or six open gas jets would consume in that time. The engine cost one hundred dollars. In five years I have spent only fifty-five cents on repairs, and that was for new leather valves. The electric heat regulator, which controls the flow of natural gas into the furnace, cost twenty-eight dollars, and is operated by dry batteries which need to be replaced every year at a cost of fifty cents for the two.

You will notice that the wages of an ordinary maid who is willing to do any kind of work about the house would, in a year and a half, amount to more than the cost and operation of all my labor-saving appliances."

None of these families have supplanted servants with labor-saving devices to save money, but because they think them better tools with which to run their homes.

Other people write about the care and responsibility of servants as a reason for using labor-saving appliances in their place. women have tacitly accepted the responsibility for the conditions under which our domestics live and work. We no longer question that it is our duty to see that they have proper food, comfortable rooms, and sufficient wages. Mostly we consider that our responsibilities extend beyond this to the point of seeing that they have recreation, opportunities for improvement, and time to rest and to see their friends. One of our objects in substituting labor-saving devices for servants is to relieve ourselves of this pressing responsibility. Have we got to consider whether the vacuum cleaner is tired or not? Whether the electric washer and wringer has a headache? If the gas iron desires a day off to visit its aunt? No. We can overwork steel and leather and wood, steam and gas and electricity, with a conscience free from concern for anything but our own pocketbooks. We can be light-heartedly free from moral responsibility toward the thermostat that controls the furnace-its back never aches.

But, besides being satisfactory substitutes for servants, labor-saving appliances can be so reduced in cost that people who couldn't possibly afford a servant might well afford them.

As Mr. H. F. Stimson, chief engineer of the Universal Audit Company, says:

"At present the amount of physical energy known as a kilowatt hour, which can be purchased in large quantities in the form of electrical mechanical energy for two cents, would cost about two dollars and twenty-eight

cents if purchased in the form of human physical energy at the rate of twenty cents an hour."

According to this expert calculation, it costs less than one per cent as much to clean house by electricity as it does by hand, theoretically. Practically, it isn't so cheap as that, because, as one of the householders from whom I have just quoted says, "electric current costs us twelve cents per kw. hour," which is a wide spread between the wholesale cost and the retail selling price. It is the same with practically every commodity the home administrator uses, from beef to biscuits-we pay all the traffic will bear when we go from coal to gas, from gas to denatured alcohol, from denatured alcohol to electricity.

Now, if the highest efficiency of the home requires the use of electrical appliances, and if the cost of them puts them out of the question, what is the home administrator to do? Decide to go without them? Never in this world did we get any good thing which we were content to go without. Isn't the ideal manager of the ideal home going to insist on having this ideal power? But you can't raise a private crop of it in the back yard; you can't get it at wholesale and store it up for future use; you can't discover a mine of it or a place where it grows wild; you can't do any of the things by which you are prone to think you can circumvent high prices. You have to buy it of a company. Evidently the housewife, in trying to make her home administration efficient, will run head on into a public service corporation—a public utility. Is it true that in order to control her kitchen she has got to control the public utilities?

For it isn't as though each family, having. its own set of light-running, labor-saving devices corralled on its own premises, so to speak, had solved the problem of efficient administration. Because a thing can be done easily and well in the home is no possible reason why it should be done there. In these days of wonders it is conceivable that a machine might be invented for the home manufacture of shoes, raper patterns being furnished, with instructions how to feed in a little raw leather, a few buttons, and a bit of thread at one end, turn a crank, and take out a pair of shoes at the other. But do we want to bring shoe-making back into the home on that account? No labor-saving device that made this possible would be in the direction of real efficiency.

