to assert itself. One person, or a number of isolated persons, however
conscientious, cannot perform this office of public opinion. Certain
hospitals in London have contributed statistics showing that
seventy-eight per cent of illegitimate children born there are the
children of girls working in households. These girls are certainly not
less virtuous than factory girls, for they come from the same families
and have had the same training, but the girls who remain at home and
work in factories meet their lovers naturally and easily, their fathers
and brothers know the men, and unconsciously exercise a certain
supervision and a certain direction in their choice of companionship.
The household employees living in another part of the city, away from
their natural family and social ties, depend upon chance for the lovers
whom they meet. The lover may be the young man who delivers for the
butcher or grocer, or the solitary friend, who follows the girl from her
own part of town and pursues unfairly the advantage which her social
loneliness and isolation afford him. There is no available public
opinion nor any standard of convention which the girl can apply to her
own situation.

It would be easy to point out many inconveniences arising from the fact
that the old economic forms are retained when moral conditions which
befitted them have entirely disappeared, but until employers of domestic
labor become conscious of their narrow code of ethics, and make a
distinct effort to break through the status of mistress and servant,
because it shocks their moral sense, there is no chance of even
beginning a reform.

A fuller social and domestic life among household employees would be
steps toward securing their entrance into the larger industrial
organizations by which the needs of a community are most successfully