I think I must be personally known to most of the readers of the
"Atlantic." I see them wherever I go, and they see me. Beneath a
shelter-tent by the Rapidan, in a striped railroad-station in Bavaria,
at the counter of Trübner's bookstore in London, and at Cordaville, in
Worcester County, Massachusetts, as we waited for the freight to get out
of the way, I have read the "Atlantic" over their shoulders, or they
over mine. The same thing has happened at six hundred and thirty-two
other improbable places. More than this, however, my words and works in
the great science of Domestic Economy have travelled everywhere before
me, not simply like the Connecticut of the poet,
"Bringing shad to South Hadley, and pleasure to man,"[35]
but extending all over the civilized world. Not that I am the author of
the clothes-wringing machine, or of the spring clothes-pin,--my
influence has been more subtile. I have propounded great central axioms
in housekeeping and the other economies, which have rushed over the
world with the inevitable momentum of truth. It was I, for instance, who
first discovered and proclaimed the great governing fact that the butter
of a family costs more than its bread. It was I who first announced that
you cannot economize in the quality of your paper. I am the discoverer
of the formula that a family consumes as many barrels of flour in a year
as it has adult members, reducing children to adults by the rule of
three. The morning after our marriage I raised the window-shade, so that
the rising sun of that auspicious day should shine full upon our
parlor-Brussels. I said to Lois, "Let us never be slaves to our
carpets!" The angel smiled assent; and on the wings of that smile my
whisper fluttered over the earth. It brooded in a thousand homes else
miserable. Light was where before was chaos. Sunshine drove scrofula
from ten thousand quivering frames, and millions of infant lips would
this day raise Lois's name and mine in their Kindergarten songs, did
they only know who were their benefactors.
Standing thus in the centre of the sphere of the domestic economies, I
have, of course, read with passionate interest the "House and Home
Papers" in the "Atlantic." It is I, as I am proud to confess, who have,
violated all copyright, have had them reprinted, as Tract No. 2237 of
the American Tract Society, No. 63 of the American Tract Society of
Boston, and No. 445 of the issues of the Sanitary Commission, and am now
about to introduce them surreptitiously into the bureaus of these
charities, so that the colporteurs, of every stripe, may at last be
certain that they are conferring the first of benefits upon their
homeless fellow-creatures. It is I who every night toil through long
streets that I may slide these little tracts, messengers of blessing,
under the front-doors of wretched friends, who are dying without homes
in the gilded miseries of their bowling-alley parlors. Where they have
introduced the patent weather-strip, I place the tract on the upper
door-step, with a brick-bat, which keeps it from blowing away. But I
observe that it is no part of the plan of those charming papers, more
than it was of the "Novum Organon" or of the "Principia," to descend
into the details of the economies. I suppose that the author left all
that to the "Domestic Economy" of her excellent sister, and, as far as
the details of practice go, well she might. But between that practical
detail by which one sister cooks to-day the dinners on a million tables,
and the æsthetic, moral, and religious considerations by which the other
sister elevates the life of the million homes in whose dining-rooms
those tables stand, there is room for a brief exposition of the
principles on which those dinners are to be selected.
It is that exposition which, as I sit superior, I am to give, _ex
cathedra_, after this long preface, now.
I shall illustrate the necessity of this exposition by an introduction
to follow the preface, after the manner of the Germans, before we arrive
at the substance of our work, which will be itself comprised in its
first chapter. This introduction will consist of two illustrations. The
first relates to the planting of potatoes. When I inherited my ancestral
estate, known as "Crusoe's Well," I resolved to devote it to potatoes
for the first summer. I summoned my vassals, and we fenced it. I bought
dung and manured it. I hired ploughmen and oxen, and they ploughed it. I
made a covenant with a Kelt, who became, _quoad hoc_, my slave, and gave
to him money, with which I directed him to buy seed-potatoes and plant
it.