The difficulties attending domestic service are so many and so pressing that a large number of measures intended to meet them have been proposed, all of them as varied as the personalities of those dealing with the problem. This difference of opinion in regard to the best methods of meeting the question is largely due to the fact that, not domestic service as an occupation, but domestic servants as individuals have been considered. It has also come from the fact that while the feudal castle of the Middle Ages has shrunk to the city apartment, the attempt is made to preserve intact the customs that had their origin in mediævalism and ought to have died with it, overlooking the fact that every other occupation has made at least some slight concession to economic progress. Moreover, it must be said that the purely ethical phases of the subject have been the ones most often kept in mind in discussing measures of relief. This ethical side of the question is indeed important, but it is largely based on the assumption that the relation between employer and employee is a purely personal one. Since the discussion of the question up to this point has been based on a different theory, namely, that other relations besides the personal ones are established when that of employer and employee is assumed, and that domestic service has been and is affected by political, economic, industrial, social, and educational questions, the present discussion of possible and impossible remedies in domestic service cannot take into consideration the purely ethical questions involved in the subject, but must deal with its other aspects.
Before attempting to answer the question of what can and what cannot be done, a few general principles deduced from the consideration of the subject up to this point must be indicated. First, since the evils are many and complicated no panacea can be found. The patent medicine that cures every physical ailment from consumption to chilblains is disappearing before the scientific studies of the day; it is quite as little to be recommended for economic and social maladies. Second, the remedy applied must have some relation to the nature of the disease. A sprained wrist will not yield to the treatment for dyspepsia, nor can rheumatism and deafness be cured by the same brown pills. The principle does not differ if moral remedies are administered for educational diseases and economic maladies are expected to succumb to social tonics. Third, reform in domestic service must be accomplished along the same general economic lines as are reforms in other great departments of labor—not at right angles to general industrial progress. Fourth, reform in domestic service must be the result of evolution from present conditions and tendencies—not a special creation. Fifth, no reform can be instituted which will remove to-morrow all difficulties that exist to-day. Domestic service cannot reach at a bound the goal towards which other forms of labor have been moving with halting steps.
These principles are simple and will perhaps be generally accepted. A few of the measures often suggested as affording means of relief may be tested by them.
It is the opinion of a very large class that all difficulties can be removed by the application of the golden rule. No belief is more widespread than this. But it rests wholly on the assumption that the relation between employer and employee is a personal one, and presupposes that if this personal relationship could be made an ideal one the question would settle itself. In so far as the connection between mistress and maid is a personal one, the golden rule is sufficient, but other factors are involved in the problem. The golden rule may be ever so perfectly observed, but that fact does not eliminate the competition of other industries where the golden rule may be observed with equal conscientiousness, nor does it remove the distasteful competition of American born employees with foreigners and negroes; it does not overcome the preference for city life or the love of personal independence; it is not always able to substitute intelligence, capability, interest, and economy for ignorance, inefficiency, indifference, and waste; the observance of the golden rule by the employer is not a guarantee that it will always be followed by the employee. For moral difficulties, moral remedies must be applied, but they will not always operate where the maladies are in their nature economic, social, and educational. The golden rule is a poultice that will relieve an inflammation but will not remove the cause of the evil—a tonic that will invigorate the system but which cannot be substituted for surgical treatment.
Another class of persons believes that the application of intelligence as well as of ethical principles is what is required of the employer. This position is best expressed by the correspondent of a leading journal who says: “The capable housekeeper is quite satisfied with the performance of her own domestic duties. If a true woman performs her whole duty, that which lies within her sphere of action, this everlasting cry of reform in domestic service would cease and in its place there would rise a more satisfied race of human beings.” But intelligence, capability, and the observance of all ethical principles must, like the golden rule, encounter the question of free Sundays and evenings after six o’clock, as well as that of the regularity of working hours and the possibility of promotion found in other occupations. No system ever has been or ever can be found that will enable a housekeeper to conduct a household satisfactorily on the instinct or the inspiration theory, to substitute sentiment for educated intelligence and for a knowledge of economic conditions outside of the individual home. The ostrich is said to cover its head in the sand and imagine that it is safe from capture; as well may the individual employer say, “I have settled the question for myself; it is sufficient and I am satisfied.”
