The plan of co-operative housekeeping would, if carried out successfully, undoubtedly remove many of the difficulties of the question of service. But it presents others, some of which are inherent in human nature and therefore not easily or speedily removed. It presupposes that all persons are equally endowed by nature with business instinct, which by cultivation will develop into business success; it overlooks the fact that ninety-five per cent of men do not succeed in business when conducting it independently, and that these are in the employ of the few gifted with executive talent, “one of the rarest of human endowments.” Again, the same difficulty exists as was presented to Louis XVIII. when he attempted to create a new order of nobility after the restoration of the Bourbon line; history tells us that he could find many willing to be dukes and earls but none willing to be anything less. Most persons are willing to co-operate in the management of an association, but modern industry, Nicholas Payne Gilman has well said, “takes on more and more the character of a civilized warfare in which regiments of brigadier-generals are quite out of place.” Co-operation also requires for its success certain positive characteristics. It implies an ability to subordinate the individual to the general welfare, to sacrifice present comfort to future good, to decide whether an act is right or wrong by making it general, to put all questions on an impersonal basis. The principles on which the family is organized and the conditions surrounding the housekeeper make these necessary qualifications peculiarly hard to attain. Ideal co-operative housekeeping implies ideal co-operators, and these it will be difficult to find before the majority of the employers have more business training and more unselfishness than are now found. All the arguments that prevail against co-operation in ordinary business enterprises must prevail against the system in household management. “All that is needed is the proper person to take the charge,” it is often explained. But it is at this very point that the theory breaks down. If the competent manager is secured, the plan ceases to be co-operative housekeeping. But the competent manager is the most difficult person in the world to find. “The man we want to manage our farm has a farm of his own,” said a city lawyer of the old family homestead; the same principle holds in the household. It must be said too that neither productive nor distributive co-operation has yet proved an unqualified success in other industries where the difficulties to be encountered are far less than in the case of that most complicated of organisms—the modern household. A larger number of successful experiments in co-operation must have been tried in this country in other and simpler fields before co-operative housekeeping can prove a panacea for all the troubles attending domestic service.