Italy a land given over to petty industries, and have emphasized in France the tendency to seek official positions, no matter how small the salary involved, rather than embark on individual enterprises involving initiative. Some changes that have come within scarcely more than a hundred years have been peculiar to a single country, most of them have been shared by all, while not a few have affected America as well as Europe. The changes have often been wrought silently, but they have been none the less effective because they have come unnoticed and unrecognized alike by the employer and by the employed in domestic service. On the other hand, domestic service is affected by many external conditions that are apparent to the most casual observer. These often vary in the different countries, and often explain in turn some of the conditions that differentiate domestic service in one European country from that in another, as well as domestic service in Europe as a whole from that in America. One illustration is found in the varying types of domestic architecture which grow out of the varying national ideals of home and of social life. The typical English dwelling, whether it is detached, semi-detached, or one of a series, is complete in itself and cut off from all communication with its neighbors. The huge French apartment house containing half a dozen or a dozen families, without an elevator and dominated by its concierge, has an artery in a common stairway leading from the _loge_ of the concierge to the upper floor occupied by all of the domestics in the building. The small apartment house or detached house of the German is isolated, but it is in close proximity to a garden café. The lofty, cheerless, mediæval palace in which the Italian finds his abode is typical of the hardness of life for those serving and those served. These fundamental differences in the material construction of buildings must have an influence on the question of domestic service. Houses arranged perpendicularly as in England, or horizontally as in France and Germany, or located in the air as in Italy, carry with them their own peculiarities of service and of work. Countries where ice is not freely used, and apartment houses without places for storage, make inevitable the daily marketing and purchasing all supplies in small quantities; the delicatessen shop and the garden café simplify the question of the evening meal in Germany; the elimination of breakfast from the daily meals everywhere on the continent reduces to a minimum that problem in domestic service. The isolation of life in one country, the simplicity of life in another, the entire absence of hospitality in still another, all affect the question, sometimes rendering it more simple, sometimes more complex than in America.