est auspices, schools where girls will be taught how to bring up
babies and how to keep house. When it is considered that, out of about a
million children which are born annually, over 260,000 die before the
age of five, it calls for the utmost care in the watchfulness and habits
of parents with regard to young children.

Of all European countries, it is perhaps in France that mortality among
babies is largest. France is being depopulated, or at least is not
increasing her population. Enough children are born, but not enough are
brought to grown-up age. This problem, over the solution of which our
legislators are very anxious, is vital to France. It will not be solved
by laws enacted, congresses held, and leagues founded. It will be
solved by a reform in the manners and habits of the people, by making
marriage easier, by marrying for love more often, and by teaching French
women that the first duty of a mother is to raise her children herself,
and the second to know how to do it. This new school, just established
in France, will help in the right direction.

The teaching of household duties will also tend to make marriages
happier by enabling wives to be more clever and economical. If we
consider that in England and France, which each has a population of
about 40,000,000, only about 100,000 men in each country have an income
of more than L500 a year, it will soon be clear that the great problem
of happiness can only be solved by the good management of wives.

Girls will be taught family hygiene, domestic economy, and the art of
cooking, including that of utilizing the remnants of a previous meal.
They will be taught how to 'shop' intelligently; that is to say, to
distinguish good material from shoddy, and thus obtain the worth of
their money. They will, I hope, also be taught how to make a bargain, a
talent which I must say is practically inborn in every French woman of
the middle and lower classes. No woman in the world knows as she does
how to bring down the price of things to what she wants it to be, in
Paris especially.

Perhaps they will advise her to do what I would advise every visitor to
Italy. I take it that you do not speak Italian. Never mind that; three
words will serve your purpose perfectly. When you are in an Italian
shop and you ask the price of an article you wish to buy, say to the man
'_Quanto_?' (how much?); as soon as he has named it, say '_Troppo_' (too
much). Then he will say something else. Ju