HOME AND EDUCATION
HOME AND EDUCATION The home is the real seat of government, and the Wise Men of all nations bring their gilts to the cradle. Conducted by BELLE CASE LA FOLLETTE and CAROLINE L. HUNT A City of...
...It is very often the best possible way to get a new wall covering with small expense and little tearing up of the house...
...Why do we have to look to men for these things...
...It is most distracting to see one part of a pattern in one place and an entirely different part in a corresponding place on the other side of a room...
...BUT now, in the year 1909, we are introduced to a new city of ideals...
...She means satisfactory in inventing, applying and using mechanical devices for house work...
...They are intended for the use of individuals and of clubs...
...But it is not so much upon the proportions of the separate spaces, the spaces between windows or over fireplaces, that the beauty of the walls depends as upon the relation of the separate spaces one to another...
...Here there is no child-labor, for the inhabitants believe that the home, the school and the playground are the places for children...
...To the ordinary, unliterary man, the possession of a Utopia is a means of consolation and enjoyment, but never a source of inconvenience...
...Tuberculosis, a Preventable and Curable Disease, by S. Adolphus Knopf, M. D., New York, 1909, Moffat, Yard & Co., P. 394...
...they have long French windows which may be opened from top to bottom...
...If, on the other hand, the prominent feature is at one side of the center, it must be balanced by some other equally imposing object or the eye is not satisfied...
...In this relation we may have what artists call balance...
...Being asked by his wife to polish the waxed floors, he put on his heelless sandals, tied cloths about them firmly, and went over the floors with a skating motion...
...Besides an air ship suspended over a house would be a fine place to cook onions and cabbage...
...HINTS TO HOME-MAKERS A mere man recently made an important household discovery...
...Having invited the public to the city of his dreams, he is obliged to find a reason for everything therein contained...
...This city lies near a woodland, left as Nature planted it...
...But even if a wall covering is plain, it should have depth and richness...
...S. A. Knopf, is unique, the method by which we are introduced to it is even more unique...
...They are, how-e v e r, expensive...
...The worst shaped room I ever saw, one in which no two walls were of the same length, was covered with a wide-striped paper...
...He is obliged also to find, for the public, a means of access and approach...
...Why not hang the clean clothes on a small ship and allow it to sail away above the dust and soot...
...If the paper had not been there, something would have in time whispered to those who entered the room, or at least to those who tarried in it, that it was fundamentally ugly, but as it was, the 12 big stripes on one wall and the 15 stripes on the opposite wall, with the 8 stripes on one side of the mantel piece and the 5 on the other, fairly shouted the fact so that not even the casual visitor escaped the knowledge...
...Perhaps it is because fathers never take any pains to explain the intricacies of steam rollers and locomotives to them as they do to the boys...
...The spaces at the sides of the fireplace or the group of windows, or whatever it is that forms the center of the decorative scheme, may contribute further to the restfulness of the effect if they are treated alike, if there are low book cases at each side, for example...
...It amounts to this in the end: if you have a room of fine proportions, a big-figured paper is likely to spoil its effect...
...if you have a room of bad proportions, a conspicuous wall covering makes it worse...
...And the schools are nice places to be in, for, like the houses, their chief provision is for life in the open air...
...But if this Utopia which has in fact been created by a great tuberculosis expert, Dr...
...We can, however, gain a sense of such proportions by studying walls that have been "arefully designed and in which a proper dividing up of the space, good woodwork and well-chosen ornament combine to make the walls themselves things of beauty, too pleasing to be concealed under pictures, casts, or other kinds of superimposed ornament...
...We must have housekeeping engineeresses...
...This is the principle and the philosophy of panelling, to which some well-planned walls owe their beauty...
...The time will come very soon when we shall want her to develop the housekeeping possibilities of the airship...
...Take the most conspicuous wall in the house, which is usually the long wall of the living-room, as an illustration...
...compelled to bridge the chasm which separates the world of realities from the world of imagination...
