Home Education and the Home Circle [pp. 49-53]

HOME EDUCATION AND THE HOME CIRCLE.
ciety in Augusta needing a quantity of paper recently, sent to New
York in order to get a superior article. When it arrived they found
it had been manufactured within six miles of home at the Bath Mills,
sent to New York and then returned.
At Kaolin, twelve miles off, is a porcelain factory, and at Kalmia
Mills a company has been actively engaged in the erection of a very
large establishment for making cotton goods, calculated to afford employment to one thousand hands, and which is expected to be in
operation by next fall. A charter has also recently been granted to
t le Rose Mill Manufacturing Co,mpany, to be located on the head
waters of Tinkers' Creek, eight miles Southeast of Aiken.
As yet these water powers have not received the attention they
merit. The streams are never-failing, and capable of driving the
machinery for hundreds of miles, and, unlike marny in more Northern
latitudes, are not affected by the ill effects of the extreme cold.
In another paper, in our next issue, will be presented the invaluable
resources of this region, in clays, fruits, vines, etc., etc.
ART. VI. —HOME EDUCATION AND THE HOME CIRCLE.
ECONOMY is a virtue, hitherto little understood or practiced at the
South. She is now called on to retrench all the usual expenses of
living, and to practice the most systematic and rigid economy. The
privations which she patiently endured throughout the late war, and
the herotic fortitude which she exhibited under suffering in every
form, will render it easy for her now to dispense with many of the
comforts and most of the luxuries of life-the more easily, because
all being reduced in circumstances, all alike will live plainly and
frugally. Thus to live will become the fashion, and be considered,
(very properly under our present circumstances,) the chiefest of virtues. We were glad to find during a late trip to the country, that
those whom the war had left moderately independent, were busiest
and most energetic in setting the examples of industry and frugality.
It is easy for the poor to be frugal when the rich thus set the example.
Most of our wants were acquired and artificial, the creatures of
fashion, rather than of nature or necessity. To live plainly and
cheaply is less troublesome, less laborious, and begets less of care
and anxiety, even with the wealthy, than to live fashionably and expensively. Until the late war we were all, more or less the slaves of
t;shion. To become independent of her costly or capricious dominion
is a great point gained, which of itself will reduce the ordinary expense of living at least one-half. It has become the fashion not only
to live plainly, but to labor with our own hands, at any work that our
fam,ily wants require. When we had whole troops of negro servants
about us, to supervise and keep them at work, left us no time to work
ourselves. We find now. it is often less irksome and disagreeable to
VOL. II.-NO. I.
49
4