A third suggestion in harmony with the two preceding is to receive the employee into the family of the employer, giving her all of the family privileges, including a seat at the table. This plan finds many advocates among intelligent, conscientious employers who are earnestly trying to find a way out of present troubles. But there are several objections to it. One is the fact that such a policy is a distinct deviation from all economic tendencies of the century. A hundred years ago under the domestic system of manufactures the masterworkman received his apprentices into his family, and no other arrangement seemed possible. The factory system has revolutionized this manner of life, and a return to it in manufacturing industries would be as impossible as a restoration of the feudal system itself. The attempt to return to what was once a common custom in many parts of the North is an attempt to restore the patriarchal relationship between employer and employee in a generation which looks with disfavor on paternalism in other forms of labor. Another objection to the plan is its inherent impossibility. John Stuart Mill could conceive of another world where two and two do not make four, but it must in this world be at present an impossibility to conceive of a family in which the idea of unity is not an essential feature. The very foundation of a family is its integrity. Four plus one half can never equal five, and no one can ever be more than a fraction in any family into which he has not been born, married, or legally adopted. The family circle cannot be squared, and if it could be, the curve of beauty would be lost. Moreover, even if the plan could be carried out, it would not meet the needs of the majority of employees or of those who would become such if the conditions of service were more favorable. What domestics as a class desire is the opportunity of living their own lives in their own way. This is what other occupations offer to a greater degree than does domestic service, and it is one reason for the preference for them. The desire is not always on the part of the employees for the same friends, the same amusements, the same privileges, the same opportunities, the same interests, as those of their employers, but it is to have such friends, such amusements, such privileges, such opportunities, such interests, as they personally crave. Even what would be in themselves the greatest advantages often cease to be such when the element of personal choice in regard to them is removed. Still another objection is the failure of the plan to subserve the best interests of the employer, even granting that it is best for the employee. It grows out of the nature of the family, as previously suggested. Comparatively few persons are willing, except as a business necessity, to open their homes even temporarily to those compelled to board. The privacy of home life is destroyed to even a greater extent by the attempt to make household employees permanently a part of it, not because those admitted within the family circle are of this particular class, but because they are not of the family. Marriage has been called a process of naturalization—a difficult one when all the conditions are most favorable. The process is infinitely more difficult when an extraneous element is introduced into a family, not as a result of mutual choice, but of a business agreement.
A fourth proposition for lessening the difficulties in domestic service is to increase the number of employees by bringing to the North negroes from the South. So seriously has this plan been contemplated that companies have in some places already been formed, and through them colored servants have been sent to different parts of the Eastern states. But this plan assumes that no perplexities exist where colored servants are found, and also that there are no difficulties which a greater supply of domestic employees will not remove. That the former assumption cannot rightly be made is evident from many facts. The anomalous condition is found in at least one Southern city of an organization to assist Northern housekeepers to secure colored servants, and of another to aid Southern housekeepers in obtaining white employees from the North.[282] The examination of a large number of advertisements for “help wanted” shows apparently a preference in many parts of the South for white servants,[283] while the testimony of many employers seems to show that service is at present in a transitional state—the older generation is disappearing, while in the younger generation the same tendencies are found as in other classes of employees.[284] The second assumption, that the question is settled wherever the supply is greater than the demand, also seems unwarranted in the judgment of many.[285] These facts are in no sense to be regarded as an exhaustive presentation of the condition of domestic service at the South; they only indicate that in the opinion of many intelligent employers “the question of negro help is as broad as the negro question itself.” If it has proved such to those who know the negro best, there is little hope that Northern employers would gain more than new and perplexing complications by introducing as domestic servants large numbers of negroes from the South.[286]
Another suggestion of the same character is the importation of Chinese servants. While much has been said of the superiority of the Chinese as household employees,[287] and not a few housekeepers would be glad to see the restriction act repealed,[288] difficulties other than the present legislative and political ones stand in the way of adopting this policy. The Chinese, as well as the negroes, occupy in this country a social position inferior to that of Americans or Europeans. Gresham’s law may perhaps be applied to domestic service and the principle stated that superior and inferior labor cannot exist side by side—the inferior must drive out the superior. Unless employees of the lower social grade can be imported in such numbers as to meet every call for domestic servants, there must exist, as now, the discrepancy between supply and demand. The old struggle between free labor and slave labor must be repeated in miniature wherever the social chasm exists between two classes of laborers. The introduction to any considerable extent of Chinese servants would drive out European labor as that has in a measure driven out native born American service.
As a means of promoting a better adjustment of the business relations between employer and employee, it is sometimes proposed that licenses should be granted domestic employees by municipal corporations. This plan, however, would be a violation of the principles underlying the granting of such licenses. A municipal body is not justified in granting a license to any employment or industry unless such occupation is objectionable in itself as entailing expense, or danger of expense on the part of the taxpayers, as the sale of intoxicating liquors; or unless it involves special use by non-taxpayers of city improvements made at the expense of the taxpayers, as in the case of cabmen; or unless it brings into competition with tax-paying industries trades which contribute nothing to the general treasury, as is true of travelling peddlers; or unless it brings special danger, as of fire in the case of theatrical companies. The license is a tax imposed in return for special risks incurred or privileges granted. Domestic service comes under none of these principles, and to place it under the care of municipal authorities as is not done with other occupations of its class would be to degrade it in an unjustifiable way. The license, when granted in accordance with a principle, is not more objectionable than an ordinary tax; if granted without principle, it becomes an obnoxious and tyrannical measure.
The system of German service books has been widely advocated as an efficient means of securing reliable testimony as to the character and capabilities of employees, thus removing one of the most serious of present difficulties. But even in Germany, where obedience is man’s first law, as order is heaven’s first law in other parts of the world, it is impossible to obtain service books that do not need to be supplemented by personal inquiries. The service book is of value in weeding out the most inefficient employees, but it can do little more. As in any other form of recommendation, the employer wishes to say the best possible thing for a servant that he may not injure his prospects of obtaining another place. Moreover, the law compels every employer to believe an employee innocent until he is proved guilty. The employer must state that the servant is honest unless he has proof positive to the contrary. He is not permitted to say that he is suspicious, or even to leave out the word “honest.” The policy is a necessary protection to the weaker class, but it must vitiate somewhat the absolute reliability of the testimonials given. The German service book has a place where all occupations are permeated by government control, but it cannot be introduced into America. We must work out our own system of improvement in household service as we have worked out our own political system.
Other measures have been suggested that call for only a passing notice. It is often proposed to call together a convention of housekeepers to discuss the subject. But the mass must be disintegrated before anything can be accomplished, and moreover the difficulty of calling together such a convention and of securing through it any permanent results is the same as is found in political circles in attempting to organize a citizens’ party.
Other housekeepers seriously advocate abolishing the public schools above the primary grade on the ground that girls are educated above their station, and they follow the plan of one who says, “I do not engage women who have been beyond the third reader and the multiplication table.” The quality of service obtained by such a policy is indicated by the remark of the father of a remarkably stupid girl, “She ain’t good for much; I guess she’ll have to live out.” No statement can be more fallacious than that girls are educated above their station. There can be no so-called “station” in a democratic country. We have given the reins to our democratic views politically, and we must abide by the industrial and social results.
Still other housekeepers advocate the introduction of housework into all the public schools, and thus securing well-informed “help.” But both this proposition and its converse overlook the fact that it is the function of the public school to educate, not to supply information on technical subjects.