...If in the middle of this there is a fireplace or a group of windows, the wall spaces at the sides will be of equal width and the room will naturally fall into lines of dignity, repose and restfulness...
...In this city there are no fresh fruits exposed for sale in dusty places...
...Good spacing and balance effects may be emphasized if the wall is properly treated...
...It is a boon, therefore, for those who wish to retain old paper for the protection it gives to the wall and yet cover up an ugly, soiled, or faded surface...
...Cool, non-alcoholic beverages are offered to him, in convenient places, for small sums...
...With the literary man, however, it is different...
...No man's Utopia is like any other man's, for its character is determined by his temperament and his experiences...
...Note:—Outlines of the lessons in Domestic Science and a list of reference books can be obtained without cost by addressing The Home and Education Department of La Follette's Weekly, Madison, Wisconsin...
...We are running "short of first-class women and I have to turn to men, who are proving most satisfactory...
...It has broad streets which turn aside here and there into parks, play-grounds, school-gardens, school-farms, out-door theaters and other open-air places of amusement...
...There are no brooms nor featherdusters, but pneumatic cleaners...
...sometimes by the state of his digestion and his nervous system...
...no really novel way of approach...
...They defy description...
...To tell what good proportions are in wall-spaces is as impossible as to describe good forms in chairs or in tables...
...It is as great a mistake to put a window here, a door there, and a fireplace somewhere else, without regard to the way in which they cut up the wall and then to expect to get a good effect by papering the wall or hanging pictures on it, as it is to take a chair of ugly form and to try to make it beautiful by upholstering it in artistic material...
...Before it came down we might have it pass through a cloud and sprinkle the wash...
...If not so used it should be stippled to remove the shine...
...In fact there are no dusty places and no flies, and finally—a circumstance which may seem trivial to some—from this ideal place of abode the whisk broom of the Pullman car porter, which now blows other peoples' dust in our faces at the end of a journey when nerves have reached the limit of their endurance, is banished by law...
...Oil paint makes a good wall if it is put over rough plaster...
...It is full of inconsistencies and incongruities, but he is obliged neither to make excuses for the inconsistencies nor to remove the incongruities...
...They are chiefly porch...
...This chasm, the creators of literary Utopias have bridged in many different ways...
...Conducted by BELLE CASE LA FOLLETTE and CAROLINE L. HUNT A City of Dreams, Not Far Away EVERY man has his Utopia, his place of dreams, from which he has banished all that he abhors in the world around him, and in which he has embodied all that he loves and longs for...
...In the streets are public comfort stations and bubble drinking fountains...
...Price $2.00...
...Bellamy mesmerizes us, and carries us forward a hundred years, knowing that in "Looking Backward" we will learn to appreciate the advantages of the world he has fabricated...
...William Morris, artist and idealist, created a Utopia in which the inhabitants wandered about in a more or less leisurely manner, in pleasant out-door places, clothed in robes that had been woven and dyed by hand, and which were held in place by hand-wrought buckles and brooches...
...The Household Engineer ALETTER from a woman vitally interested in the Home Economics movement contains the inquiry: "When are we going to start our school of mechanical housekeeping...
...What more frequently happens, however, is that bad proportions are brought out by the wall paper or other wall covering...
...From that time on they seem to grow helpless for some reason or other...
...THE DECORATION of the walls of a house should begin when the plan is made, for the wall-spaces as they are determined by the windows and the doors and oftentimes by the fire places may be pleasing to the eye or may be displeasing...
...TfThe appointment of three women as members of the board of education is among the closing acts of Mayor McClellan's term, and it is one that will meet with general approval.—New York Evening Post...
...This is because he keeps it to himself, inviting no one to enter...
...H. G. Wells on the other hand, a scientist of a mechanical turn of mind, created an ideal city in which everything, from a fresh cake of soap to an air-ship, could be secured by pressing a button...
...Its houses are airy and well-sunned...
...To-day we have courses of preparation for this very occupation...
