Still another hindrance is the tone of certainty and finality that characterizes all discussions concerning the household. It is a part of the religious belief of many persons that every woman has been foreordained by Providence to be a wife, mother, and housekeeper, and that any deviation from this fundamental law is an infringement on the designs of Providence. But some of us remember that scarcely more than fifty years ago Daniel Webster said in the United States Senate that slavery had been excluded from California and New Mexico by the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth, and that he would not through the Wilmot Proviso take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of nature or to reënact the will of God. Many apparently believe, through the same specious reasoning, that to provide instruction in household affairs would be in a similar way to reaffirm an ordinance of nature. Not only does this tone of finality characterize the household when it is assumed that because the majority of women will always choose to be housekeepers, therefore all women must be housekeepers, but the same tone of finality also characterizes methods in the household. It is interesting to read to-day the objections raised fifty years ago to the use of anesthetics in surgery; it was argued that since pain was sent by heaven, it was sacrilegious to use any means of alleviating it. It may be of equal interest fifty years hence to read the protests of our contemporaries against the present effort to combat instinct with science. Another difficulty is the inherent proneness of Americans to look for results before establishing the conditions on which alone results are to be based. The nervous haste that characterizes us physically as a nation also characterizes us mentally. We seize eagerly suggestions and scorn the slow processes through which alone suggestions can be made realities; then comes the inevitable reaction and we drift into the fatalistic tendency to put up with evils rather than fight against them.