is affected to such an extent by the variable factors of fees and outside perquisites.[360] It is still more difficult to compute the variations that wages have undergone from a past to the present time.[361] That the cost of domestic service is in many places in excess of what it should be is indicated by the growing custom among certain classes of employers of demanding as their right a percentage of the fees received,[362] and the protests, as yet unavailing, on the part of the public against the exactions of these fees by either employer or employee.[363] It seems not unreasonable to conclude, in view of all the various ways by which wages are augmented, that they are in reality much greater than their face value indicates, and in many parts of the service greatly in advance of wages in other corresponding occupations. The question naturally arises whether the value of the service rendered is commensurate with its cost, but it is a question that must remain unanswered in default of any common standard by which service can be gauged.[364] Figaro has answered the question theoretically in the other question put to Count Almaviva, “Measured by the virtues demanded of a servant, does your excellency know many masters worthy of being valets?”[365] But the wage received sums up as little in Europe as it does in America the subject of domestic service. Even good wages do not altogether compensate for long hours of service,[366] hardness of work[367] and of life,[368] and entire lack of social intercourse. It is undeniable that the social conditions that surround domestic servants in Europe are harder than in America. They are the survivals of the condition of serfdom, as this was in turn the survival of a preëxisting state of slavery.[369] Literature everywhere testifies to the social chasm that has at all times existed between master and slave, master and servant, mistress and maid, and employer and employee, as it also does to the manifold imperfections of both parties to the domestic contract,[370] while on the stage as well as in the daily press it has been the domestic servant who has always been made the butt of jest and ridicule.[371] “Now, as before and during the Revolution,” says M. Salomon, tersely, “it (the occupation) remains under the ban of society; customs are not changed with laws.”[372] It is true that the domestic servant is often apparently unconscious of the existence of this social ban, and that even when he is conscious of it, he acquiesces in it and accepts it as a part of the social order that he cannot and perhaps would not change, yet this unconsciousness of it does not alter the fact of its existence.