t room in which to sleep, and another in which to
receive her friends. This employer naturally felt aggrieved when the
cook refused to stay in her bay. Viewed in an historic light, this
employer might quite as well have added a bay to her house for her
shoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live in
it.

A listener, attentive to a conversation between two employers of
household labor,--and we certainly all have opportunity to hear such
conversations,--would often discover a tone implying that the employer
was abused and put upon; that she was struggling with the problem
solely because she was thus serving her family and performing her social
duties; that otherwise it would be a great relief to her to abandon the
entire situation, and "never have a servant in her house again." Did she
follow this impulse, she would simply yield to the trend of her times
and accept the present system of production. She would be in line with
the industrial organization of her age. Were she in line ethically, she
would have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life do
not consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but in
sharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the family
the unit of that life.

The selfishness of a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics,
insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family shall
minister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall be
cut off, more or less, from their natural social ties, excludes the best
working-people from her service.

A man of dignity and ability is quite willing to come into a house to
tune a piano. Another man of mechanical skill will come to put up window
shades. Another of less skill, but of perfect independence, will come to
clean and relay a carpet. These men would all resent the situation and
consider it quite impossible if it implied the giving up of their family
and social ties, and living under the roof of the household requiring
their services.

The isolation of the household employee is perhaps inevitable so long as
the employer holds her belated ethics; but the situation is made even
more difficult by the character and capacity of the girls who enter this
industry. In any great industrial change the workmen who are permanently
displaced are those who are too dull to seize upon changed conditions.
The workmen who have knowledge and insight, who are in touch