The trouble goes much deeper, however, even to the foundations.  The nineteenth-century house is not suited to twentieth-century needs.  In other words, lack of adaptation to present conditions of the houses we live in is a large factor in the prevailing domestic discontent.  The next largest has been referred to as attempting a style of living beyond one’s income.

In all other walks of life, in transportation, in manufacturing, machinery has come in to replace the heavier and more mechanical portions of labor.  The steam-shovel, the hoisting-engine, an infinite combination of mechanical principles have been applied to the doing of things to save human muscle.  To stand by the machine which turns out the familiar grape-basket, ready to fill with the fruit, and then to watch the housemaid bending over some piece of work, is to realize the difference.  In few, very few operations is it necessary to-day that men should bend their backs, but in how many household processes is the worker expected to get down on all fours?  The free-born American rebels.  Perchance it is the unconscious protest over a four-footed ancestry, or it may be that disuse has really weakened the spinal column.  Whatever the cause, the fact remains.  It is not the idea of work, of service, but of bending the back to work that is so repugnant; likewise the effect on the hands of hot water and scrubbing.  Close observation has convinced me that care of the hands has become an indication of freedom from manual labor quite unthought of fifteen or twenty years ago.  The increase of manicuring-rooms, like the increase of restaurants, is a clear sign of the trend of the times.  Not only the class who likes to waste conspicuously, but many a teacher, many a young man in State or Government employ with an income of one, two, or three thousand a year patronizes these rooms.

This daintiness reflects downward, and the girl whose acquaintances in her high-school days are in a position to keep well manicured, if not “lily-white,” hands does not like to have hers show the effect of housework, when that means scrubbing the floor and cleaning the stove.  Gloves?  Ah, well, James Nasmyth once wrote:  “Kid-gloves are great non-conductors of knowledge.”  I believe that gloves of any kind are a makeshift in real cleaning of dirty corners; but there should not be corners to catch dirt.

The unnecessary nastiness of the scrub-water with its fine soot which works into every pore is a great objection to the girl who must work for her living.  If she goes to visit her friends, her hands betray her.  She can remove the other badges of her toil, her cap and apron; she may go out on the street as brave as her mistress; but the moment her gloves are removed her hands tell the tale.  With the means at hand this need not be.  It is one of the legacies which have come down to us, and which we have connected with the servant problem.  The work in the most modern apartments does not require the soiling of