One general tendency in all business circles must also be mentioned—that towards increasing publicity in all business matters. It is coming to be recognized that society has the right to know certain general and even specific facts in regard to the conduct of affairs formerly guarded in jealous privacy by the individual. The National Census Bureau requires, for the benefit of society, an answer to a large number of personal questions, and the requirement is resisted only by the most ignorant. The state bureaus of labor have legal authority to obtain information in regard to the management of business enterprises which they wish to investigate. The salaries of all public employees are officially published, and legal inquiry is instituted when the expenses of such employees largely exceed the salary received. The number of joint-stock companies is increasing, and these companies are legally bound to render full and exact accounts of all receipts and expenditures. The Chinese wall of absolute privacy is practically retained only with reference to household occupations. If then the question in domestic service is this: How can the supply of domestic servants be increased, or how can the demand for them be lessened? the only answer must be, by bringing household employments and household service into the current of these and other industrial and social tendencies. To state the case in detail, the problem is not so much how to improve the personal relationship between the employer and the employee as it is to decrease this relationship; not how to increase the number of household drudges, but to decrease the amount of household drudgery; not how to do more for domestics, but how to enable them to do more for themselves; not how to merge the individual home into the co-operative home or boarding house, but how to keep it still more intact by taking out of it as far possible that extraneous element—the domestic employee; not how to restore the old household system, but how to bring about adaptation to present conditions; not so much how to persuade more persons to go into domestic service, as to use to better advantage the time and strength of those already engaged in it; not how to induce sewing women in the tenement houses of New York City to engage in work for which they have neither the physical nor the intellectual qualifications,[292] but how to utilize the idle labor in boarding houses and in the homes of the so-called middle and upper classes.