A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for their patrons.  There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, except that they are absolutely necessary.  Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as they usually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands of domestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets.  Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in.  Many more are barred from hotels on account of small means.  Often a girl finding it impossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided by these lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to return until morning.  She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts.

According to Miss Kellor’s report this description of employment agencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to about seventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined.  For greater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions in cities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio.  The differences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem is much the same east and west.

Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like other workers.  Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in a high-class employment office, while at other times they are obliged to have recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, and perhaps also, of propriety, are low.  Domestic workers are the nomads of industry.  Their lives are like their work,—­impermanent, detached from others’, unobserved.

It is for the housekeepers of America to consider the plain facts concerning domestic service.  Some of the conditions they can change.  Others they cannot.  No one can alter the economic status of the kitchen.  Like the sweat shop, it must ultimately disappear.

What system of housekeeping will take the place of the present system cannot precisely be foretold.  We know that the whole trend of things everywhere is toward co-operation.  Within the past ten years think how much cooking has gone into the factory, how much washing into the steam laundry, how much sewing into the shop.  As the cost of living increases, more and more co-operation will be necessary, especially for those of moderate income.  At the present time millions of city dwellers have given up living in their own houses, or even in rented houses.  They cannot afford to maintain individual homes, but must live in apartment houses, where the expenses of heat, and other expenses, notably water, hall, and janitor service, are reduced to a minimum because shared by all the tenants.  There may come a time when the private kitchen will be a luxury of the very rich.

For a time, however, the private kitchen and the servant in the kitchen will remain.  That is one servant problem.  But the housekeeper still has another “servant problem,” and I have tried to make it clear that this problem pretty closely involves the morals of the community.