In the archives

An American newspaper is qualifying for a monument from the housewives of the world. It has discovered, or calculated, that, in the course of a year, the average mother of four or five children makes the 'equivalent' of 1,095 loaves of bread... 50 cakes and 750 pies. She also prepares meat which, if assembled, would make one or two cows and about six pigs, peels 5,100 potatoes, makes 1,200 beds and dusts on average 7,500 chairs every twelve-month. This sort of stuff makes one hungry for statistics. Cannot some baker come up with some intensely human story of the number of times a year his nose begins to itch as soon as he plunges his hand into the dough? If the trade should ever decide to answer its plague of critics, a wagon-load of distressing statistics of this kind would make the public weep oceans of tears. Really, bakers are a most unenterprising lot of fellows.