The household has been up to this time a _terra incognita_. Until but yesterday absolutely nothing had been done in any educational institution towards investigating its past history, its present condition, its future needs. The beginning has scarcely been made, although the field for such investigation is limitless. Comparatively little is known of artistic house-building and furnishing, scarcely more of household sanitation[327] and the chemistry of foods,[328] even less of the economic principles underlying the household; fashion, not art, governs every question of costume, while, with a few notable exceptions, Porter’s _Development of the Human Intellect_ contains the sum and substance of our knowledge of the mental development of children. Years of patient, laborious, unremitting investigation must be given to all household affairs before any appreciable advance can be made by them. The historical and scientific investigation of all the great subjects of art, economics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology in their application to the household, and the publication of the results of these investigations, would not indeed settle to-morrow all the difficulties that arise to-day in regard to household affairs; but such investigation and publication would take the subject out of the domain of sentiment and transfer it to a realm where reason and judgment have the control. Household affairs would in time come to receive the respect now accorded the learned professions. Household service, instead of being taken up as a last resort by those who themselves say “have not education enough to do anything else,” would be dignified into a profession that would attract large numbers who now seek other occupations. It has already been said that “educational forces do not push from the bottom, they pull from the top.” When a strong educational force exerted from the top shall have pulled the household and all questions connected with it out of the slough of stagnation in which it has been for so long a time, then, and not till then, will training schools for domestic employees be successful. Progress in every other field of human activity has been made only through investigation and the widespread diffusion of the results of such investigation; on similar investigations rests the only hope of making progress in household affairs. CHAPTER XVI CONCLUSION