Difficult 545 Yes 290 Very difficult 148 At times 72 Rather difficult 20 Generally 15 Not difficult 418 No 328 Not especially 34 Not generally 29 Not lately 13 Very little difficulty 8 Very seldom 6 Not answered 42 ---- Total 1005 Fifty-seven per cent therefore of the housekeepers represented by the schedules have found more or less difficulty in securing good servants. This is, probably, an underestimate of the true condition. Many housekeepers who see only the personal element involved in the employment of service consider an acknowledgment of difficulty a confession of weakness and inability on their own part to cope with the question and are therefore silent. Others have had the experience of one who writes, “I have had no difficulty, my cook having been with me eighteen years, and my second girl, her daughter, ten years. But if they should leave I should not know where to turn.” Again, the replies do not represent the experiences of a class not represented on the schedules—the many in the large cities who are able to employ servants only occasionally and find them through the lowest grade of intelligence offices. These difficulties are certainly not decreasing,[237] and the demand for competent servants is in most places evidently greater than the supply.[238] These difficulties are, at times, somewhat modified by the conditions in which the employer is placed. They are apparently less in large cities that are ports of entry or the termini of leading railroad lines, and have comparatively few manufacturing industries in which women are employed; they are less in small families employing a large number of servants and paying high wages. But even all of these favorable conditions only modify—they do not change—the nature of the question.[239] A careful study of the returned schedules with reference to the location, population, and prevailing industry of the towns, the number of servants employed, size of family, and wages paid leads to this conclusion. Of the five hundred and forty-five employers who reported that they had difficulty in securing competent servants, only twenty-six gave in explanation a reason that would not have been applicable in any city, town, or village in the country, and those twenty-six had reference to the negroes at the South and the Chinese at the West. One half of the employees reporting state that they would go into another occupation provided it would pay them as well,[240] although the number is very small of those who are dissatisfied except with the disadvantages of the position. If these difficulties are found in every place irrespective of its size, its geographical location, its prevailing industry, the