There is more risk of disease being introduced into the home, and of bad habits being contracted by allowing one’s children to associate with other children in schools, public or private, and by letting them play in the streets and public parks, where they mingle with more or less undesirable companions, than by having the housework performed by employees who come each day to their work and return to their homes at night when their duties are over.  Nevertheless no sensible parents would keep their children shut up in the house, only allowing them to go out of doors for a few hours once a week, for fear of contagion or contamination, and yet this is just what the housewife has been doing for years with her household employees under the firm impression that she was protecting them as well as herself.

Present statistics, however, upon the morality and immorality of women who belong to what is at present termed the “servant class,” prove only too clearly that the “protection” provided by the employer’s home does not protect.  The shelter thus given serves too often to encourage a life of deception, especially as in reality the housewife knows but little of what takes place “below stairs.”

The “servants’ quarters” are, as a rule, far enough away from the other rooms of the house for much to transpire there without the knowledge of the “mistress of the house,” but who has not heard her complain of the misconduct of her employees?  Startling discoveries have been made at the most unexpected times and from the most unexpected quarters.  One lady found her maid was in the habit of going out at night after the family had retired, and leaving the front door unlocked in order to regain admittance in the early morning without arousing the family.  Another housewife discovered one day that her cook’s husband, whose existence until then was unknown, had been coming for several months to her house for his dinner.  Every householder finds that in the late evening her “servants” entertain their numerous “cousins” and friends at her expense.  Moreover, they do not hesitate to use the best china, glass, and silver for special parties and draw upon the household supplies for the choicest meats and wines.  And because they cannot go out in the day time, it is not unusual to find some friend or relative comes to spend the entire day with them, and in consequence the housewife not only feeds her “help” but a string of hangers-on as well.  Why should she be surprised that she does not get an adequate return for the amount of money she spends?  And these things take place, not only during the temporary absence of the employer, but even while she is sitting peacefully in the library and listening to a parlor lecture on the relations of capital and labor.

Women say tearfully or bravely on such occasions:  “What can be done to make servants better?  They are getting worse every day.”  And the housewife (one might almost call her by Samuel Pepys’s pleasing phrase, “the poor wretch”) then pours out to any sympathetic ear endless recitals of aggravating, worrying, nerve-racking experiences.  Instead of putting an end to such a regrettable state of affairs that would never be tolerated by any business employer, she seems content to bewail her fate and clings still more steadfastly to obsolete methods.