made to retain her.  The writer knows an employer in one of the suburbs who built a bay at the back of her house so that her cook might have a pleasant room in which to sleep, and another in which to receive her friends.  This employer naturally felt aggrieved when the cook refused to stay in her bay.  Viewed in an historic light, this employer might quite as well have added a bay to her house for her shoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live in it.

A listener, attentive to a conversation between two employers of household labor,—­and we certainly all have opportunity to hear such conversations,—­would often discover a tone implying that the employer was abused and put upon; that she was struggling with the problem solely because she was thus serving her family and performing her social duties; that otherwise it would be a great relief to her to abandon the entire situation, and “never have a servant in her house again.”  Did she follow this impulse, she would simply yield to the trend of her times and accept the present system of production.  She would be in line with the industrial organization of her age.  Were she in line ethically, she would have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life do not consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but in sharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the family the unit of that life.

The selfishness of a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics, insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family shall minister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall be cut off, more or less, from their natural social ties, excludes the best working-people from her service.

A man of dignity and ability is quite willing to come into a house to tune a piano.  Another man of mechanical skill will come to put up window shades.  Another of less skill, but of perfect independence, will come to clean and relay a carpet.  These men would all resent the situation and consider it quite impossible if it implied the giving up of their family and social ties, and living under the roof of the household requiring their services.

The isolation of the household employee is perhaps inevitable so long as the employer holds her belated ethics; but the situation is made even more difficult by the character and capacity of the girls who enter this industry.  In any great industrial change the workmen who are permanently displaced are those who are too dull to seize upon changed conditions.  The workmen who have knowledge and insight, who are in touch with their time, quickly reorganize.