This popular discussion, which has assumed so many forms, has been almost exclusively personal in character. A somewhat different aspect of the case is presented when the problem is stated to be “as momentous as that of capital and labor, and as complicated as that of individualism and socialism.” This statement suggests that economic principles are involved, but the question of domestic service has been almost entirely omitted, not without reason, from theoretical, statistical, and historical discussions of economic problems. It has been omitted from theoretical discussions mainly because: (1) the occupation does not involve the investment of a large amount of capital on the part of the individual employer or employee; it therefore seems to be excluded from theoretical discussions of the relations of capital, wages, and labor; (2) no combinations have yet been formed among employers or employees; it is therefore exempt from such speculations as are involved in the consideration of trusts, monopolies, and trade unions; (3) the products of domestic service are more transient than are the results of other forms of labor; this fact must determine somewhat its relative position in economic discussion. Its exclusion, as a rule, from the statistical presentations of the labor question is also not surprising. The various bureaus of labor, both national and state, consider only those subjects for the investigation of which there is a recognized demand. They are the leaders of public opinion in the accumulation of facts, but they are its followers as regards the choice of questions to be studied. Public opinion has not yet demanded a scientific treatise on domestic service, and until it does the bureaus of labor cannot be expected to supply the material for such discussion.[2] Again, it is not surprising that the historical side of the subject has been overlooked, since household employments have been passive recipients, not active participants, in the industrial development of the past century. Yet it must be said that this negative consideration of the subject by theoretical, practical, and historical economists, and the positive treatment accorded it by popular writers, seems an unfair and unscientific disposition to make of an occupation in which by the Census of 1890 one and a half millions of persons are actively engaged,[3] to whom employers pay annually at the lowest rough estimate in cash wages more than $218,000,000,[4] for whose support they pay at the lowest estimate an equal amount,[5] and through whose hands passes so large a part of the finished products of other forms of labor.[6]