After all, the labor-saving device is but a

temporary host for the parasitic home. Almost as soon as it has successfully supplanted the servant it slides away and leaves us grafted upon the public utility. We've been gradually growing dependent upon public utilities ever since we dispensed with the individual cow and the individual pig and put our trust in consolidated milk companies and the gentlemen's agreement of the beef combine. We don't call them public utilities, of course; we call them Petersen's Butcher Shop and Frank's Grocery Emporium. We think we are dealing directly with our tradesmen," but we are no more independent of the public utilities that control the tradesmen than we are of the corporation back of the telephone girl. It's a pretty straight road between the home and the public utility; the hedges on either side are too high to jump, and we are rushing along it whenever we send our wash to the laundry, use electric power, or have a caterer to entertain.

A Canadian woman tells me of a firm that supplies a vacuum cleaner at a dollar a day, thus saving her the expense of the original investment and the labor of operating her

own.

A woman from conservative Maine says:

"I was the first in our city to have an electric iron, but experience has taught me that the best way is to put your whole washing into the laundry to be done. Select the right laundry and manage right, and the clothes are not worn or lost more than any other way. At the best, a washing in the house is disorganizing, no matter how it is done. I was one of the first to have an electric cleaner in my home, but I think now it is better to have a man come with one, and use it whenever you need, than to put out your own strength to use one."

These housewives are by no means exceptional; their experiences show the laborsaving device, modern as it is, in the act of being absorbed into general industry like the servant before it. And they're only doing what the rest of us do whenever we buy a ready-made dress, or a loaf of bread, or, for the matter of that, a bound book or a china dish. If for no other reason, this grafting of the home upon the public utility will go on because in the end it pays. It isn't a question of whether we individually can afford the greater expense of home production; it is the community that cannot let any of us waste money or muscle or brains. For, whether

we intend it or not, whether we see it or not, what one wastes, either in labor or money, is taken from all the rest of us. And, though each industry has to be packed out of the home separately, there is no manner of use in trying to derail the train that is thundering them to the eager corporation, for they have heard the call of economy and they will go.

But if we are forced to let the actual industries on which the home depends become public utilities, we cannot in that way escape personal responsibility toward those who serve us. The girls who make our pastry in the bakeshop, the women who wash our clothes in the laundry, the men who work sixteen hours a day at the machine when it is

rush season by ladies' cloaks" on the East Side, the mill operatives in France who starve when we choose to reduce the amount of cloth in our gowns by half, are all our domestic servants once removed. The time is not past by any means when it is a personal reproach to the housewife to serve her family unwholesome bread, to let her wash be badly done, to wear shoddy clothes, or starve the people who work for her. These things are, and always were, a sign of inefficiency, and we cannot escape responsibility for them because our servants do their work away from our immediate oversight. We can't bring the prodigal spinning-wheel home again; can we regulate the woolen mill?

It's idle to try to back out of this extended responsibility by saying that every woman ought to do the work of her own household. Suppose she could (which she can't) and suppose she would (which she won't), could the community afford to let her? So long as we have labor-saving devices invented and have developed public utilities, the work of the human hand in the home has become both wasteful and useless. Even in academic economics it is affably recognized, though reluctantly stated. that useless work is only a form of idleness, a nervous fluttering of the drone, so to speak. Professor Frank Tracy Carlton, of Albion College, puts it in this way:

When an old art is dying out in consequence of being superseded by a new art, attempts are invariably made to complicate needlessly the processes of work employed in the old art-to make work. The efforts of the various housekeeping magazines point to the decline and decay of household industry as a separate and unified form of industry. One of the important functions of these

numerous journals is that of earnestly striving to dignify useless work through the introduction of various and sundry complications."

We may as well face the fact cheerfully that industry in the home is doomed-that a home administration that tries to hang on to the coat-tails of home manufacture, in a sentimental frenzy to deter its flight instead of cheerfully handing out its hat and cane and opening the front door, is no efficient administration. All the flutteration to put hand sewing, and home baking and preserving and the making of Christmas mince-meat, on a plane of what might be called moral elegance is just a bracing back against to-mor

row.

