In comparing the advantages and disadvantages of domestic service as an occupation it will be obvious that the advantages are numerous, substantial, and easily recognized; the disadvantages are many, but they are far more subtile, intangible, and far reaching. The advantages are those which the economic woman always sees and which take her from unhealthy tenement houses into country air and sunshine; from overcrowded occupations into one where the demand for workers is and always must be unlimited; from starvation wages to peace and plenty; from long hours of dreary mechanical toil to intelligent work; from failure in an uncongenial occupation to success and prosperity in this; from a life whose sufferings and privations, as yet but half told, have roused the sympathies of all social reformers, to a life of freedom from the sweater, the floor-walker, the officious and vulgar superintendent, the industrial Shylocks of every occupation, to a life of comparative ease and comfort. But while the economic woman, like the economic man, always sees these things, the actual woman looks at another side. She does not understand why work that society calls the most honorable a woman can do when done in her own home without remuneration, becomes demeaning when done in the house of another for a fixed compensation, but she recognizes the fact; she sees that discredit comes not from the work itself but from the conditions under which it is performed, and she does not willingly place herself in these conditions; she sees that a class line is always drawn as in no other occupation; she is willing and glad to pay her life for what seems to her _life_—excitement, city ways, society of home friends, personal independence which another might call slavery. She does not care for those advantages which another person points out; to her they count as nothing in comparison with the price she must pay for them. Of five hundred and forty employees of whom the question was asked, “Would you give up housework if you could find another occupation that would pay you as well?” one-half answered, “Yes.” Yet the number is very small of those who complain of ill-treatment or lack of consideration on the part of the employer. There is, indeed, often much ground for complaint on this score, but it must be seen that other relationships besides the personal ones are entered into when the relation of employer and employee is established. That which decides the question is not always the economic advantage, not always the personal treatment, but that subtile thing the woman calls _life_. “Wages, hours, health, and morals” may all weigh in the scale in favor of domestic service, but _life_ outweighs them all. The advantages are such as lead many people to urge domestic service for the daughters of others, the disadvantages are such as incline them to choose any occupation but this for their own daughters.[281] CHAPTER X DOUBTFUL REMEDIES