If your father is a combination of all college professors you may get part of a college training at home--but not the best part. If your mother is a born teacher, a trained teacher, an experienced teacher, you may get part of your schooling at home--but not the best part. There would never have been a school or college on earth, if every man had remained content with teaching his boys at home. There will never be any proper standard of training for little children while each woman remains content with caring for her own at home. But the house-wife is changing. These ways no longer satisfy her. She insists on more modern methods, even in her ancient labours. Then follows the equally different attitude of the housemaid; her rebellion, refusal, retirement from the field; and the immense increase in mechanical convenience seeping in steadily from outside, and doing more to "undermine the home" than any wildest exhortations of reformers. The gas range, the neat and perfect utensils, these have in themselves an educational reaction; we cannot now maintain the atmosphere "where greasy Joan doth keel the pot." The pot is a white enamelled double boiler, and Joan need not be greasy save of _malice prepense_. Besides the improvement of utensils, we have in our cities and in most of the smaller towns that insidious new system of common supply of domestic necessities, which webs together the once so separate homes by a network of pipes and wires. Our houses are threaded like beads on a string, tied, knotted, woven together, and in the cities even built together; one solid house from block-end to block-end; their boasted individuality maintained by a thin partition wall. The tenement, flat, and apartment house still further group and connect us; and our claim of domestic isolation becomes merely another domestic myth. Water is a household necessity and was once supplied by household labour, the women going to the wells to fetch it. Water is now supplied by the municipality, and flows among our many homes as one. Light is equally in common; we do not have to make it for ourselves.