In one large city a “Servant Reform Association” has been organized, with an office on a prominent street-corner, and its name conspicuously posted over the door and painted on all the window shades. Its clientele is very large and embraces some of the best-known residents of the city. Among other measures of reforming servants it plans for the establishment of schools to be equipped with every household appliance, and “to have for instructors women who are thoroughly schooled in the various branches of household duties and domestic economy,” but it does not state where such instructors are to be obtained. Nothing shows so clearly how the times are out of joint as does the name of such an association.
The plan most widely advocated and believed to contain the greatest possibilities for improvement in domestic service, is that of establishing training-schools for servants, such schools to have a regular course of study and to grant a diploma on the satisfactory completion of the work. Much can be said in favor of the theory of such schools. If universally established, they would greatly lessen the ignorance and inexperience of the employees—one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of improvement in the service. The diploma would be in effect a license without the objectionable features of the latter, and it would be a testimonial of capability and moral character more reliable than the personal recommendation of previous unknown employers. It would render possible a better gradation of wages, a more perfect organization of domestic work, and more satisfactory business relations between employer and employee. In no occupation is there greater need for systematic training. The army of incompetents in domestic service is not greater than in other occupations, but incompetency here is far more productive than elsewhere of inconvenience and positive suffering. Without such public and regular training every housekeeper is compelled to make a training-school of her own house, and too often she herself lacks the necessary information she ought to impart. But two test questions must be applied to the theory. First, as far as it has been carried out, has it accomplished what was expected of it? Second, is the training-school for servants in harmony with the educational, industrial, and social tendencies of the day?
The demand for such training-schools has been almost universal, and reports of their immediate establishment on a large scale have been repeatedly circulated through the press. One of the most widely spread rumors concerned a movement to be set on foot in connection with the World’s Fair in 1893 for the organization of a national body with branches throughout every state and county in the country, each of these branches to establish a training-school for servants wherever practicable, and another concerned a scarcely less extended work to be begun in Washington. As far as can be learned, however, the number of such schools actually established has been extremely limited, and most of these have been discontinued for lack of success. As far as the results have been concerned, it must be said that, while not a failure, they have been far from commensurate with the efforts expended. In one training-school with accommodations for twenty, where neither labor nor expense had been spared to make it a success, there were when visited but five persons in attendance, and these five were the most unpromising material that could be brought together to train for such service, one being a partial cripple, another very deaf, a third too young to take the responsibility of a general servant, a fourth was deficient in mental capacity, and the fifth was a Swedish girl who attended to learn English. Another school also having accommodations for twenty reported that the number had never been full. The most successful of them all had had, a year or two since, total attendance of about four hundred during its ten years’ existence.
The practical difficulties in the way of all these schools have been many. The minimum age of admission has been fixed at sixteen, but there has been constant pressure to make exceptions to the rule and take girls under that age. The course has been usually one of three months, but this time is insufficient for the thorough training of immature girls in household duties; yet to extend the course is to decrease the attendance. Those who enter such schools do so, not because those who have attended them have been unusually successful in securing work and retaining good positions, but because sent there by friends, guardians, pastors, or city missionaries. In no instance, so far as known, has a person entered a training-school because she found herself incompetent to fill the position she had taken, or from a desire to perfect herself in any branch of her work. Much has been accomplished through these schools for the individuals attending them; personal habits have been improved, better motives in life given,—everything that has been most admirable in a philanthropic way. But it must be said that they have done little or nothing towards accomplishing the object for which they were established; the effect in elevating domestic service, in increasing the supply of trained servants, in lessening the prevailing ignorance of household affairs, has been infinitesimal. The training-school for servants is and must be a failure as long as the class for whom it was founded will not voluntarily attend it in any considerable numbers for the sake of the instruction it is primarily intended to give. They will not attend it because while there is a theoretical demand for such schools on the part of employers there is no practical demand for them. Young women will not spend three months in learning the details of such work when they can receive high wages for doing it without such instruction; not until domestic service loses its distinctive marks of drudgery, menial servitude, and social degradation will the training-school receive any large accession to its numbers. Moreover, public opinion has not yet demanded that every housekeeper should have both a general and a technical knowledge of domestic affairs before she assumes the care of a household. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, and the training-school for employees cannot succeed so long as employers are content with unscientific methods in their own share of the household duties. It is often said that by the establishment of training-schools for nurses what was formerly a trade, held in little repute, has become a profession second only in importance to that of the physician, and that in a similar way the training-school for domestic servants would elevate domestic service. But a vital difference exists in the two cases. Until scarcely more than a generation ago the medical profession could lay little or no claim to being an exact science. Most medical schools were poorly equipped and had a short course of study, while all their processes were largely experimental. But the Civil War and the scientific studies resulting from it have made of surgery an exact science, while rapid strides in biological investigation have gone far towards making other branches of medicine also exact sciences. It has been well said that “educational forces pull from the top, they do not push from the bottom.” It has been the educational forces pulling from the top as a result of increased scientific knowledge among the leaders of the medical profession that have made the training-school for nurses a necessity. Not until similar forces pull from the top in the household through the scientific and economic investigation of the processes carried on there, will a permanent, successful training-school for employees be even a remote possibility.
It must be said also that the training-school for domestic servants must be a failure as long as it is out of harmony with the tendencies in all other fields of education and industry. Technical schools are everywhere springing up, and the demand for them is constantly increasing. But the technical school teaches general and fundamental principles, the wood carver learns drawing, the plumber chemistry, the architect mathematics, and the engineer mechanics. In each trade or profession the first step is the principle underlying it, and the second the practical application of the principle. In the training-school for servants with a three months’ course, the educational idea is and must be totally different. Those attending it are taken without examination, often they have had no previous education whatever, they may be of varying grades of intelligence and capability, and any attempt at classification according to these grades is impossible. Its members must learn how to cook without a knowledge of chemistry and physiology, to care for a room without knowing the principles of ventilation and sanitation, and to arrange a table in ignorance of form and color. The work must be learned by simple mechanical repetition—a method fast disappearing from every department of education.
Again, such a plan is in opposition to present political and social tendencies. A training-school for servants is an anomaly in a democratic country. No father or mother born under the Declaration of Independence will ever send a child to be trained as a servant. A striking illustration of this is found in recent accounts of a new building about to be erected in a large city for the use of a woman’s organization. Those in charge of the organization established a few years since a kitchen garden for the children of the poor. Families recommended by the Charity Organization Society were visited and the attendance of the young daughters of the family solicited. “At first not a few mothers objected on the ground that they did not wish to have their daughters trained to be servants, even if they were poor, but when it was explained that the object of the kitchen garden was to make the children more tidy and useful in their own homes the objection usually disappeared.” Yet in the face of this experience—a common one wherever kitchen gardens have been started—the managers of the organization have provided for the establishment of a training-school for servants.
The opposition to such schools on social grounds is not strange. No recognized industrial aristocracy is possible in America. There are no training-schools for masons, carpenters, day-laborers, or clerks. In the technical school the boy learns masonry, carpentry, and brick-laying, but in these schools there is no division of those attending into “classes for gentlemen” and “classes for laborers.” American men will never recognize one kind of training for a superior social class, and another for an inferior. The training-school for servants means the introduction of a caste system utterly at variance with democratic ideas. It has not been possible at any time since the abolition of slavery to educate any class in society to be servants; it will never again be possible in America. Democracy among men and aristocracy among women cannot exist side by side; friction is as inevitable as it was between free labor and slave labor in the ante-bellum days. Opportunity for scientific training in all household employments must ultimately be given in such a form that any and all persons can obtain it, but it can never be given in a school distinctively intended for the training of servants and called by that name.
