three per cent of employment agencies were found
in business buildings. Chicago made a little better showing, with
nineteen per cent in business houses. The difficulty of properly
regulating a business which is carried on in the privacy of a home is
apparent. When an agency is in a business building it usually has
conspicuous signs, and often the rooms are well equipped with desks,
comfortable chairs, and other office furnishings. But the majority of
agencies are of another description. Those dealing with immigrant girls
are sometimes filthy rooms in some rear tenement, reached through a
saloon or a barber shop facing the street. Often the other tenants of
the building are fortune tellers, palmists, "trance mediums," and like
undesirables.

A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for their
patrons. There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, except
that they are absolutely necessary. Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as they
usually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands of
domestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets.
Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in. Many more are barred
from hotels on account of small means. Often a girl finding it
impossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided by
these lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to return
until morning. She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts.

According to Miss Kellor's report this description of employment
agencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to about
seventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined. For
greater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions in
cities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. The
differences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem is
much the same east and west.

Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like other
workers. Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in a
high-class employment office, while at other times they are obliged to
have recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, and
perhaps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic workers are the nomads of
industry. Their lives are like their work,--impermanent, detached from
others', unobserved.

It is for the housekeepers of America to consider the plain facts
concerning domestic service. Some of the conditions they can change.
Others the