There is today practically no standard of wages for domestic help. The wages vary in different cities: in fact they vary in a city and a neighboring suburb. One “employment agency” fixes one wage: another settles on a different wage. There is no equitable fairness either to mistress or servant. No one really knows what is fair. The same haphazard system applies to hours of work. Neither employer nor servant knows what constitutes a fair day’s work for a cook or a maid. The whole question should be threshed out and adjusted to a standard just as are other branches of labor. Whether the eight-hour idea can be effectively worked out in the home is a question: more likely we shall have to begin on a ten-hour-day basis and gradually adjust ourselves to an eight-hour schedule with extra pay for extra hours. Employer and helper should know exactly where each stands on both questions of hours and wages. There is no further reason why, gradually, the system of our servants living outside of our homes should not be generally brought into vogue—the same as the working women engaged in all business lines. It is now done in “flats” and “apartments” where there is no room for servants’ quarters, and there is really no reason why the system should not be followed in houses where there is room. This would give a freedom of life to the servant that she does not now have, and which lack of freedom, and hours of her own and a life of her own, is the chief source of objection to domestic service, while the employers’ gain would lie in the fact that our homes could be smaller in proportion to the number of servants for whom we must now have rooms. In other words there seems to be no practical reason, except a blind adherence to custom, why the worker in the home should not be placed on exactly the same basis as the worker in the office, the store or the factory. That this idea is destined to come in the future, and in the near future, admits of no doubt. Of course it will take some time to consider all the phases of the matter that make home service different from office or store service. But we shall never solve the question of domestic service until we first place it on a practical business basis. * * * * * In the library of Clark University the volumes of Charles Booth’s Life and Labor of London are bound under the title A Survey of London. BOOKS THE EVOLUTION OF A COUNTRY COMMUNITY By WARREN H. WILSON. The Pilgrim Press. 221 pp. Price $1.25; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.35.