cular is wholly mistaken. Even if the races from
all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens
of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to
even learn how to do good work in those kitchens. The first chance
they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open
field of harvest would take them away. And this is not because the
work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as
elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of
aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will
long accept it. Miss Salmon's ideas, if carried out, would stay the
rapidity of the current away from domestic service. But a quite new
approach to the whole problem must be defined and realized by women of
light and leading if we would have adequate and efficient help In
household work. The fact that most professional or business women find
it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept,
than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the
situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of
most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for
she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take
a place where there were women in the family who could do the
housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them."

The absurd hypocrisy that in one breath praises all work done for the
comfort of the family as the highest form of service and in the next
demands that the family "servant" accept all manner of inherited
insignia of social inferiority must be outgrown. In the city and
suburban towns the hour-service and the various forms of commercial
aids to household tasks may work, as has been before indicated, to
gradually do away with the servant class, in the old sense of those
words and without much social consciousness of the change. In the
small towns and in the rural districts, where is now the most acute
suffering and need of housemothers, there must be a conscious and a
wholesale movement to reinstate domestic service on a plane compatible
with democracy and amenable to high standards of intelligence and
efficiency. When one thinks of the rural need for teachers, for
nurses, for doctors, for kindergartners, for recreation managers, for
community leaders, one is tempted to call for a social conscription
that shall make all graduates from normal and teacher