We of limited means hug some of the most extravagant of habits. The
average working-class family enjoys none of the fruits of cooeperation We
keep each to our isolated family group, while the richer a person is the
more does she gather under her roof representatives of other families.
Her cook may come from the Berri family, the waitress may be an
Andersen, the nurse an O'Hara.
The poor might well practice the economy of fellowship.
The better-off live in apartment houses where the economy of central
heating is practised, while the majority of the poor occupy tenements
where the extravagance of the individual stove is indulged in. The
saving of coal is urged, but the authorities do not seek to secure for
the poor the comfort of the true method of fuel saving.
The richer a family is, the more it saves by the use of skilled service.
The poor, clinging to their prejudices and refusing to trust one
another, do not profit by cooeperative buying, or by central kitchens run
by experts. Money is wasted by amateurish selection of food and
clothing, and nutritive values are squandered by poor cooking.
Unfortunately Uncle Sam does not suggest how many War Saving Stamps
could be bought as a result of economy along these lines.
The woman with the pay envelope may democratize thrift. She knows how
hard it is to earn money, and has learned to make her wages reach a long
way. Then, too, she has it brought home to her each pay day that health
is capital. She finds that it is economy to keep well, for lost time
brings a light pay envelope. Every woman who keeps herself in condition
is making a war saving. There has been no propaganda as yet appealing to
women to value dress according to durability and comfort rather than
according to its prettiness, to bow to no fashion which means the
lessening of power. To corset herself as fashion dictates, to prop
herself on high heels, means to a woman just so much lost efficiency,
and even the most thoughtless, if appealed to for national saving, might
learn to turn by preference in dress, in habits, in recreation, to the
simple things.
The Japanese, I am told, make a ceremony of going out from the city to
enjoy the beauties of a moonlight night. We go to a stuffy theatre and
applaud a night "set." Nature gives her children the one, and the
producer charges his patrons for the other. A propaganda of democratic
war economy would teach us to delight in the beauties of nature.
In maki
|