Whose fault is it that they are not so?  Fault is a heavy word.  It includes generations in its pitiless entail.  Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof is but one side of the truth.  No day is sufficient unto the evil thereof is the other.  Each day has to bear burdens passed down from so many other days; each person has to bear burdens so complicated, so interwoven with the burdens of others; each person’s fault is so fevered and swollen by faults of others, that there is no disentangling the question of responsibility.  Every thing is everybody’s fault is the simplest and fairest way of putting it.  It is everybody’s fault that the average home is stupid, dreary, insufferable,—­a place from which fathers fly to clubs, boys and girls to streets.  But when we ask who can do most to remedy this,—­in whose hands it most lies to fight the fight against the tendencies to monotony, stupidity, and instability which are inherent in human nature,—­then the answer is clear and loud.  It is the work of women; this is the true mission of women, their “right” divine and unquestionable, and including most emphatically the “right to labor.”

To create and sustain the atmosphere of a home,—­it is easily said in a very few words; but how many women have done it?  How many women can say to themselves or others that this is their aim?  To keep house well women often say they desire.  But keeping house well is another affair,—­I had almost said it has nothing to do with creating a home.  That is not true, of course; comfortable living, as regards food and fire and clothes, can do much to help on a home.  Nevertheless, with one exception, the best homes I have ever seen were in houses which were not especially well kept; and the very worst I have ever known were presided (I mean tyrannized) over by “perfect housekeepers.”

All creators are single-aimed.  Never will the painter, sculptor, writer lose sight of his art.  Even in the intervals of rest and diversion which are necessary to his health and growth, every thing he sees ministers to his passion.  Consciously or unconsciously, he makes each shape, color, incident his own; sooner or later it will enter into his work.

So it must be with the woman who will create a home.  There is an evil fashion of speech which says it is a narrowing and narrow life that a woman leads who cares only, works only for her husband and children; that a higher, more imperative thing is that she herself be developed to her utmost.  Even so clear and strong a writer as Frances Cobbe, in her otherwise admirable essay on the “Final Cause of Woman,” falls into this shallowness of words, and speaks of women who live solely for their families as “adjectives.”

In the family relation so many women are nothing more, so many women become even less, that human conception may perhaps be forgiven for losing sight of the truth, the ideal.  Yet in women it is hard to forgive it.  Thinking clearly, she should see that a creator can never be an adjective; and that a woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator, second only to God.