652
THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
agricultural laborer of the past, who depended on his own eye and hand for the unswerving furrow or the neatly felled sheaf, developed aptitudes which his successor who rides a machine is without. A multitude of unremembered artists made our ancient cathedrals glorious with lavish carving. Nowadays even our aesthetic needs are to a large extent gratified by wholly mechanical processes. It is good that the humblest cottages should be hung with chromo-lithographed copies of good pictures, but the production of these copies draws out no artistic faculties in their producers. Thanks, however, to the good artificial light which modern inventions supply, the plowman or factory “hand” has an evening that his ancestor had not, in which the day’s dull toil may be supplemented by the carving class or instructive lecture, calling out powers that would otherwise remain undeveloped.
Thirdly, the growing tendency toward separation of class from class. “ Our greatest industrial danger,” said the Bishop of Durham lately, “ lies in the want of mutual confidence between employers and employed. Confidence is of slow growth. It comes most surely through equal intercourse.” The descendant of the apprentice who lived under his master’s roof now receives his wages from an employer who does not know his name. In many of our great towns rich and poor do not even meet on Sundays before their common Maker. The employers dw r ell in a handsome new suburb, and swell the well-dressed congregation of a new church. The employed herd in the older part of the city, and form parishes where, as an East End London vicar lately expressed it, “ Every lady cleans her own doorstep.” No wonder, therefore, that in our days social questions are in the forefront, and “the human heart by which we live ” demands new means of bringing together those who would otherwise be utterly separated in all relations outside of business to their great mutual loss. We need (I again quote Dr. Westcott) “to hallow large means by the sense of large responsibility; to provide that labor in every form may be made the discipline of noble character.”
It is the public-house that fills the workhouse and the prison; and the public- house is too often filled by the mismanaged home, the badly chosen and the worst cooked meal. When, therefore, a girl acquires practical skill in cookery, she not only fits herself for the comfortable and well-paid calling of a first-class domestic servant instead of the comfortless and ill-paid calling of an unskilled factory hand, but she diminishes her risk of becoming the hapless wife of a drunkard. Board schools had, however, been in existence more than ten years before the government recognized that cookery should be regularly taught in them. Private enterprise preceded government action in training teachers for this subject and in forming schools of cookery in London, Leeds, Pxlinburgh and Glasgow. To Miss Fanny Calder’s initiative is owing the Liverpool Training Schools of Cookery and the Northern Union Schools of Cookery, and government recognition both of cookery and laundry work is due to her vigorous struggle with the Education Department. Private enterprise must supplement government action also in continuing the training when school is over, or giving it then to those who have attended schools for which teachers of cookery could not be provided.
Classes for cookery and domestic economy in Wiltshire and Dorsetshire were founded by Mrs. Bell in 1889. The Bishop of Salisbury suggested this scheme, which works through the organization of the Girls’ Friendly Society. It began with a grant of ten pounds, and gave during the next two years between fifty and sixty courses of lessons in cookery and laundry work to girls fresh from school. Eventually it was affiliated to the Northern Union Schools of Cookery.
In days of old every woman, as the term “ spinster ” still indicates, “ sought wool and flax and worked willingly with her hands,” and no part of the world produced more characteristic and interesting fabrics than the Scottish Highlands. But when the machine-made goods of our great centers of industry were distributed to the remotest corners of the kingdom, native homespun was in danger of being altogether discarded for cheaper but less durable and becoming raiment. The insight to recog-