as I have sincerely meant in life, to stand by the great cause of poor, oppressed humanity. There must be explorers along all pathways; scouts in all armies. This has been my "call" from the beginning, by nature and by nurture; let me be true to its inspiriting and cheery mandate even

unto this last. "

Youth's Delectable Mountains.

695

FINALLY.

The foregoing book has been written, revised and the proofs corrected, in about three months, largely in enforced seclusion, away from books of reference and to a great degree from memory. It does not then claim to be absolutely accurate, and it is quite likely that in respect to some minor dates there may be a discrepancy between the book and the series of journals beginning when I was about twelve years old and ending when I returned from Europe in 1870.

"Seen through memory's sunset air,"

the far away Delectable Mountains of my youth may have a halo around them greater even than when with eager feet I climbed their summits. My mother says that I have idealized her character, and friends have always accused me of seeing them in colors more glowing than the cold light of day revealed.

All that I claim is that in this book, from cover to cover, I believe I have been loyal to the higher law of truth, if not to the common law of fact, and my purpose, from first to last, has been to tell the story as it was told to me by the higher faculties of my nature. I have had the happiness of illustrating in a small way the result of American institutions upon individual and family life, in the hope that good might come of it to some who are now in the formative period of their career; and with the purpose to applaud whatsoever things are true and lovely and of good report, frankly bemoaning those things that are not, in myself especially.

Nothing in this book is meant to give the impression that its author undervalues the household arts or household saints.

If anybody living is beholden to them, I surely am. A wellordered home is the beginning of wisdom and of virtue and, I have always dwelt in such a home, made wholesome and delightful by other hands than mine. Most girls take kindly to the spelling-book of home's beautiful literature of action as exemplified in the needle, broom and kneading-trough, but I had not this happy gift, never having got beyond the A B C of sampler, dust-brush and cake-making in my home education. Lack of natural facility should have condoned the offense whose inexorable penalties I have been, under the present régime, obliged to pay as the years brought in their bills. All that I plead for is freedom for girls, as well as boys, in the exercise of their special gifts and preferences of brain and hand. It is also my belief that the law of development will at no distant day, so largely relegate the household arts to the realm of invention and coöperation that unless this larger liberty of woman is fully recognized she will, during the transition period, at least, prove less useful to society than she was meant to be and must be for her own highest happiness.

This is the sum total of my creed concerning household economics, and if it be treason I mean to make the most of it, for I expect to see the day when hot water and steam-heated air will be supplied to every house as gas is now from common reservoirs; when we shall have a public laundry system, so complete as to drive the washtub out of every kitchen, banishing forever the reign of steamy, sudsy, indigo-blue Monday; and a caterer's system so complete as to send the cooking-stove into perpetual exile. If men had these problems on hand, complicated with the unspeakable servant-girl problem, they would have solved them by a syndicate long before this, putting no end of money in their purses and no end of misery outside of home's four walls.

I often think, when rejoicing in the homelike amenities of a vestibule train, with its day coach, dining-car, and sleeper, that if George M. Pullman could be induced by a council of women to give five years of his wonderful brain to this problem of household comfort off the rails, counseling with the housekeepers, as he would be wise enough to do, he might crown his life by carrying into the average home the same wholesale comforts and elegancies with which he now regales the traveling

"A Great New World Looms into Sight."

697

public. Only in that case we must petition him to spare us the diffusive atmosphere of that horrible smokers' annex!

To preserve the individuality, the privacy, and sanctity of home, while diminishing its cost and friction, is the problem that women in council must set themselves to solve. Notable homemakers, ready for the next thing, and not afraid of it because it is the next and not the last, should be organized into a standing committee on this subject.

But with these varied cares and perpetual annoyances removed, how will the home-maker of the well-to-do classes employ her time? In the care of her children, the companionship of her husband, and in works of philanthropy, by which will be hastened forward the coming epoch when there shall be no classes that are not well-to-do.

There will always remain abundant territory to be possessed in home's illimitable realm. Women in council working to improve that sanctuary of their hearts will find grievous inequalities in the laws that relate to the control of children and of property as between husband and wife; they will find that in most of the states a wife can not bring a civil suit for damages against her husband; that as a rule, the crime of despoiling a woman of her honor is not punished so heavily as the crime of stealing a cow; that in general, the protection of the person ranks far behind protection of the purse.

A great new world looms into sight, like some splendid ship long-waited-for-the world of heredity, of prenatal influence, of infantile environment; the greatest right of which we can conceive, the right of the child to be well born, is being slowly, surely recognized. Poor, old Humanity, so tugged by fortune and weary with disaster, turns to the Cradle at last and perceives that it has been the Pandora's box of every ill and the Fortunatus casket of every joy that life has known. When the mother learns the divine secrets of her power, when she selects in the partner of her life the father of her child, and for its sacred sake rejects the man of unclean lips because of the alcohol and the tobacco taint, and shuns as she would a leper the man who has been false to any other woman, no matter how depraved; when he who seeks life's highest sanctities in the relationships of husband and father, shuns as he would if thoughtful of his future son the

698 Christ's Kingdom Means Universal Brotherhood.

woman with wasp-waist that renders motherhood a torture and dwarfs the possibilities of childhood, French heels that throw the vital organs out of their normal place, and sacred charms revealed by dresses décolleté, insisting on a wife who has good health and a strong physique as the only sure foundation of his home-hopes, then shall the blessed prophecy of the world's peace come true; the conquered lion of lust shall lie down at the feet of the white lamb of purity and a little child shall lead them.

Forces of infinite variety conspire to bring in the kingdom to which poets, orators, philosophers, philanthropists and statesmen have looked with longing eyes since humanity set forth on its mystical career. If this true story of my life has any force at all, I pray that it may help to hasten the coming of Christ's Kingdom, whose visible token is universal brotherhood; the blessed time drawing nearer to us every day, when in the most practical sense and by the very constitution of society and government, "all men's weal shall be each man's care.”

Val