No pen, however powerful, no voice, however eloquent, can present in the full force of its true colors the value of intellectual and moral development to the housewife, the woman, the home-maker. Religion is not a subject for our Department. The matter of creed is for each one to settle for herself. But in those questions of ethics and social morals that arise in any household and generally have, after all, their foundation in religion, and in all those questions of intellectual living and growth, this Department of ours does have its field and its purpose. Why? Because, as I said, a _home_, a _real_ home, has its moral and intellectual sides as well as its material side. Because even its material side, the everyday round of duties, cannot be made what it should be unless brain and soul are made fit to direct the body. Because as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters we are responsible for the members of our family, and for ourselves as human souls. It is not enough to bring a child into the world and then feed it, wash it, dress it, give it a place to sleep, and one day say to it: “We have raised you. Go forth and make your living.” Of course not. We all know that, though goodness knows there are plenty of people who don’t do even that much. It is not enough to furnish a clean, warm house and three meals a day to the bodies of your husband, parents, brothers or sisters. They could get that much at a boarding-house or hotel. They, and you, must have moral and mental food, baths, clothes and beds as well as physical ones—a _home_—not merely a house. We cannot give what we don’t have. To furnish these things to them we must first get them ourselves. Then we should give heed to moral and intellectual living and growth because it is our _duty_. There is another reason—because it is for our own happiness and pleasure. It was once my privilege to go over a thousand or two letters from people who, after becoming members of a great and good system of education by correspondence, had written in the fullness of their hearts to tell how it had made their lives brighter and happier and to thank the school, not as much for the knowledge they had acquired from their reading and study at home, but for the great pleasure and joy the _having_ of this knowledge had brought them—for the _new intellectual, social and moral life_ that had come to them with it. The letters came from all over the English-speaking world, but I was most struck by the fact that a large part of them came from housewives. The following is a fair sample of hundreds from farmers’ wives, laborers’ wives, clerks’ wives, business-mens’ wives: “Life has been a new thing to me since I took up your course. My housework used to be an awful drudgery—a never-ending grind. Now it is easy and I do it better, for my mind has _something outside to think about_ and be interested in.”