The practical difficulties in the way of all these schools have been many. The minimum age of admission has been fixed at sixteen, but there has been constant pressure to make exceptions to the rule and take girls under that age. The course has been usually one of three months, but this time is insufficient for the thorough training of immature girls in household duties; yet to extend the course is to decrease the attendance. Those who enter such schools do so, not because those who have attended them have been unusually successful in securing work and retaining good positions, but because sent there by friends, guardians, pastors, or city missionaries. In no instance, so far as known, has a person entered a training-school because she found herself incompetent to fill the position she had taken, or from a desire to perfect herself in any branch of her work. Much has been accomplished through these schools for the individuals attending them; personal habits have been improved, better motives in life given,—everything that has been most admirable in a philanthropic way. But it must be said that they have done little or nothing towards accomplishing the object for which they were established; the effect in elevating domestic service, in increasing the supply of trained servants, in lessening the prevailing ignorance of household affairs, has been infinitesimal. _The training-school for servants is and must be a failure as long as the class for whom it was founded will not voluntarily attend it in any considerable numbers for the sake of the instruction it is primarily intended to give._ They will not attend it because while there is a theoretical demand for such schools on the part of employers there is no practical demand for them. Young women will not spend three months in learning the details of such work when they can receive high wages for doing it without such instruction; not until domestic service loses its distinctive marks of drudgery, menial servitude, and social degradation will the training-school receive any large accession to its numbers. Moreover, public opinion has not yet demanded that every housekeeper should have both a general and a technical knowledge of domestic affairs before she assumes the care of a household. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, and the training-school for employees cannot succeed so long as employers are content with unscientific methods in their own share of the household duties. It is often said that by the establishment of training-schools for nurses what was formerly a trade, held in little repute, has become a profession second only in importance to that of the physician, and that in a similar way the training-school for domestic servants would elevate domestic service. But a vital difference exists in the two cases. Until scarcely more than a generation ago the medical profession could lay little or no claim to being an exact science. Most