his is a moral duty, a debt as real as
taxes and very much like them.

In our People's Institute over in Northampton, Massachusetts, this is
the a-b-c of all they seek to do: the individual tutoring, by college
girls and town residents, of hundreds of young working men and women in
whatever these may choose from among a score or so of light studies
calculated to refine their aspirations; the training of young girls, by
paid experts, in the arts of the home, from cooking to embroidery; the
training of both sexes in all the social amenities; and the enlistment
of more than a thousand cottage homes in a yearly prize competition.

It is particularly of this happy garden contest that I wish to say a
word or two more. In 1914 it completed its sixteenth season, but it is
modelled on a much older one in the town of Dunfermline, Scotland, the
birthplace of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, and it is from the bountiful spirit
of that great citizen of two lands that both affairs draw at least one
vital element of their existence.

We in Northampton first learned of the Dunfermline movement in 1898. We
saw at once how strongly such a scheme might promote the general
spiritual enrichment of our working people's homes if made one of the
functions of our home-culture clubs, several features of whose work were
already from five to ten years old. We proceeded to adopt and adapt the
plan, and had our first competition and award of prizes in 1898-'99.

Like Dunfermline, we made our prizes large, and to this we attribute no
small part of our success. When we saw fit to increase their number we
increased the total outlay as well, and at present we award twenty-one
prizes a year, the highest being fifteen dollars, and one hundred
dollars the sum of the whole twenty-one prizes. So we have gained one of
our main purposes: to tempt into the contest the man of the house and
thus to stimulate in him that care and pride of his home, the decline of
which, in the man of the house, is one of the costliest losses of hard
living.

One day on their round of inspection our garden judges came to a small
house at the edge of the town, near the top of a hill through which the
rustic street cuts its way some twelve or fifteen feet below. The air
was pure, the surroundings green, the prospect wide and lovely. Here was
a rare chance for picturesque gardening. Although the yard was without a
fence there had been some planting of flowers in it. Yet it could hardly
be ca