of testimony from three thousand employees, it is found that on a wage of $3.25 a week it is possible to save annually nearly $150 “in an occupation involving no outlay, no investment of capital, and few or no personal expenses.”  The wages received are relatively higher than those of other occupations; for in Professor Salmon’s comparison of wages received by three thousand country and the same number of city employees it was found that of six thousand teachers in the public schools the average salary actually paid is less than that paid to the average cook in a large city.

The second advantage lies in the healthfulness of the work, which includes not only regularity but variety; the third, that a home, at least in all externals, is insured; the fourth, that a training which makes the worker more fit for married life is certain; and a fifth, that the work is congenial and easy for those whose tastes lie in this direction.

These are the facts that are constantly urged upon the army of under-paid, half-starving needlewomen in our great cities, and no less upon another army of girls in shops and factories, who are implored to consider the advantages of domestic service and to give up their unnecessary battle with the limitations hedging in every other form of labor.  Astonishment that the girls prefer the factory and shop is unending, nor is it regarded as possible that substantial reason may and must exist for such choice.  As a means of arriving at some solution of the problem, some six hundred employees of every order were interviewed, under circumstances which made their replies perfectly free and full; and the results tallied exactly with others obtained by an inquiry in the Philadelphia Working-Woman’s Guild, a society then representing seventy-two distinct occupations.

A report of this inquiry was made by Mrs. Eliza S. Turner, the President of the Guild, and is given as the most suggestive view of the whole subject yet secured.  She writes as follows:—­

     “Why do not intelligent, refined girls more frequently choose house
     service as a support?” The replies here given are as nearly as
     possible verbatim: 

1.  Loss of freedom.  This is as dear to women as to men, although we don’t get so much of it.  The day of a saleswoman or a factory hand may be long, but when it is done she is her own mistress; but in service, except when she is actually out of the house, she has no hour, no minute, when her soul is her own.

2.  Hurts to self-respect.  One thing that makes housework unpleasant—­chamber-work, for instance, and waiting on table—­is that it is a kind of personal service, one human being waiting on another.  The very thing you would do without a thought in your own home for your own family seems menial when it is demanded by a stranger.

     3.  The very words, “service” and “servant,” are hateful.  It is all
     well enough to talk about service being divine, but that is not the
     way the world looks at it.