The statement cannot be made with too great emphasis that no plan can be suggested that will enable a housekeeper whose inefficient employee leaves to-day to secure a better one to-morrow; a complicated social malady of long standing demands time and patience to work a cure or even a relief. Two classes of measures, however, looking towards an improvement in the character of the service can be suggested, the first general, the second specific. It is believed that both classes will conform to the general industrial and social tendencies enumerated. In the first place there must be a truer conception on the part of both men and women of the important place that household employments occupy in the economy of the world. The utter neglect of the subject by economic students and writers must give place to a scientific investigation of an employment which is at least wealth-consuming if not wealth-producing. A very large part of the wealth produced in the world is consumed in the household, yet neither those who produce nor those who consume know on what principles it is done. Time-saving and labor-saving devices are made at enormous cost for uses in production, while time and strength incalculable are wasted through consumption. In no other occupation is there so much waste of labor and capital; in no other would a fraction of this waste be overlooked. It is idle to complain of poor servants and of poor mistresses so long as domestic service is divorced from general labor questions, and employers everywhere are ignorant of the economic laws, principles, and conditions underlying the household. Men and women might better give to the study of domestic service as an occupation the time and energy that now are absorbed in considering the vices and virtues of individual employees. This truer conception of the place of household economics considered from the theoretical standpoint will give rise to a more just estimate of their place in a practical way. Those employers who “despise housekeeping,” who “cannot endure cooking,” who “hate the kitchen,” who “will not do menial work,” will come to regard household work in a different light. Indeed, until the members of this class, far too large in numbers, change either their opinion or their occupation, it is hopeless to look for a reform in domestic service. That “dignity of labor” so often prescribed as a panacea for the troubles in the kitchen must first be maintained in the parlor if reform is to come. The simple prescription of the remedy will not effect a cure. “To know the workman,” wrote Leclaire in 1865, “one must have been a workman himself, and above all _remember it_.” In a similar way the housekeeper must have not only a knowledge of household affairs, but a respect for them, and being presumably better educated and equipped, she must be the one to prove that the interests of employer and employee are the same.