aboratory
but raising the productive level of the whole valley where she lived and
helping to lighten the burdens of a hundred farm women who were having
not even so comfortable a time in their life plans as she was?

Now if this woman had had a little more business sense she would have
realized that she had begun wrong years ago. It may also be that, if she
had understood the whole situation, she would have approved of leaving
the money in the bank for a time: it may be that she would have devoted
it to sending a daughter to college. But, other things being equal, and
if to her marriage had been a platform from which the soul of woman
takes a new flight, we may believe that she would have devoted some of
the money to better equipment for her own workshop.

But all these things are aside from the point, which is that she had
earned the money as much as he had, and that she should have had as much
to say as her husband had about the disposal of their joint savings.

The Country Girls of to-morrow must profit by experiences like these in
the families of the generation now passing, and make certain that the
efficiency principle of the square deal and the basic principle of a
true partnership shall be established in the home-plans they are
making. If they cannot assure themselves that conditions satisfying to
their self-respect will prevail for them in the farmsteads of the
future, they are justified in rejecting the countryside for their home
and in leaving it to wither away in its lack of their dynamic and
rejuvenating presence.

CHAPTER XX

THE COUNTRY GIRL'S TRAINING

Here in America, for every man touched with nobility, for every
man touched with the spirit of our institutions, social service is
the high law of duty, and every American university must square
its standards by that law or lack its national title.

--_President Wilson._

The object of all education is to fit men for service.

--_Edmund Janes James._

CHAPTER XX

THE COUNTRY GIRL'S TRAINING

It would indeed be fortunate if every young woman who has been raised in
rural surroundings could go to some educational institution where there
is a department of home economics, and there prepare herself by a
thorough four years' course for a life of service in her home and
community. One could hardly ask for a more ideal life than a Country
Girl prepared in that way would see before her, a life that would b