It is apparently a common belief in America that there are no difficulties in domestic service in Europe, as it is an equally common belief in Europe that the difficulties in domestic service are greater in America than in any other country.[333] The judgment in one case is as extreme as it is in the other. It is indeed as unsafe to make a generalization in regard to all the phases of domestic service in Europe as it is to make similar generalizations concerning all sections of America—different countries have their own peculiar problems to meet, and these vary in details as do the problems in different sections of America. Yet a careful examination of the question may lead to the conclusion that the differences in the condition of domestic service in Europe and in America are those of degree rather than those of fundamental principles; that the situation in Europe is modified rather than radically altered by the social and political conditions existing there; that as these conditions in Europe and in America become more alike even these external differences will disappear, and that an ideal form of domestic service exists as yet only in the castles of Spain. Any consideration of domestic service as it is found in Europe to-day must frankly recognize at the outset that the social and political conditions that affect the question result on the one hand from tradition and long-established customs, and on the other from the social and political unrest that was born of the French Revolution. The past and the present, the present and the future, stability and unrest, blind obedience and personal freedom, aristocracy and democracy, have been and are perpetually at war with each other. Every political revolution that has widened the circle of democracy, every industrial movement that has affected large classes of workers, every modification of national ideals of education, every social change that has shifted the relations of classes to each other, every barrier between nations that has been broken down or that has been put up, has changed the problem of domestic service. In England the tendencies towards social aristocracy on the one hand and political democracy on the other, in Germany the trend towards the exaction of military obedience in every walk in life and the counter influences of the social democratic party, in France the deadening hand of bureaucracy and the opposing unrestrained passions of the multitude, in Italy the inherited prejudice against manual labor and the necessity of gaining a livelihood by means of it,—all these forces so diametrically opposed to each other, and so inevitably coming into collision, are but illustrations of conflicting forces that have entered and that must enter into the question. Political, industrial, educational, and social changes have made England a manufacturing nation, have made Germany one denominated by a military spirit and a military régime, have made