“One of the great Evils, which lies heavily upon Families now, in this particular Case of taking Servants, is the going about from House to House, to take Characters and Reports of Servants, or by Word of Mouth; and especially among the Ladies this Usage prevails, in which the good Nature and Charity of the Ladies to ungrateful Servants, goes so far beyond their Justice to one another, that an ill Servant is very seldom detected, and the Ladies yet excuse themselves by this, _namely_, that they are loth to take away a poor Servant’s Good Name, which is starving them; and that they may perhaps mend, when they come to another Family, what was amiss before, which indeed seldom happens.... The Ladies are cheating and abusing one another, in Charity to their _Servants_. It is Time to put an End to this unreasonable Good nature.”[229] These words are as true a description of this phase of the subject in America to-day as they were in England at the beginning of the last century. It seems impossible to devise any system of personal recommendations that will convey the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The third expedient—the employment bureau—is apparently coming into general use, especially in the large cities where some means of communication is necessary between those desiring employees and employment. But it is in the large city, where the greatest need for it exists, that the employment bureau is most unsatisfactory. The bureau lives by the fees paid to it by those desiring help and those seeking employment. Every expedient, therefore, is used to extort fees from both classes, and it is difficult to tell which suffers more from this extortion. Even when numberless fees have been paid, the employer too often finds himself without the service to which his fee presumably entitles him. The first department abandoned by a large philanthropic institution in Boston, was the intelligence office, “because it was found impossible to supply well-trained servants while there was no demand for any other.”[230] But the greatest objection to the intelligence office is that it is often a breeding place for vice and crime. An investigation recently made of the intelligence offices in a large city showed that it supported one hundred and twenty, two thirds of them controlled by foreigners, many of them managed by minor ward politicians, and four of them under police supervision. The employees that can be found through such agencies are not those willingly received into a respectable family.[231] Employment bureaus in small cities are apparently more satisfactory than those in large ones, while those offices are to be commended which use printed forms for obtaining statements from previous employers as to the qualifications of applicants.[232] Those agencies patronized by an inferior class of employers and employees, especially