My desk is covered always with pamphlets entitled The Profession of Home-making, Food Values, Freehand Cooking on Scientific Principles, and so on, but does this knowledge reach the people? Does it reach the 388,000 school girls? Recently I heard an hour’s talk by a member of the Board of Health on how we ought to know good milk from bad, how careful we should be about canned vegetables, and the horrors of buying tainted meat: but when I asked how the common people could know these facts I could get no satisfaction other than that the way to know whether the milk was good or not was to examine the barns where the cows were milked or have the milk tested; but the people I know are ignorant as to how to wash milk bottles, or why it is wrong to leave the milk uncovered, or why the nipple from the milk bottle can’t be played with, fall on the floor and then be used. This representative from the Board of Health told startling facts about candies and ice cream, sold on push carts, but the audience at this lecture were land owners along the Hudson River, and I doubt if one of them had ever seen an East Side push cart, and I know that not one was ever tempted to buy. Why can’t these facts reach the thousands of children who do buy dyed ice cream and varnished candy, and whose fathers sell these very things? [Illustration: A COOKING LESSON ] We not only have to establish an up-to-date, scientific way to live, but we cannot do this without the help of the tenement house woman. We contribute the ideals, the theories and the science; she must contribute experience. We are up in the air with our castles, she is down in the thick of the fight where the smallness of the tenement room presses upon her, where every day she faces the high price of food and an insufficient income, where a gentle love for her children is constantly at war with a nervous irritability, the product of disorder, noise and confusion. Do you think this woman does not want a real home? Look at the energy and thought she puts into furnishing her house, the scrimping that preceded the buying of the ugly red carpet and the plush chairs. There were hours of work given to hemming and hanging the ruffles over every door, around every shelf and even around the bath tub. Look at the tarletan festooned around the chandelier and over the pictures; see the dozens of calendars collected and pinned on the wall. Isn’t this a reaching out with all the power that is in a woman to express to her family and her neighbors what, in her ignorance, she believes to be a home? We need the energy and the courage and the experience of these tenement housekeepers, but we must add education; and do we?