Another plan, perhaps less widely but even more earnestly advocated by its supporters, is that of co-operative housekeeping. There has been much looseness of phraseology in referring to this plan, and many experiments have been called co-operative housekeeping which are such in no sense of the word. Co-operative housekeeping, pure and simple, as described by the pioneer in the movement, Mrs. Melusina Fay Peirce,[289] means the association in a stock company of not fewer than twelve or fifteen families. The first step is the opening of a co-operative grocery on the plan adopted by the Rochdale Pioneers, and this to be followed by the opening of a bakery, and later by a kitchen for cooking soups, meats, and vegetables. The next department to be organized is that of sewing, beginning with the establishment of a small dry-goods store, and developing from this the making of underclothes, dresses, cloaks, and bonnets. The last step is to organize a co-operative laundry. The main industries pursued in every house—cooking, sewing, and laundering—are thus to be taken out of the house and carried on at a central point, while the profits on all the retail purchases are ultimately to accrue to the purchasers.
The advantages in the scheme are in the saving of expense in buying, economy in the preparation of all the materials consumed, a division of labor on the part of the co-operators which enables each to follow her own tastes in work, and a removal of all difficulties with the subject of service by making the servants responsible to a corporation, not to individuals. The essential point in the whole plan, and that which justifies the name, is that each housekeeper is to take an active part not only in the management, but also in the actual work of the association, since co-operation ceases to be such if one individual or “manager” is paid for assuming the responsibility of the business.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, Co-operative Housekeeping Association was organized in 1870 with forty shareholders and continued about one year. It approached more nearly than any other experiment that has been made to the ideal of its chief promoter, Mrs. Peirce, but failed in the opinion of its founder for three reasons: because all the shareholders did not patronize the co-operative store; because three departments of work—a bakery, kitchen, and laundry—were begun at the same time instead of being allowed to develop as experience should dictate; and because the whole was given over to the charge of a board of seven directors, one of whom was to be a paid officer and the manager of the entire business. The theory in its realization, therefore, lacked some of the essentials of a true co-operative enterprise, but even in this form it is believed to have been the only experiment that can in any real sense of the word be called co-operative housekeeping.
The plan of co-operative housekeeping would, if carried out successfully, undoubtedly remove many of the difficulties of the question of service. But it presents others, some of which are inherent in human nature and therefore not easily or speedily removed. It presupposes that all persons are equally endowed by nature with business instinct, which by cultivation will develop into business success; it overlooks the fact that ninety-five per cent of men do not succeed in business when conducting it independently, and that these are in the employ of the few gifted with executive talent, “one of the rarest of human endowments.” Again, the same difficulty exists as was presented to Louis XVIII. when he attempted to create a new order of nobility after the restoration of the Bourbon line; history tells us that he could find many willing to be dukes and earls but none willing to be anything less. Most persons are willing to co-operate in the management of an association, but modern industry, Nicholas Payne Gilman has well said, “takes on more and more the character of a civilized warfare in which regiments of brigadier-generals are quite out of place.”
Co-operation also requires for its success certain positive characteristics. It implies an ability to subordinate the individual to the general welfare, to sacrifice present comfort to future good, to decide whether an act is right or wrong by making it general, to put all questions on an impersonal basis. The principles on which the family is organized and the conditions surrounding the housekeeper make these necessary qualifications peculiarly hard to attain. Ideal co-operative housekeeping implies ideal co-operators, and these it will be difficult to find before the majority of the employers have more business training and more unselfishness than are now found.
All the arguments that prevail against co-operation in ordinary business enterprises must prevail against the system in household management. “All that is needed is the proper person to take the charge,” it is often explained. But it is at this very point that the theory breaks down. If the competent manager is secured, the plan ceases to be co-operative housekeeping. But the competent manager is the most difficult person in the world to find. “The man we want to manage our farm has a farm of his own,” said a city lawyer of the old family homestead; the same principle holds in the household. It must be said too that neither productive nor distributive co-operation has yet proved an unqualified success in other industries where the difficulties to be encountered are far less than in the case of that most complicated of organisms—the modern household. A larger number of successful experiments in co-operation must have been tried in this country in other and simpler fields before co-operative housekeeping can prove a panacea for all the troubles attending domestic service.
