicitly than they have before been stated, and thus to help toward a more perfect organization of the forces that carry on our households--to direct with scientific and economic prevision the food of the house members; to emphasize in all departments of the house thoroughgoing sanitation and scientific cleanliness.