Undoubtedly by a system of co-operative boarding many families could live better, at much less expense, and at a saving of time and certain kinds of friction. But co-operative boarding is to the employer what high wages are to the employee—he is willing to sacrifice something for what seems to him _life_, that is, in this case, the unity, privacy, quiet, and independence of family life. The friction with servants is obviated since the plan includes a housekeeper who is to stand between the co-operators and the employees, but the common interest of desiring freedom from the care of servants and of securing the best board at the lowest rates is not a tie strong enough to bind together those whose interests in other directions are most diverse. Co-operative boarding will do much for the vast army of persons obliged to board, but all such plans should receive their proper designation and not be called co-operative housekeeping. For the great majority of housekeepers who do not care to give up their individual homes, the system proposed will bring no relief. Still a third scheme called co-operative housekeeping is that proposed by Mr. Bellamy.[291] This is a union of co-operative housekeeping and co-operative boarding, with the application to both of certain business principles already recognized in the housekeeping of to-day. In so far as it is a combination of the two plans already discussed, it is open to the same criticisms as are its component parts, while the business principles suggested are the result of the same unconscious, not conscious, co-operation that governs all industries. It must be said, therefore, that all of these various measures of relief proposed to meet the difficulty fail, because, like the golden rule and the admission of the employee into the family life of the employer, they do not touch the economic, educational, and industrial difficulties; or because, like the license, the importation of negro and Chinese labor, the training-school for servants and co-operative housekeeping, they run at right angles to general economic, educational, and industrial progress. The question how to improve the present condition of domestic service is, however, not a hopeless one, but the answer to it must be based on an examination of the historical and economic principles underlying the subject. CHAPTER XI POSSIBLE REMEDIES—GENERAL PRINCIPLES