Certain practical difficulties have also been found. In all experiments in pure or partial co-operative housekeeping it has been found impossible to deliver cooked food hot and invariable in quality at the same hour to all the members of the association. In one city a company was organized as a business enterprise to furnish hot lunches to business men at their offices and also to supply family tables. The prices charged were double those of ordinary table-board, but the expenses were very heavy, no dividends were ever declared, and the object was ultimately changed to that of supplying clubs and private entertainments. That clock-like regularity in the serving of meals, demanded alike by health and business hours, is impossible, unless co-operation is universal, where families in the association reside from five to twenty blocks apart.
But the most insuperable objection to co-operative housekeeping as a remedy for the troubles with servants is the fact that the majority of persons do not wish it. The proposition suggests to many the homely adage of curing the disease by killing the patient. When its friends say in its favor, “Every time an apartment house is built having one common dining-room and one kitchen a blow is aimed at the isolated home,” the great majority of Americans rise up in protest. The semi-co-operative system of living is apparently rendered necessary in New York City by reason of the enormous value of land, but wherever the detached house having light on four sides is possible, as it is everywhere else, the American home-lover will rally to its support. Unless the desire for co-operative housekeeping and co-operative living becomes more general than it is at present, some other means of relief must be sought.
Much, however, of the so-called co-operative housekeeping is in reality co-operative boarding. This is true of “The Roby” experiment tried successfully for a time at Decatur, Illinois.[290] Fifty-four of the leading persons in the city formed a club, adopted a constitution and bylaws, elected officers, and found that through this organization they could “live off the fat of the land for $2.75 per week.” The plan in its essence is an old one; it has been followed for years by college students in institutions that do not provide dormitories. In many college towns it is rendered almost necessary by virtue of the residence there of many persons owning houses who wish to take lodgers but not boarders and of many women without capital who wish to act as housekeepers. But probably few college students consider it an ideal way of living, it is tolerable only at a time of life when new experiences are always welcome, and few have ever been known to continue it beyond college days.
Undoubtedly by a system of co-operative boarding many families could live better, at much less expense, and at a saving of time and certain kinds of friction. But co-operative boarding is to the employer what high wages are to the employee—he is willing to sacrifice something for what seems to him life, that is, in this case, the unity, privacy, quiet, and independence of family life. The friction with servants is obviated since the plan includes a housekeeper who is to stand between the co-operators and the employees, but the common interest of desiring freedom from the care of servants and of securing the best board at the lowest rates is not a tie strong enough to bind together those whose interests in other directions are most diverse. Co-operative boarding will do much for the vast army of persons obliged to board, but all such plans should receive their proper designation and not be called co-operative housekeeping. For the great majority of housekeepers who do not care to give up their individual homes, the system proposed will bring no relief.
Still a third scheme called co-operative housekeeping is that proposed by Mr. Bellamy.[291] This is a union of co-operative housekeeping and co-operative boarding, with the application to both of certain business principles already recognized in the housekeeping of to-day. In so far as it is a combination of the two plans already discussed, it is open to the same criticisms as are its component parts, while the business principles suggested are the result of the same unconscious, not conscious, co-operation that governs all industries.
It must be said, therefore, that all of these various measures of relief proposed to meet the difficulty fail, because, like the golden rule and the admission of the employee into the family life of the employer, they do not touch the economic, educational, and industrial difficulties; or because, like the license, the importation of negro and Chinese labor, the training-school for servants and co-operative housekeeping, they run at right angles to general economic, educational, and industrial progress. The question how to improve the present condition of domestic service is, however, not a hopeless one, but the answer to it must be based on an examination of the historical and economic principles underlying the subject.