hen all
Sunday morning that an over-big meal may be eaten in half an hour by her
family. She encourages gluttony by feeling that her standing as cook is
directly proportional to the heartiness of her meal. Thanksgiving,
Christmas,--the good cheer of gluttony is sentimentalized and hallowed
into poetry and music. The table that groans under its good cheer has
its sequence in the diners who groan without cheer.

While we might further dilate on the physical deficiencies and
inefficiencies of the segregated home, there is a disadvantage of vaster
importance. After all, institutionalized cooking is rarely satisfactory,
because it lacks the spirit of good home cooking, the desire to meet
individual taste without profit. It lacks the ideal of service.

There are bad effects from the segregation and the privacy of the home,
even of the good kind. For there are very many bad homes; those in which
drunkenness, immorality, quarreling, selfishness, improvidence,
brutality, and crime are taught by example. After all, we like to speak
too much in generalities--the Home, Woman, Man, Labor, Capital,
Mankind--forgetting there is no such thing as "the Home." There are
homes of all kinds with every conceivable ideal of life and training and
having only one thing in common,--that they are segregated social units,
based usually on the family relationship. Montaigne very truly said
approximately this: "He who generalizes says 'Hello' to a crowd; he who
_knows_ shakes hands with individuals."

In the first place the home (to show my inconsistency in regard to
generalizing) is the place where prejudice is born, nourished, and grown
to its fullest proportions. The child born and reared in a home is
exposed to the contagion of whatever silliness and prejudice actuate the
lives and dominate the thought and feeling of its parents. And the
quirks and twists to which it is exposed affect its life either
positively or negatively, for it either accepts their prejudices or
develops counter-prejudices against them. To cite a familiar case; it is
traditional that some of the children brought up overstrictly,
overcarefully, throw off as soon as possible and as completely as
possible conventional morals and manners. Such persons have simply
overreacted to their training, revolted against the prejudice of their
teaching by building counter-prejudices.

Further, the home fosters an anti-social feeling, or perhaps it would be
kinder to say a non-social f