I am not trying to do anything but show how the wind blows; this article isn't meant to be a stone sign-post, but a well-oiled weather-vane. It points directly away from the time to which Charlotte Perkins Gilman referred when she said:

"Six hours a day the woman spends on food, Six mortal hours! .

Till the slow finger of heredity writes on the forehead of each living man,

Strive as he may: 'His mother was a cook!'"

Not a desirable motto for the human brow to bear, and only slightly less distressing than that written all over dyspepsia-ridden frames : "His mother couldn't cook. For the horrid truth is that the majority of women cannot cook. Take the case in Vermont, a nice, backward, domestic State, with no cities of the first class, and therefore not especially addicted to delicatessen stores or foreign restaurants. Ten and one-tenth per cent of its inhabitants die of digestive troubles!

Apparently women will not stand for these six hours a day spent on food, resulting in the death of ten per cent of those fed. Whenever they can, they save themselves by handing the six hours of work over to another woman. But there aren't enough detached women to go around; and anyway, hiring a servant isn't labor-saving, but labor-shifting. So housewives are catching at the modern labor-saving device even when it isn't a money-saving device, as it should be. And because the labor of operating a labor-saving device is in itself a thing to be saved, they are reaching out to the corporations which can distribute the cost of these new inventions.

The manufacturer of an electric motor for a sewing-machine recently wrote a plaintive letter asking why women are so reluctant to

buy a device that is so cunningly designed to lighten their labors. It appears to me that women are not anxious to make sewing easier to do; they want to get rid of it altogether, to make an industry of it and put it out of the house. From all over the country they write me :

"We buy ready-made clothes because they are cheaper and better."

This is right in line with the civic associations which in the South are buying themselves vacuum cleaners to be used by a whole township; with the municipal laundries of Glasgow; with the hundred other public utilities that are beginning to do our chores. There is no use getting sentimental when some favorite drudgery bursts out of the front gate!

When I was in college, we had a song in which the hero asked his beloved :

"Can you brew, can you bake
Good bread and cake?

Before my love I utter.
Can you sew a seam?
Can you churn the cream

And bring in the golden butter?
What use is refraction?

Chemical reaction, biologic protoplasm,
Psychologic microcosm?

Would you be my weal,
You must cook the meal,-

You shake your head,-
You I'll not wed,-
And so, Farewell!"

If that song were rewritten and brought up to date, the lover's questions would be much harder to answer, and yet they might not be so disconcerting. They would run something like this:

"Are you up on the pure food laws affecting the manufacture of canned soup?

Can you assure me that you know the conditions governing the sanitary production of pastry?

Can you bring enough influence to bear on public opinion so that the family clothing will not have to be made in a sweatshop? you know how to get honest Government inspectors appointed, to assure the purity of the milk and butter you promise to serve me?

Do

What use is your knowing
Everything of sewing,

All of pickling and preserving,
All of washing and of serving?

Would you be my weal,
Do not cook the meal,—
You shake your head,-
You I'll not wed,-
And so, Farewell!"

W

HEN you find a railway magnate who deliberately selects for his office, out of hundreds offered for his choice, one bearing the number "1313" on its door, you suspect that here is a man who is not much influenced by popular superstitions; and after you have talked an hour or two with Frank Trumbull, for thirty years a prominent figure in the transportation world in the Southwest, and now Chairman of the Boards of Directors of the Chesapeake and Ohio and of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railways, you are convinced of it. He hasn't any of the prevalent business megrims in his head. Though a lifelong manager of great corporate interests, even the Federal Anti-Trust Act does not frighten him; he only wishes that our people would mix a little discretion and tact with their plans of campaign against monopoly, and go slow on the criminal side of the Act till all its doubtful terms can be accurately defined by the courts. He has nobody to denounce, being as far from an extremist in his methods of protest and resistance as in his judgment of how existing law, since it is law, ought to be enforced. He has no patent cure-alls to propose merely patience, and the exercise of that measure of common sense with which Providence is supposed to have endowed ordinary human nature.

