ked to go and begin her own
home-making in the old homestead, she will ask to have the walls
perforated and a large-sized vacuum cleaner installed in the cellar with
hose connections on all the floors. There must be slides and pulleys to
let heavy things down to the lower floors, and to draw them up to
bedrooms or storerooms above. Room must be made for dust chutes from all
floors above the cellar and heating pipes to every room. One may think
that the House in the New Era is to be all pipes, but this is the
laboratory installation idea; this is simply applying the same principle
to the house that men are applying to the office. The telephone, the
private wire, the repeating phonograph, the card system, the calculating
machine and all the different kinds of recording and stamping
machines--these are what the mechanical age provides for the workshop of
the man. Well may we repeat what has been said: "The workshop of the
woman is the worst workshop in the world." But it is not to be so very
much longer.

The scheme above described is not by any means a dream of the far
distant future. No: here and there it is now being realized. In many a
kitchen in small villages and along the countryside where the distance
is not too great to make electric connections from central plants, we
may find installed the electric stove which with fireless cooker and
scientific manipulation is found to be no more costly after the initial
expense of installation than other forms of heating, and the dishwashing
machine which reduces that part of the labor from three separate hours
each day to forty solid minutes of one single morning. We may find also
the inlet of power by which many other household processes as well as
such branches of the farming business as are carried on in the house,
are turned from unbearable drudgery almost into play. In such a kitchen
the fittings will be exquisite; to work there a delight. The housewife
who has devoted so much money to mere machinery may have resigned the
addition of a wing or a porch and devoted the two thousand dollars the
enlargement of the house would have cost to the installation of these
expensive fittings. But it has richly paid her. The whole field of
family welfare has been lifted to a higher plane and the happiness and
health of all indefinitely increased. And the same fine experience will
be within the reach of all farm and village women soon. Those that live
in villages and closely inhabited