Something must be trusted to
servants; and what is thus trusted brings such confusion and waste
and dirt into our house, that the poor woman is constantly
distraught between the disgust of having them and the utter
impossibility of doing without them.

"Now, it has been suggested that we remedy the trouble by paying
higher wages; but I find that for the very highest wages I secure
only the most miserable service; and yet, poor as it is, we are
obliged to put up with it, because there is an amount of work to
be done in our family that is absolutely beyond my wife's
strength.

"I see her health wearing away under these trials, her life made a
burden; I feel no power to help her, and I ask you, Mr. Crowfield,
What are we to do? What is to become of family life in this
country?

"Yours truly,

"A YOUNG FAMILY MAN."

"My friend's letter," said I, "touches upon the very hinge of the
difficulty of domestic life with the present generation.

"The real, vital difficulty, after all, in our American life is, that
our country is so wide, so various, so abounding in the richest fields
of enterprise, that in every direction the cry is of the plenteousness
of the harvest and the fewness of the laborers. In short, there really
are not laborers enough to do the work of the country.

"Since the war has thrown the whole South open to the competition
of free labor, the demand for workers is doubled and trebled.
Manufactories of all sorts are enlarging their borders, increasing
their machinery, and calling for more hands. Every article of
living is demanded with an imperativeness and over an extent of
territory which set at once additional thousands to the task of
production. Instead of being easier to find hands to execute in all
branches of useful labor, it is likely to grow every year more
difficult, as new departments of manufacture and trade divide the
workers. The price of labor, even now higher in this country than
in any other, will rise still higher, and thus complicate still more
the problem of domestic life. Even if a reasonable quota of
intelligent women choose domestic service, the demand will be
increasingly beyond the supply."

"And what have you to say to this," said my wife, "seeing you cannot
stop the prosperity of the country?"

"Simply this,--that communities will be driven to organize, as they
now do in Europe, to lessen the labors of individual families by
having some of th