Why should it? I believe this 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.
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