...Wall Coverings and Rugs (A Reading Course in Domestic Science.—Lesson XL...
...This book we buy and begin to read from the sense of duty...
...On the other hand, the symmetrical effect may be marred by ill-chosen decoration...
...Perhaps it is because mothers give to their sons things to use and to their daughters things to wear and to have, thus early laying the foundation for that difference which becomes so prominent in later years between the men who want to do things and the women who are content to have things...
...He puts it away in a remote corner of his brain, and retires to it only in moments of stress and peculiar dissatisfaction with the world about him...
...Part I.—Wall Coverings...
...He now insists that the price of a weighted polisher and a great deal of backache may be saved if his plan is adopted...
...and families live out of doors except when it is necessary to be indoors, just as we now do the reverse...
...Morris asks us to sleep for a few centuries, and wake up in "Nowhere...
...And what Deborah Franklin did in 1767 we can do in 1909...
...Then if their lack of mechanical skill is not inherent, we may in time get our much needed household mechanics from among the women...
...The truth is that there are few people who go more directly to the bottom of things and who delight more in doing things that tax their strength and their ingenuity than little girls of three or four years...
...In this well-ordered place, if a man works where he is likely to become over-heated, means are provided by which he can cool off gradually...
...So there are few saloons...
...A wall is divided into spaces that are of good proportion and then the outline is followed by the decoration...
...Which...
...then suddenly we forget its main thesis, and find ourselves living in a place, so healthful and so beautiful, and, at the same time, so near to us, being separated only by a little lack of energy and a little selfishness, that we begin to think how easy it would be, if we could only stop "laying waste our powers" in "getting and spending," to pick up the inhabitants of our dirty and unnecessarily unhealthful world, and transport them to it...
...These are points which men will surely overlook when the aeroplane is perfected...
...so many the methods by which we have been introduced to them, that we had begun to think that there could be no really new Utopia...
...I have seen many walls so treated with excellent results...
...The same is true of papers with very small patterns and of those in which the color is broken by shading...
...Calcimine is the cheapest wall covering and may be very good to look at if enough coloring matter is used to give it depth and character...
...A paper of large pattern with a right and left to it may be cut up in sueh a way as to make the two spaces appear quite unlike and unsymmetrical...
...Certainly a new need has arisen...
...At any rate, now that oculists tell us that it is cruel to make any young child focus the eyes on so small a tool as the needle, we might make the experiment of giving girls hammers and spades and we might at the same time reduce the number of their mere possessions, hair ribbons and bracelets, for example...
...Decorators almost invariably say this is not practicable, but it is entirely so...
...A few years ago there was an unsatisfied demand for institutional managers and housekeepers—women who could take charge of the buying of supplies, the hiring of help and the ordering of meals...
...there is little need of them...
...That the scheme is not a new one is proved by the fact that Benjamin Franklin writing from London to his wife in the year 1767, after telling her to have a certain room papered blue, adds: "If the paper is not equally colored when pasted on, let it be washed over again with the same color...
...The best of the ingrain papers have enough variation of surface to give them depth...
...The Japanese grass cloths and other fabrics give these effects...
...These are usually secured by roughnesses in the surface which give lights and shades or by other variations which produce the same effect...
...Now the unsatisfied demand is for women to take charge of machinery, to superintend electric lighting and to repair pneumatic cleaners...
...So many, in fact, have been the kinds of Utopias to which we have been invited...
...From this city, social justice has banished philanthropy and charitable institutions, for here every man who wishes to work, and is able to work, finds employment at good wages...
...The simplest way to get balance is through symmetry...
...Are they better fitted to tackle them by nature or by training...
...As a rule, plain wall coverings or those of conventional design in two tones of one color are best...
...It may be described as a sort of benevolent misrepresentation, for the author calls the book in which he admits us to it: "Tuberculosis, a Preventable and Curable Disease...
...A coat or two of it applied over wall paper will cover all but the most highly colored patterns...
...115 illustrations...
Vol. 1 • December 1909 • No. 51
