A third difficulty is the fact that employers are so often obliged to engage for skilled labor the assistance of unskilled laborers. Many who seek employment as servants do not know even the names of the household tools they are obliged to use—still less are they acquainted with their uses. A part of this ignorance and lack of skill is due to the prevalence of the old idea that anybody can do everything—a theory abandoned in most occupations but still dominating the household. Household employments and service are still generally considered occupations that any one can “pick up,” but the picking-up process has resulted in the household, as elsewhere, in unscientific, haphazard work and has seldom produced expert workmen. The Superintendent of the Census wrote in 1880, “The organization of domestic service in the United States is so crude that no distinction whatever can be successfully maintained (between the different parts of the service).”[225] In confirmation of this statement is the testimony of a large number of employees to the effect that they have become domestic servants because they had not education enough to do anything else.[226] From this general conception of the nature of household service several things result: first, few opportunities exist for learning household duties in a systematic way; second, if the opportunities were created, few would avail themselves of them so long as this low estimate of the occupation prevails; third, many housekeepers are obliged to conduct in their own households a training-school on a limited scale; fourth, the expense is far greater than it should be, since unskilled labor is always improvident of time and materials;[227] fifth, the hygienic results of “instinctive cookery” and “picked up” knowledge are often seen in ill health and a derangement of household affairs erroneously attributed to other causes. A fourth difficulty arises when the seemingly inevitable annual change of employees comes. Four courses are open to the housekeeper: (1) she may employ a new servant without asking for a recommendation, (2) she may take the recommendation of previous employers, (3) she may consult an employment bureau, (4) she may advertise. Few persons are willing to adopt the first expedient and take a stranger into their service, not to speak of their family life, without some recommendation.[228] But the second course open—taking the recommendation of others—is scarcely more practicable. There must always be a difference in standards, and “excellent” to one may mean “fair” or even “poor” to another. It is also true that an employee may succeed in one place and be ill adapted to meet the requirements of another. Again, it is a common complaint that the recommendation does not always carry with it implicit confidence in its contents. Daniel DeFoe wrote nearly two hundred years ago: