uncomfortable, the family is uncomfortable; but it will not drop her as
all her fellow-workers have been dropped, although the cook herself
insists upon it. So far has this insistence gone that every possible
concession is made to retain her. The writer knows an employer in one of
the suburbs who built a bay at the back of her house so that her cook
might have a pleasant room in which to sleep, and another in which to
receive her friends. This employer naturally felt aggrieved when the
cook refused to stay in her bay. Viewed in an historic light, this
employer might quite as well have added a bay to her house for her
shoemaker, and then deemed him ungrateful because he declined to live in
it.

A listener, attentive to a conversation between two employers of
household labor,--and we certainly all have opportunity to hear such
conversations,--would often discover a tone implying that the employer
was abused and put upon; that she was struggling with the problem
solely because she was thus serving her family and performing her social
duties; that otherwise it would be a great relief to her to abandon the
entire situation, and "never have a servant in her house again." Did she
follow this impulse, she would simply yield to the trend of her times
and accept the present system of production. She would be in line with
the industrial organization of her age. Were she in line ethically, she
would have to believe that the sacredness and beauty of family life do
not consist in the processes of the separate preparation of food, but in
sharing the corporate life of the community, and in making the family
the unit of that life.

The selfishness of a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics,
insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family shall
minister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall be