The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-07-21

impossibility of hiring the best class of domestics that women are over- nervous and under toned physically There are sixty thousand women in New York City working on semi- starvation wages in shops and facto- ries. Were there schools for the training of domestic help, these women could pass from them into good homes, where they are greatly needed. Americans are willing to pay we'll for good servants; they only grumble that they have to pay high wages for poor service. The general ity of servants employed in our homes would not be tolerated in the same class of homes in England or France, or in the leading continental coun- tries. Dire necessity alone causes them to be endured here.
 It is discredit to our country that we permit such injustice to be further practiced, and the burden of home life to rest so heavily upon the mothers of families. Boycotting one class ot servants will not avail; the tempta- tion of high wages will not answer cooperation will not succeed noth- ing will remedy the evil but the or- ganization of domestic help on a per- manent basis. The plan of hiring on recommendations from the last en- ployer is nothing more or less than an absurdity. Servants rarely stay in a family long enough to get endorse ments of value, and the best of the latter are hardly to be relied upon in the present state of affairs. The fact is that the whole army of domestics is on the march from place to place, seeking no other success than the highest wages for the least amount of labor. The demand for help is so great that the greenest recruits are hired, and the domestic chaos is con- tinued to the injury of all but the en- ployment agents. This class reaps Ia continuous harvest from it's victims, and is an evil and an expense to the community. All that can be said of employment agencies is that they are an additional reason for the training school and it's sequence-a bureau of domestic en- ployment. When this latter is an es- tablished fact, the American people will begin to enjoy the domestic com fort for which they sigh now. Our country is mentioned, in an uncom- plimentary way, in other parts of the world, as the land of hotels, and our women are spoken of as helpless and inefficient, whereas the truth is that the average American woman finds the strain of housekeeping greater than she can endure continuously, if she is rearing children. The medical fraternity is authority for this state- ment, and for the additional one, that the American mother, like the Amer ican child, is martyr to the undisci- plined foreign element in our kitch- ems. No wonder is it that housekeep- CTS are nervous class; they will be an exterminated class if this evil is not removed. There is not social or political question before the people of the United States to-day SO vitally important to the we'll being of the present and future generations, as Ihoo OA uOiiCotAN hClp. Auc way out of the difficulty can be found only in the combination of organization and capital in training schools and em- ployment bureaus, through which latter shall be distributed the gradu- ates of the former. Only by this means can be secured for households orderly government. With the train ing school and the employment bu- reau should be inaugurated the house. holders protective society, the duty of which would be the settlement of contracts for employment, and the points of difference regarding the dis missal of servants; in word, the re- moval of the hap hazard features of the present unbusiness- like methods. When we nationalize servants by edu- eating them for their work, then will American home-life be idolized, and American women will develop along all wholesome and desirable lines, and then, and not until then, will the problem of domestic help be perma- nently solved.-Drake's Magazine.