In those cases in which the household employees have no family ties, doubtless a remedy against social isolation would be the formation of residence clubs, at least in the suburbs, where the isolation is most keenly felt.  Indeed, the beginnings of these clubs are already seen in the servants’ quarters at the summer hotels.  In these residence clubs, the household employee could have the independent life which only one’s own abiding place can afford.  This, of course, presupposes a higher grade of ability than household employees at present possess; on the other hand, it is only by offering such possibilities that the higher grades of intelligence can be secured for household employment.  As the plan of separate clubs for household employees will probably come first in the suburbs, where the difficulty of securing and holding “servants” under the present system is most keenly felt, so the plan of buying cooked food from an outside kitchen, and of having more and more of the household product relegated to the factory, will probably come from the comparatively poor people in the city, who feel most keenly the pressure of the present system.  They already consume a much larger proportion of canned goods and bakers’ wares and “prepared meats” than the more prosperous people do, because they cannot command the skill nor the time for the more tedious preparation of the raw material.  The writer has seen a tenement-house mother pass by a basket of green peas at the door of a local grocery store, to purchase a tin of canned peas, because they could be easily prepared for supper and “the children liked the tinny taste.”

It is comparatively easy for an employer to manage her household industry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress.  The difficulties really begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or, worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set of utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly insupportable on rainy washing-days in winter.  Such a woman, rather than the prosperous housekeeper, uses factory products, and thus no high standard of quality is established.

The problem of domestic service, which has long been discussed in the United States and England, is now coming to prominence in France.  As a well-known economist has recently pointed out, the large defection in the ranks of domestics is there regarded as a sign of revolt against an “unconscious slavery,” while English and American writers appeal to the statistics which point to the absorption of an enormous number of the class from which servants were formerly recruited into factory employments, and urge, as the natural solution, that more of the products used in households