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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
a tinsmith? What man would trust his life in a boat steered by a man who had been but a fireman in the hold? Yet how many of our so-called cooks have any real knowledge of the subject? How many, not alone of the cooks, but of the housekeepers, know why we eat butter with bread, rice and potatoes with meat? Or why Nature gives us fruit and green vegetables in the warm season, and not in the cold? Yet it is this very knowledge that makes of cooking an art. Why should we not demand of the person who has so much that concerns our well-being in her hands, that she have a training for it as well as the man who holds our horses, or the woman who makes our clothes? Most assuredly we would not employ a physician who had only read Steele’s physiology and experimented on his own family. And it is safe to say that if we had better educated cooks, we could not support well so many doctors. But we can not demand, any more than teach, that we do not understand ourselves. “Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things, but in'doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.” Cooking is an ordinary, everyday occupation, but when rightly done is not only easily performed, but becomes a delightful labor. Raise it to its true dignity. Give it its rightful place among the arts. Women have been fighting many battles for higher education in the last few years, and they have nearly gained the day. But when their victorious banner be unfurled, let not one star be missing from its field of glory—this star of household labor, which must include the training from childhood to motherhood, from the mother to the child. “ It is better to be ready, even if one is not called for, than to be called for and found wanting.”