Part 115 (2/2)
The services of the horse, and the tons upon tons of fertilizing material produced by him, are financially valuable; but the injury from many deaths, the yearly drain from long sickness, and all the doctors and druggists bills, amounts to a far greater loss.
There is no horse work in a city that cannot be done by machine. The carriage, wagon, truck and dray, can take his place as workers; and they _breed no flies._
We are learning, learning fast, how large a proportion of diseases spring from minute living things which get inside of us and play havoc with our organism. And very lately we are learning further, that of all the benevolent distributors of disease none are more swift and sure than certain insects; insects which are born and bred in and upon the bodies and excreta of animals.
It is true that our kitchen garbage furnishes another popular nursery for flies, but the unclean stable is the other breeding place.
Next in number to the horse come the dog and cat. These creatures are not healthy and not happy in a city. They cannot be kept there without injury to them; and the injury is more than revenged upon their keepers.
The dog furnishes his quota of deaths from hydrophobia, as well as plain ”a.s.sault and battery;” he defiles our sidewalks, and the fruits and vegetables exposed upon our sidewalks; he keeps us awake by his forlorn howling; he has diseases of his own which we may receive from him; and he has fleas.
The flea, as well as the fly, is a valiant and industrious purveyor of disease. From beast to beast they hop, carrying their toxic germs with them: and the dog, displeased with his persecutors, scratches them off upon our carpets.
The same applies to cats. A cat in the country is clean and safe; a cat in the city is neither--if it has any freedom. If a young kitten, cleansed and flealess, were reared in a lofty apartment, it would be clean, doubtless; but the usual cat is free on intersecting fences; and in the contact of warfare, or of gentler feelings, the flea is free to travel and exchange.
The rat and mouse come under the same condemnation; they have fleas.
They make dirt. They tend to increase and maintain our insect pests and terrors. They penetrate to all unsavory places. They acquire disease themselves, or carry the germs of it in their blood or on their fur.
Their parasites gather them up and give them to us. The rats will leave a sinking s.h.i.+p, the fleas will leave a sinking rat, and among their millions some of them come to us.
When we build cities clean and tight from bas.e.m.e.nt to roof,--all concrete, brick, stone, metal, and plaster; when the holes for pipes of all sorts are scaled as they enter the home; when the kitchen is eliminated by 90 per cent. and replaced by the food laboratories; when no animal but man is allowed within city limits--and he is taught to keep clean; we can then compare, for antiseptic cleanliness with a fine hospital--and have few hospitals to compare with!
WHAT DIANTHA DID
XI.
THE POWER OF THE SCREW.
Your car is too big for one person to stir-- Your chauffeur is a little man, too; Yet he lifts that machine, does the little chauffeur, By the power of a gentle jackscrew.
Diantha worked.
For all her employees she demanded a ten-hour day, she worked fourteen; rising at six and not getting to bed till eleven, when her charges were all safely in their rooms for the night.
They were all up at five-thirty or thereabouts, breakfasting at six, and the girls off in time to reach their various places by seven. Their day was from 7 A. M. to 8.30 P. M., with half an hour out, from 11.30 to twelve, for their lunch; and three hours, between 2.20 and 5.30, for their own time, including their tea. Then they worked again from 5.30 to 8.30, on the dinner and the dishes, and then they came home to a pleasant nine o'clock supper, and had all hour to dance or rest before the 10.30 bell for bed time.
Special friends and ”cousins” often came home with them, and frequently shared the supper--for a quarter--and the dance for nothing.
It was no light matter in the first place to keep twenty girls contented with such a regime, and working with the steady excellence required, and in the second place to keep twenty employers contented with them. There were failures on both sides; half a dozen families gave up the plan, and it took time to replace them; and three girls had to be asked to resign before the year was over. But most of them had been in training in the summer, and had listened for months to Diantha's earnest talks to the clubs, with good results.
”Remember we are not doing this for ourselves alone,” she would say to them. ”Our experiment is going to make this kind of work easier for all home workers everywhere. You may not like it at first, but neither did you like the old way. It will grow easier as we get used to it; and we _must_ keep the rules, because we made them!”
She laboriously composed a neat little circular, distributed it widely, and kept a pile in her lunch room for people to take.
<script>