country districts will get their
electric power from streams and waterfalls, utilized for community
service; those that live on remote farms on the prairies and
mountain-sides will have their individual resources for power. For the
most part these are financially able to gain this, for if they were not
they could not remain in the regions where they dwell. A comparatively
small proportion of the population could not, if they would, make use of
some source of mechanical power. If they would! What prevents them? It
is this--only this: the lack of community spirit! And since this
desirable spirit is constantly increasing, since recruits are coming to
this new army almost daily, since students, teachers, ministers,
philosophers, one after another are putting shoulder to this wheel, and
farm men, farm women, and farm sons and daughters are coming forward
with the new light in their eyes to ask and expect the aid of machinery
to make their work more effective, it is not unwise to hope that the
people of the countryside are not going to be made to wait many years
more for the fulfilment of their dream.

The Country Girl of the New Era will ask to have a new house, built to
the highest ideals of sanitary living, and of release from unnecessary,
uncalled-for toil, or else she will require that the old house be made
over to the new mechanism. Which will be the most economical? Sometimes
that old place has advantages in the lines of its roof, the store of its
traditions, the love laid up in its cubby-holes; but then--it will have
to be torn out somewhere for the entrance of labor-saving devices.
Science will insist on some surgery for cleanliness and deftness and the
wisdom of the future to enter in.

Whatever plan is made for the house of the future that its household
laboratory may have the attention it deserves, the life of the Country
Girl therein is to be set to a new rhythm, or she will be hopelessly
left behind. Can any one doubt that she will ask for such things as she
believes are necessary to her highest efficiency, and insist upon having
them?

Various lists of essential labor-saving devices have been suggested. The
one that follows was taken for the most part from an agricultural paper
and includes most of the things now recommended by specialists in
household economics. But it must be noted that the progress in the
application of forces to needs is now very swift, and any day these
devices may be superseded by more