871
THE KING’S BUSINESS
our country place sheep and cattle to be used later as food.’ One wonders how many sheep and cattle this one family is going to use in the present stringency. Another society lady tells how they are trying to help Mr. Hoover by using so much less white bread as to save twelve loaves of bread per week in their home. It would interest the laboring people to know how many loaves of white bread per week that family has been in the habit of using. To help out in the^pinch, of economy she tells how the cook makes corn bread and how they have “muf fins or something of the sort.” It must be very hard to put up with corn muf fins. One can’t but pity this family. Further on she tells how they have decided to have one day in the week in which they will do without meat and how they have been in the habit of having “jive or six courses” for their din ners, but how in their burst of patriotism they are going to cut it down to three, then goes on to tell what the three will be: “soup or fish, meat with vege tables and a simple desert.” To most of the common people of this country that would be considered a feast. She tells furthermore, how she attended many dinners in Washington (it would strike the ordinary person that attend ing many dinners would not be a good way to use one’s time in these days of stringency, strife, action and sorrow) and one was given by the Secretary of State and- his wife. She says there were 28 present, including some distin guished guests and there were but three courses, soup, lamb with peas, pota toes and asparagus, all served on the same plate,” (it was fine to save on the plates, but one rather wonders how the soup tastes when served on the plate with lamb and peas and potatoes and asparagus). She goes on to tell how all they had for desert was “ice cream and cake.” In another place she tells how a number of the guests “expressed their approval.” One doesn’t wonder that they did. Most people would decidedly approve of such a dinner, as it was decidedly beyond what they ordinarily get. An article has gone the round of a large number of the daily papers in the country in which it is set forth that “the food,serving program adopted at the home of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, has been selected by the conservation section of the food administration as a model for other large households. It goes on to tell how this lady in her description of this model for others had “seven in the family, and that ten servants were employed.” Each servant" signed a pledge card and there are daily conferences on economy. The economies prac tised were as follows: “No bacon is used in the Roosevelt home. Corn bread is served once a day. The consumption of laundry soap has been cut in half. Meat is served but once daily and all ‘left-overs’ are utilized.” The natural supposition is that .these left-overs are left-overs of meat and therefore meaf is served more than “once a day.’ “Menu rules allow two copses for luncheon and three for dinners. Everybody eats fish at least once per week.” Mrs. Roosevelt goes on to say, “Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible, but highly profitable.” We do not doubt but that it has, but it does not seem to have occurred to Mrs. Roosevelt that if she would cut the ten servants down to two there would have been just about half as many people to provide for as there was with the ten, and the cost of living would have been reduced from the infinitesimal amount it is now to about one- half and the majority of not only the working people, but well-to-do families in this country would be glad to get two servants or even one. Articles like this published in the papers, read by the common people and the poor, set the poor to doing a great deal of thinking and produces serious discontent. Doubt-
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