The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-09-19
AS THE PESSIMIST SEES TT
By DOROTHY DIX


 There Is no place like home," said the sentimental optimist And, thank heaven, thAre isn't," exclaimed the bil- ious optimist.
 What's home? The last place you go at night. when you are turned out from everywhere else. A place that is full of work and worry and brutal truths and dyspepsia. A place where even the mirrors always give you back an unflattering reflection of yourself ans make you look 10 per cent more like the original human shrimp than you do elsewhere. A place where you get less for your investment than you do anywhere on earth. Why. man alive. if we could get the home bug out of our system. it would be money in our pockets, peace in our souls and diges- tion in our stomachs.
 "Talk about the comforts of a home !. Did you ever have to get up of cold biting winter morning and make the fire in stove that sulked and smoked and chewed and drank and did every thing but burn. while the nipping air played coldly around your. nude shins and the rigid iron stuck to your hand every time you touched it
 Did you ever of a hot summers day have to shove a lawn mower up and down, up and down, around the door step that poets rave about? Did you ever sit down in your own house to take your ease, with pipe and paper and slippers that you weren't routed cut and put to fixing the plumbing or mending a window screen or putting up shelf or hanging a picture? Talk about the comforts of home. Why, it's life sentence of hard labor, | it's tread mill. it's first aid to ner- vous prostration; that's what home is. And the delights of home cooking. Say, that hoary superstition about mothers bread and mothers pie has made everybody a millionaire who has ever devised a purple pill for chronic 1 indigestion, and has filled the ceme- teries with heroic souls whose spirits were willing but whose stomachs were weak.
 1 Why, mother couldn't get a job to cook in third class beanery. Under done bread and meat, watery vegetables soggy pie, dish water that masquerades as coffee. the same old dreary round | of the same old dreary foods, cook ed in the same old dreary manner is
 
 per cent of the people who keep house.
 "No wonder we are a nation of dys- peptics It's home cooking that does l it. No wonder that you can't pick up a paper without reading about half a dozen men having committed suicide without apparent reason. They were driven to it by home cooking. The marvel is, that when the average fam fly takes look at it's breakfast table it doesn't rush out en masse and make a grab for the razor or the gas tube. Just look at the difference between the happy, healthy, cheerful people who live Tn hotels and the aenemic, disgruntled, starved, poor creatures who have to eat home cooking. Mark my words, it's mothers cooking that does it.
 Talk about the freedom of home Why, a home makes a penitentiary look like an open door, Maybe woman has some freedom in her home but any man wko goes and blows in his good, hard earned dollars in a home in the supposition that he Is going to be able to do as he likes, has gotten stung | for fair. It doesn't take him long to find out that the only place where he can not do as he pleases Is in the house that his money supports. AS he puts his key in the lock in the front door, | | be sure to wipe your feet on the door matr He is tired and throws himself down on the couch to rest. but he is warned off of it. 'Will-yum, don't muss up those sofa cushions, and, for good ness sake. look where you have got lyour feetr'
 And, talk about the privacy of a home! There is no spot on earth so public as home; there are no people who strip, every garm lent of decent re- serve from about you as do your own home people; there Is no curiosity so morbid, so trying and unsuitable as | that of your own family. If you want to live life of privacy, if you want to keep your affairs to yourself, if you want to come and go freely and un- questioned then go and settle yourself in the midst of the biggest hotel you can find. You may live there for 4o years, and as long as you pay your bills | and behave with decorum nobody Will ever give you a second look You are mo business of theirs and they respect lyour right to live your life in your own way.
 But home! There you stand for ever in the middle of the spotlight, with every one about arrogating the right to police every single thing you do and say and think You cant go down town without having to give minute account of every place you went ana Everybody you saw, and what they said and you said. and you thought they might have said if you had said some- thing from what you did say 'sYou can't buy tooth brush with out everybody in the house wanting to know why you bought one at all. and If you did buy one, why you didn't buy harder one or a softer one, or some other kind of one than the one you did. You can't get letter without every body having to know whom 1t is from, and what are its contents. You cant