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 the present domestic tasks done out of the house.

"In France, for example, no house-keeper counts either washing, ironing,
or bread-making as part of her domestic cares. All the family washing
goes out