the position can be sustained that this isolation proves the determining
factor in the situation, then certainly an effort should be made to
remedy this, at least in its domestic and social aspects. To allow
household employees to live with their own families and among their own
friends, as factory employees now do, would be to relegate more
production to industrial centres administered on the factory system, and
to secure shorter hours for that which remains to be done in the
household.

In those cases in which the household employees have no family ties,
doubtless a remedy against social isolation would be the formation of
residence clubs, at least in the suburbs, where the isolation is most
keenly felt. Indeed, the beginnings of these clubs are already seen in
the servants' quarters at the summer hotels. In these residence clubs,
the household employee could have the independent life which only one's
own abiding place can afford. This, of course, presupposes a higher
grade of ability than household employees at present possess; on the
other hand, it is only by offering such possibilities that 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