female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness
will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of human
dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of
industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of the conscripts
would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat
(houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of the community.
She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of
general education at a municipal college. Three years would be her term
of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her
hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of
her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If
her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to
the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an
additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any
complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another
flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their license to employ.
There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not
be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which
survives to-day.

Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain
tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all
their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not
knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while
they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those
who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the
rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and
defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible
that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said 'Sarah, your master wishes--'
or Mr. Smith said 'Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether--' I am
well aware that the very title of this essay jars. I wish I could find
another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by
word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service, in
its old form, depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.

Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all, worth
saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly so
ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile