those that are at no pains to secure recommendation of employees from respectable persons, are worse than useless. Employers who adopt the fourth policy and advertise for help are forced to open an intelligence office on a small scale in their own homes. All of these difficulties are so great, especially that of securing reliable testimony from responsible employers, that many persons tolerate incompetent service rather than incur the risk of a change for the worse. A fifth difficulty encountered by the employers of domestic service, and probably the most serious of all, is the prevailing indifference among housekeepers to the action of economic law—a failure to realize that in domestic service, as in other occupations, the course followed by one employer has an appreciable effect on the condition of service as a whole. This can be best explained by a few concrete illustrations “drawn from life.” Mr. A, an employer, leaves his city home during the summer, retaining in it two servants to care for the house and paying them their usual wages, $16 a month. No special service is required of them, but wages are paid in consideration of the tacit understanding that they are to remain in his employ. On the return of Mr. A, Mr. X, who has discharged his servants during the summer, offers the employees of Mr. A $18 a month. This price he can afford to pay since he has been at no expense for service during the summer. Mr. A, rather than lose his trusted employees, pays them the advance offered by Mr. X, although the services of neither employee are worth more than three months previous. Mrs. B, an employer of limited means, with a natural gift for cooking considered as a fine art, takes an inexperienced girl from Castle Garden and teaches her after long training something of her own skill. She pays fair wages, which are considered entirely satisfactory by the employee in view of the instruction she has received. Mrs. Y, who ignores Mrs. B socially and is indifferent to the matter of wages, calls on Mrs. B’s cook and offers her $5 per week. This is much above the current rate of wages in the place and moreover Mrs. B cannot afford to pay it. She therefore loses her trained cook. Mr. C, an employer in haste to reach his distant home and anxious to secure a servant, engages in the afternoon a Swedish girl who has that morning landed in America and of whom he knows nothing. She is to accompany his family, which includes five children, to their Western home, have all of her expenses of travel paid by her employers, and receive $4.00 a week for her services as a nurse-maid. Mrs. D, a housekeeper with a large family, moderate income, and ambitious tastes, employs one general servant and requires, in addition to the ordinary duties of such a servant, dining-room and chamber service.