Such well-known employers like Mr. Debenham and Mr. Derry in London, who have changed from the living-in to the natural system, brush all this cant and vapour away with a healthy breath of fresh air. “The character of some employers,” says the latter, “I would not trust from their own housekeepers. I do not think that drapers are worse than any other commercial men, but all commercial men are the same.” He sees “no difficulty in finding proper apartments outside,” with people “in whom we should have every confidence to put our own children.” “I am quite out of touch with excuses which have been made by employers at conferences I have been at, with regard to the moral side of the question. I think it is sheer nonsense.” The system is sometimes enforced by a system of “fines”: the substitute, in a humanitarian age, for more drastic disciplinary measures of the older servitudes. Fines for smoking or reading in bedrooms, fines for sleeping out without permission or for arriving after locking-up time, fines for taking supper away, for burning candles after the gas is turned out, for heating water on the gas, exhibit the method by which adjustment has to be effected and the smoothness of the communal existence maintained. “The system,” says Miss Bonfield, “robs the assistant, whether men or women, of the sense of personal responsibility which is developed by ordering and controlling one’s own life. The herding together of large numbers of either sex, restricted as to the most ordinary intercourse with the opposite sex, creates an unnatural and vicious atmosphere which is morally dangerous to both men and women.” She repudiates the idea that there is “any kind of home life, any kind of home consideration”--at least in her personal experience. The dinner-hour she found “the most disagreeable interval of the day.” “In a long business experience I have never yet had a properly made cup of tea.” “The sitting-room of a business house is usually a most dreary place, very much like the waiting-room of a railway station.” In many shops the hours worked are seventy per week: the atmosphere in one experience “particularly vitiated, and the assistants chronically overtired.” The work is peculiarly stimulating to nervous strain: fretful customers, sometimes friendly, sometimes bullying, often merely tiresome--for hour after hour of the day. Even when the catering is excellent, is another experience, the girls “have no appetite for food.” “What they need is fresh air and more outdoor exercise. The factory girl who eats her unscientific meal in the street, does so with a greater relish and with more profit to health than does her sister of the shop extract from the choice meals eaten in the atmosphere of the shop dining-room.” “I have frequently gone to my dinner feeling faint for want of food, and on entering the dining-room have been nauseated to such an extent as to be unable to eat anything except