In Germany the government maintains a system of education in what is called intensive farming. Through instructors who go about the country, the farmers are taught how to get a bigger yield from the same area of soil. The work of these wonderful teachers is supplemented by women domestic science teachers who in the same manner visit the homes in their districts and instruct the good Haus Frau on how to improve, economize, and systematize in kitchen and household work.

The manner in which these women instruct is, I am sure, of especial interest to the Cook Book readers, inasmuch as the method is in a way practically the same as what the Cook Book is doing. Where they teach by hand and mouth the Cook Book has taught through its exchange of ideas, contest stories, and recipe contests, the object being the same in both cases that of instruction, education and economy in the kitchen and saving of steps in the housework.

It is truly said of Germans that they are the most frugal and economical of all people. In the past the usual method has been to exert this frugality with what is already on hand in the larder left-overs, so to speak. One point of the modern instruction of these wandering domestic science teachers, as they go from home to home, is to show the economy of systematic buying of groceries, meats and vegetables. Where the practice in the past has been to buy a little, so there is not much expenditure of money, German housewives are now taught the economy of buying in bulk, because it is cheaper, and there is never any waste of food in a German home, no matter how much of it there may be on hand.

Neither is there any good reason why there should be any waste of food in an American home. Economy or frugality comes from knowing how, and not from any stingy purpose, as some ill-advised people think.

The methods of these teachers show that this wonderful nation is alive to the fact that the high cost of living is in our own waste and carelessness, that oftentimes we do not make the most of what we have or what we are given to do with.