employees permanently a part of it, not because those admitted within the family circle are of this particular class, but because they are not of the family. Marriage has been called a process of naturalization—a difficult one when all the conditions are most favorable. The process is infinitely more difficult when an extraneous element is introduced into a family, not as a result of mutual choice, but of a business agreement. A fourth proposition for lessening the difficulties in domestic service is to increase the number of employees by bringing to the North negroes from the South. So seriously has this plan been contemplated that companies have in some places already been formed, and through them colored servants have been sent to different parts of the Eastern states. But this plan assumes that no perplexities exist where colored servants are found, and also that there are no difficulties which a greater supply of domestic employees will not remove. That the former assumption cannot rightly be made is evident from many facts. The anomalous condition is found in at least one Southern city of an organization to assist Northern housekeepers to secure colored servants, and of another to aid Southern housekeepers in obtaining white employees from the North.[282] The examination of a large number of advertisements for “help wanted” shows apparently a preference in many parts of the South for white servants,[283] while the testimony of many employers seems to show that service is at present in a transitional state—the older generation is disappearing, while in the younger generation the same tendencies are found as in other classes of employees.[284] The second assumption, that the question is settled wherever the supply is greater than the demand, also seems unwarranted in the judgment of many.[285] These facts are in no sense to be regarded as an exhaustive presentation of the condition of domestic service at the South; they only indicate that in the opinion of many intelligent employers “the question of negro help is as broad as the negro question itself.” If it has proved such to those who know the negro best, there is little hope that Northern employers would gain more than new and perplexing complications by introducing as domestic servants large numbers of negroes from the South.[286]