exertions, operatives clear $5 a week.  Then, underbidding from the unemployed is a fruitful source of low wages.  Massachusetts has 20 per cent of her workers unemployed.”

These conditions, while varying as to numbers, are practically the same for the work of women in all parts of the United States, and are matters of increasing perplexity and sorrow to every searcher into these problems.  At its best, woman’s work in industries is intermittent, since it is only textile work that continues the year round; dress and cloak making, shoe and umbrella making, fur-sewing and millinery, have specific seasons, in the intervals between which the worker waits and starves, or, if too desperate, goes upon the streets, driven there by the wretched competitive system, the evils of which increase in direct ratio to the longing for speedy wealth.  In short, matters are at that point where only radical change of methods can better the situation, even the most conservative observer, relying most thoroughly upon evolution, feeling something more than evolution must work if justice is to have place in the present social scheme.

It is at this point that some consideration of domestic service naturally presents itself.  Though regarded often as no part of the labor question, there can be no other head under which to range it, since the last census gives over a million persons engaged in this occupation, the lowest rough estimate of wages being $160,000,000 and the support included forming a sum at least as large.  It is through the hands of the domestic servant that a large part of the finished products of other forms of labor must pass, and the economic aspects of the question grow in importance with every year of the changing conditions of American life.  In no other occupation is a just consideration of the points involved so difficult a task, since the mistress who faces the incompetence, insubordination, and all the other trials involved in the relation, suffers too keenly from the sense of individual wrong to treat the matter in the large.  Till it is so treated, however, understanding for both sides is impossible, and to bring about such understanding is the first necessity for all.

From the employer’s standpoint the advantages to be stated are as follows:  First and most obvious is the fact that wages are not only relatively but absolutely high; for aside from the actual cash there are also board, lodging, fuel, light, and laundry, all of which the worker in trades must provide for herself.  There is no capital required, as for type-writer, sewing-machine, or any appliances for work, nor is the girl forced to expend anything in preparation, since under the present system housekeepers take her untrained fresh from Castle Garden, and willingly give the needed instruction, at the same time paying the same wage as that given to competent service.  Professor Lucy Salmon, of Vassar, who has devoted much time to this subject, reports that, on examination