Two excuses for feeing are given. One, “because every one else does it and one feels contemptible if he doesn’t do it,” an easy, good-natured way of disposing of a serious problem. Comparatively few persons are controlled by general principles; each acts according to what seems most convenient at the time being. The second excuse is that employees in hotels and restaurants and porters in drawing-room and sleeping cars are underpaid. This is undoubtedly true, and _it will remain true as long as the general public frees the class of hotel, restaurant, and boarding-house proprietors, and palace and sleeping car companies, from the responsibility of paying their own assistants_. But the general public also knows that the saleswomen in many large stores work for almost nothing, that street-car conductors and motor men are overworked and underpaid, that school teachers receive but a pittance. The public, however, pursues here a different policy; it puts on “the white list” employers who pay their saleswomen well, it allows street-railway employees to fight out the matter of low wages by strikes or in such other ways as they deem fit, it permits the school teacher to struggle on with a salary of $400 or $500 a year and patronizes a fair held for the benefit of a pension fund. It is difficult to see why this reason for feeing a domestic employee should not hold good in all underpaid employments; that it does not is one reason why those in other occupations do not fall in the social scale. That the public continues to pay directly the employees in this occupation as it does in no other is one explanation of the ill repute it bears among self-respecting wage-earning men and women. Every person has a contempt for another who accepts a fee, and the reproach extends from the individual to every branch of the occupation he represents. No other thing has done more to lower domestic service in the eyes of the public than this most pernicious custom, and every person who fees a domestic employee has by that act done something to degrade what should be an honorable occupation into a menial service.[276] Another phase of the social question is presented by an employer who writes, “There is something wrong when a young girl servant is sent out in the evening to accompany the daughter or perhaps the mistress and return alone.” If protection is the thought, the maid needs it as much as the mistress; if it is in deference to a social custom, the maid must bitterly resent any custom which demands this distinction between herself and those whom she serves. Another aspect of the same question is suggested when it is realized what veritable dens of iniquity are some of the intelligence offices in large cities, and how difficult it often is for a domestic employee to come in contact with them without becoming contaminated by the touch. These are the things that lead many to believe that “the kitchen has become very like a social Botany Bay.”[277]