g up cigar-making, which soon finishes the work
of demoralization.

Fringes, gimps, plush, and bonnet ornaments are overcrowded with
workers, for here, as in flowers and feathers, fashion determines the
season's work, and the fringe-maker has for a year or so had small call
for her knowledge save in some forms of upholstery. One and all are so
hedged in by competition that to pass beyond a certain limit is
impossible, and all wages are kept at the lowest point, not only by this
fact, but by the fact that many women who had learned the trade continue
it after marriage as a means of adding a trifle to the family income. An
expert in any one of them is tolerably certain of steady employment, but
wages have reached the lowest point and it does not appear that any rise
is probable. Sharp competition rules and will rule till the working
class themselves recognize the necessity of an education that will make
them something more than adjuncts to machinery, and of an organization
in which co-operation will take the place of competition. That both must
come is as certain as that evolution is upward and not downward, but it
is still a distant day, and neither employer nor employed have yet
learned the possibilities of either.

CHAPTER NINETEENTH.

DOMESTIC SERVICE AND ITS PROBLEMS.

At last we have come to the problem to which there has necessarily been
incidental reference here and there, but which has otherwise bided its
time. That these pages or any pages written by mortal hand in this
generation can solve it, the writer doubts, its solution being
inextricably involved with that of other social problems for which time
is the chief key. State the question as we may, there is always a fresh
presentation to be made, and replies are as various as the minds of the
staters. It is the mistress with whom such presentation has thus far
rested,--a mistress thorned beyond endurance by incompetence, dirt,
waste, insubordination,--all the evils known to ignorant and
presumptuous service. For such mistress, smarting from a sense of wrong,
and hopeless and faithless as to remedies, the outlook is necessarily
bounded by her own horizon. She listens with indignant contempt to the
story of the thousands who choose their garrets and semi-starvation with
independence, to the shelter and abundance of the homes in which they
might be made welcome. She may even aver that any statement of their
suffering is stupid sentimentality; the gush