Another curious anomaly is that domestic servants are becoming fewer in proportion to the population, although the level of their wages is very high in comparison with the usual payments for women's work. Between 1881 and 1901 female indoor servants increased from 1,230,406 to 1,330,783, an increase of 8.2 per cent., while the population increased 25.2 per cent. Actually, then, there was a smaller proportion of the population engaged in domestic service in 1901 then in 1881.[77] What is still more remarkable is that at the younger ages the number has actually decreased. Between the ages 15-20, there is a decrease of 7.3 per cent., while in the number of females living at those ages there is an increase of 28.1 per cent. This suggests that the difficulty of finding servants will intensify as time goes on, as is indeed borne out by observation. Other women's industries are growing very rapidly. The number of female clerks more than trebled between 1891 and 1901. In the same period, female elementary school teachers increased by over 50 per cent., and the women engaged in hospital and institution service and in workhouses and workhouse infirmaries by 41 per cent. These facts indicate that domestic service is becoming less and less popular and is losing ground, while other women's industries are gaining. It is our duty then to consider the causes of this state of things, which cannot be regarded with equanimity. Our steadily increasing wealth ought to make it more and more possible and desirable for more women to specialise in those basic industries of cooking and cleaning, which are of the utmost importance for the right ordering of life. The question must be treated in reference to the general industrial and social changes of our time. Many ladies, knowing nothing of economics, discuss the matter as one of personal relations only, and when they find themselves annoyed with one incompetent servant after another, content themselves with blaming the servants as individuals without inquiring whether the difficulty has any deeper root. Or they take up a reactionary attitude, and declare that the lower classes are over-educated and too well off, and are in consequence refusing to perform their natural duties. But neither personal blame nor the semi-feudal belief that the one and only rightful destiny of daughters of bricklayers, coal miners, or small clerks is to become cooks or housemaids in the service of their betters will avail to throw any light on the difficulty of obtaining competent domestic workers. We must study carefully and without bias the conditions of that industry as compared with other industries, in order to solve the problem.