of Electric Power.=--To-day another great contribution to
the spiritual value of the private household ministrations is offered
in the new uses of electric power. Already the "servantless house" is
widely advertised. Already the grave difficulties in household
adjustment made by the growing unwillingness of competent girls and
women to do anything in the households of strangers, and thereby
giving rise to the serious "servant-girl problem" for people of
limited means, are being mitigated by the new devices of this modern
wizard of electricity. It seems to many of us that had this magician
been discovered before the invention of steam-power-driven machinery
the whole tendency of modern industry would have been turned not so
absolutely, if at all, toward the factory. Such modifications of
domestic manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could
have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and economic
evils of our present labor world. However that may be, it is clear
that now the modern housewife has at her hand the means of easy
control of her special family duties such as no ancient woman could
have conceived. The movement henceforward, therefore, we must believe,
is toward such lessening of household burdens by mechanical means, and
such simplification of household requirements by new family ideals as
will make every woman of ordinary strength and of even moderate
capacity and training so sure a master of essentials in that field
that she can dispense with the "help" that so often now hinders the
real family life and make the home more truly the private shrine of
affection and of mutual aid than it has ever been before.

=Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate= if she would hand on the
torch of life the brighter for her handling. Doctor Devine has well
said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely
through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan
of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in
the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of
communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and
humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a
prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a
necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health.
So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be
happy unless some one person was constantly de