OUR HOME DEPARTMENT

RAISING THE STANDARD OF DRESSMAKING: LET THE THINKERS
                               BE WORKERS.


T     HAS wisely    been said that the
     world is rapidly dividing itself into
     two social groups, "the people who
think and the people who work." And
the thinkers have grown to feel that in
order to "think" enough in one life-time
they cannot work; and the workers-usu-
ally the overworked because of this dis-
tinction-have given   up  the idea  of
thought, as not related to work.
  Stop for a moment and trace this sep-
aration to its legitimate end, along the
line it is now moving. And what do you
see?   The remote, didactic, pedantic
"thinker," a futile product unrelated to
life; and handicraft grown vulgar, com-
mercial, and without art impulse ;-a civ-
ilization where the useful is not beautiful
and the remote beautiful is not practical.
  For every phase of life, for the sculp-
tor, for the house-worker equally, it is
essential that the workers think, that un-
derstanding should be the foundation of
effor., that assimilation should precede
expression. It is a truth so fundamental
that it touches every part of civilized ex-
istence. There is no bettering of mod-
ern inartistic, complex, unbeautiful ways
unless the worker think, unless there be
so .great an appreciation of the value of
every sort of right labor that the laborer
takes up the tasks enthusiastically, builds
with thought,-whether the building be
done with brick or with a needle, and so
becomes a part of real progress.
  The low standard of excellence shown
in almost every department of labor in


this country is the result of mechanical
work, of doing a task with dexterous fin-
gers and a sleeping brain, of progressing
by the tick of the clock, of work toward
cheques, not perfection. Not but that
the cheque is a necessary detail of life,
the burden of which is felt in inverse
ratio to the cheque; but the money end of
it cannot come first where work is valued
as an expression of the development of
the worker.
  Now in the effort to raise the standard
of work in life the betterment cannot
come from the outside, the thinker can-
not do the lifting for the worker. Each
workman must furnish his own lever, and
it has to come from his own understand-
ing of all that may be achieved along the
line of his own endeavor. He may re-
ceive inspiration and profitable instruc-
tion from a more advanced worker, but
not from the thinker of egoistic dreams.
  Thus it comes about that the woman
who would like to better conditions in her
own home, who is not satisfied with her
household  economics, who    recognizes
clearly the absurdity of the way she is
living, eating, dressing, cannot set about
readjusting the problems because she
does not understand the practical side of
life. She cannot teach a practical econ-
omy of housework, a saner method of
kitchen ethics, a simpler, more wholesome
manner of dress, because she doesn't
know a solitary thing about any of it.
  Sometimes she holds a diploma for a
scientific course in health cooking, but
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