There is nothing private and special in the preparation of food; a more general human necessity does not exist. There must be freedom and personal choice in the food prepared, but it no more has to be cooked for you than the books you love best have to be written for you. We flatter ourselves that we get what we want by having it done at home. Apply that condition to any other kind of human product and see if it holds. We get what we want by free choice from the world's markets--not from a workshop in the back yard. Imagine the grade of production, the arts, crafts, and manufactures, that we should have to select from, if we tried to have all things made for us by private servants! Apply the intelligence and skill of this zoetrope procession of housemaids to watch-making or shoe-making, or umbrella-making, or the making of paper, or glass, or steel, or any civilised commodity; and if we can easily see how immeasurably incompetent these flitting handmaids would be for any of these lines of work, why do we imagine them competent to prepare food and take care of children? Because we have never thought of it at all. Men are too busy doing other things, too blinded by their scorn for "women's work." Women are too busy doing these things to think about them at all; or if they think, stung by the pain of pressing inconvenience, they only think personally, they only feel it for themselves, each one blindly buried in her own home, like the crafty ostrich with his head in the sand. The question is a public one; none could be more so. It affects in one of its two branches every human being except those who board; every home, without exception. Perhaps some impression may be made on the blank spaces of our untouched minds by exhibiting the economic status of home industry. We Americans are credited with acuteness and good business sense. How can we reconcile ourselves to the continuance of a system not only so shamefully inadequate, but so ruinously expensive? If we are not mortified to find that our boasted industrial progress carries embedded in its very centre this stronghold of hoary antiquity, this knotted, stumpy bunch of amputated rudiments; if we are not moved by the low standard of general health as affected by food, and the no standard of general education as affecting the baby, perhaps we can be stimulated somewhat by the consideration of expense.