Can such a man have broad ideas? Can his discussion of a big subject be illuminating, suggestive, inspiring? We have become so accustomed to associate risky enterprises with leadership, and to confound rashness with courage, that we sometimes forget that the most trustworthy leader is he who knows how to walk as well as how to rush, and where to pause as well as where to push ahead. Read what Mr. Trumbull had to say to me, and, when you have laid your Outlook

corporations, how little is said about the example of a great competitor in the world's trade like Germany. Hundreds of millions of dollars are taken away from the United States every year by tourists, by returning immigrants, and to pay interest and dividends on our securities held abroad. How can a nation, any more than an individual, grow rich if it keeps on paying out more money than it takes in? It seems to me-particularly as we are soon to have the Panama Canal-that we should foster our exports, not only of cotton and grain, but of manufactures. The whole thing ought to be dealt with from a world-wide view-point, and be eliminated from political harangues. Our political leaders could confer no greater blessing than to pledge themselves to a non-partisan solution. Let us keep business out of politics'—and politics out of business."

"Does the experience of the railways. afford any criterion for industrial corporations ?"

"In my judgment, it does. The railways tried and discarded money pools, divisions of tonnage, gentlemen's agreements, and control of other companies directly and substantially competitive, and are to-day just as amenable to the Anti-Trust Law as the industrials are—and with really less justification; for, in addition to that law and to enforced publicity, railway rates are regulated and controlled. If the railways have survived it, why not the industrials? Conversely, if the industrials need relief, why not the railways also?

"The right of the Government to supervise corporations generally rests on the fact that they are creatures of the State.

If per

sons interested in corporations object to this, they have always the alternative of investing in individual or firm enterprises. Railways were first put under supervision to insure publicity and prevent discrimination, and the present regulation and control by both Federal and State Governments represents the evolution of a quarter of a century. Supervision—that is, general oversight-regulation, and control are not synonymous terms, though often used indiscriminately."

but happier for it. Thousands of passengers who debauched train conductors by 'short fares' and laughed over it could now be subjected to severe penalties for such practices. All this is a fine contribution by the generation just passing to the young men just coming on the stage; and all who have participated in promoting business integrity ought to have credit. Possibly whatever I might say about other existing features of railway regulation would seem somewhat partisan, but let me show you what Presiding Judge Knapp of the Commerce Court said. in a recent splendid address at Philadelphia. After summarizing his theory of railway regulation and telling of benefits achieved, he concluded:

"Nevertheless, I am not sure that the policy of regulation has passed the stage of experiment, for I can see in the present situation many elements of doubt and not a few of positive danger. With the intense friction of commercial rivalry and sectional antagonism, that is, the endless controversy over relative rates; with the Federal Congress and nearly half a hundred State Legislatures in vigorous activity every year; with more than twoscore State Commissions acting under laws and carrying out policies which range all the way from ultraconservatism, which does nothing and helps nobody, to ultra-radicalism, which does too much and hurts everybody; with the disturbing possibility of business paralysis at any time and in any quarter, resulting from unyielding differences between railroad managers and their two millions of organized employees; and with the sinister shadow over all of political influence and party ambition, no man, I think, can be sure that our efforts at regulation will prove an assured and permanent success.

"With the results of that experiment, you, young gentlemen, are vastly more concerned than am I, for you will come into active life, and have your influence and duty, when this question reaches its crisis; and you know better than I can tell you that if regulation fails, the only and early alternative will be Government ownership, with all its social and industrial dangers, and even its deeper peril to republican institutions.

"We must not forget that every step along the road of regulation of business is a step in the direction of State Socialism. Unless we have determined that end to be desirable, it behooves us to weigh carefully each proposal to move further toward it. Otherwise we may thoughtlessly gain such headway that we cannot apply the brakes."

"Has the Inter-State Commerce Act so eliminated competition between carriers as to justify exempting them from the Anti-Trust Law?"

"No. Undoubtedly the greatest restraint