at 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 be manufactured in factories, and that
personal service, at least for healthy adults