Already the grave difficulties in household adjustment made by the growing unwillingness of competent girls and women to do anything in the households of strangers, and thereby giving rise to the serious "servant-girl problem" for people of limited means, are being mitigated by the new devices of this modern wizard of electricity.

It seems to many of us that had this magician been discovered before the invention of steam-power-driven machinery the whole tendency of modern industry would have been turned not so absolutely, if at all, toward the factory.

Such modifications of domestic manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and economic evils of our present labor world.

However that may be, it is clear that now the modern housewife has at her hand the means of easy control of her special family duties such as no ancient woman could have conceived.

The movement henceforward, therefore, we must believe, is toward such lessening of household burdens by mechanical means, and such simplification of household requirements by new family ideals as will make every woman of ordinary strength and of even moderate capacity and training so sure a master of essentials in that field that she can dispense with the "help" that so often now hinders the real family life and make the home more truly the private shrine of affection and of mutual aid than it has ever been before.
=Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate= if she would hand on the torch of life the brighter for her handling.