These are the facts that are constantly urged upon the army of under-paid, half-starving needlewomen in our great cities, and no less upon another army of girls in shops and factories, who are implored to consider the advantages of domestic service and to give up their unnecessary battle with the limitations hedging in every other form of labor. Astonishment that the girls prefer the factory and shop is unending, nor is it regarded as possible that substantial reason may and must exist for such choice. As a means of arriving at some solution of the problem, some six hundred employees of every order were interviewed, under circumstances which made their replies perfectly free and full; and the results tallied exactly with others obtained by an inquiry in the Philadelphia Working-Woman's Guild, a society then representing seventy-two distinct occupations. A report of this inquiry was made by Mrs. Eliza S. Turner, the President of the Guild, and is given as the most suggestive view of the whole subject yet secured. She writes as follows:-- "Why do not intelligent, refined girls more frequently choose house service as a support?" The replies here given are as nearly as possible _verbatim_: 1. Loss of freedom. This is as dear to women as to men, although we don't get so much of it. The day of a saleswoman or a factory hand may be long, but when it is done she is her own mistress; but in service, except when she is actually out of the house, she has no hour, no minute, when her soul is her own. 2. Hurts to self-respect. One thing that makes housework unpleasant--chamber-work, for instance, and waiting on table--is that it is a kind of personal service, one human being waiting on another. The very thing you would do without a thought in your own home for your own family seems menial when it is demanded by a stranger. 3. The very words, "service" and "servant," are hateful. It is all well enough to talk about service being divine, but that is not the way the world looks at it. 4. Say that a young woman well brought up undertakes to do chamber-work; she is obliged to associate with the other girls, no matter how uncongenial they may be, what may be their language or personal habits or table manners. If she tries to keep to herself, the rest think she is taking airs, and combine to make her life unbearable. 5. Or say she takes a place for general housework; to be alone in the midst of others is crushing,--quite different from being alone in one's own lodgings. 6. I suppose a soldier doesn't mind being ordered around by his captain; but in a family the mistress and maid are so mixed up that it is much harder to keep the lines from tangling. It takes a very superior person, on both sides, to do it.