To Popularise Domestic Service.

So to make domestic service popular we must make it fashionable. It should be as fashionable to be a domestic servant as to become a hospital nurse.

Alter the conditions of domestic service until the profession of domestic worker attracts the educated woman, and the problem is solved.

III

Study the psychology of the question, find out what it is young women want of life. Be progressive. Do not say, "Because it was, it ever shall be." Thank God, things do not stay as they were, or we might still be working little children eighteen hours a day in factories, starving and whipping lunatics, and burning witches.

Having realised that it is the human attitude which is of first importance, then let us go on to see by what means we can lighten the work of our households so that we may make service attractive.

We can solve the domestic problem—

1.—By becoming entirely, or partly, our own servants.

2.—By employing outside workers, who should be trained, uniformed, and paid at a fixed rate per hour.

3.—By changing the conditions until domestic service becomes as attractive to the worker as any other profession open to the woman of average ability and education.

Other changes can be made: indeed, it is certain that sooner or later they must be made unless we are to go servantless. When the necessary alteration of mental attitude towards the subject is achieved, the next thing to be done is to call to our aid all the labour-saving devices which are available, for it is by making full use of them that we can eliminate the hard and disagreeable work from houses and make the profession of a domestic worker attractive to an educated woman.

In the industrial world it is now realised that to obtain the best results the worker must be saved all unnecessary fatigue, and that the mental atmosphere in which he works must be as free from strain and anxiety as possible, for it is found that the labour of an over-tired worker becomes practically worthless.

It is time we applied modern methods to the working of our households, in which they are needed as much as in the office or the factory.