erent
qualifications for success, they are, nevertheless, threatened with
failure because, to use the language of the ring, "they lack the punch."
The trouble with nine out of ten of these unfortunates is that they are
under-nourished. Not because they do not get enough food, but because
their diet is not properly balanced, is served to them in incompatible
combinations, is badly prepared, poorly cooked, unpalatable, and
doubtless, in many cases, served in anything but an appetizing manner.

Napoleon is quoted as having said that an army fights with its stomach.
The man who goes out to do battle for commercial or professional success
from an ill-managed and inefficient kitchen and dining-room is as badly
off as the army with an inadequate commissary department. Yet, while the
commissary department of the modern army receives the most scientific and
careful supervision, many a man must leave his kitchen in the hands of a
wife who received her training in music, literature, modern languages, and
classics, or in a business college, and of a servant who received what
little training she has as a farm laborer in Europe.

There is no denying the truth that if housewives themselves were
scientifically trained, we should have a far higher average of training
and efficiency amongst domestic servants. One of the consequences of our
deplorable self-consciousness in the matter of sex is that we have been
too prudish frankly to train our girls to become successful wives and
mothers. The result is that, when it becomes necessary for them to earn
money before their marriage, instead of gaining experience in
housekeeping, cooking and purchasing, they have taken up the stage,
teaching, factory work, office work, and retail selling. As we have seen,
a great many of them are misfits in these callings. Good food is wasted,
good stomachs are impaired, and good brains and nerves deteriorate
because, as a general rule, only those who are too ignorant or too
inefficient for office work or factory work can be induced to take service
in our kitchens.

CHAPTER XII

SPECIAL FORMS OF UNFITNESS

Place a quinine tablet and a strychnine tablet of the same size on the
table before you. Can you, by looking at them, smelling of them, or
feeling of them, tell them apart? Would you know the difference instantly,
by their appearance, between bichloride of mercury tablets and soda
tablets? Down in the basement of a manufacturing chemist's huge b