at one's post than to be actively engaged in work.

But on the other hand, there are many housewives who feel that they ought to give their employees more pay for extra work especially when it is connected with the entertaining of friends, and the following ways of rewarding them have been tried with more or less success.

One plan that gained favor with several families was to give ten cents to the cook and ten cents to the waitress every time a guest was invited to a meal: ten cents for each guest. At the end of a month the ten cent pieces had amounted to quite a sum of money.

Another plan that was tried in a small family was to give fifty cents to the cook and fifty cents to each of the two waitresses for every dinner party that took place, regardless of the number of guests. Still another plan was to give at the end of the month, a two dollar, five dollar, or ten dollar bill to an employee who had given many extra hours of satisfactory work to her employer.

All these plans are good in a certain sense, inasmuch as they show that women are awakening to the realization that some compensation is due to household employees for the extra long hours of work frequently unavoidable in family life. But unfortunately these plans lack stability, for they depend altogether upon the generosity and kindness of different employers, instead of upon a just and firmly established business principle.

And now comes the question: What method of payment for overtime will produce a permanently satisfactory result?

The only one that appears just and is applicable to all cases is to pay each employee one and a half times as much per hour for extra work as for regular work. In this way each employee is paid for overtime in just proportion to the value of her regular services. For instance, when a household employee receives $20, $30, or $40 per month, that is to say $5, $7.50, or $10 per week, for working eight hours a day and six days a week, she is receiving approximately 10, 15, or 20 cents per hour for her regular work. By giving her one and one half times as much for extra work, she ought to receive 15, 22-1/2, or 30 cents per hour for every hour she works for her employer after the completion of her regular eight hours' work.

This plan has never failed to bring satisfaction, and it has the advantage of placing the employer and the employee on an equally delightful footing of independence. The performance of extra work is no longer regarded as a matter of obligation on one side, and of concession on the other, but as a purely business transaction.

Some housewives fear that the regular work would be intentionally prolonged beyond all measure if it became an established rule to pay extra for work performed overtime. This could be easily checked, however, by paying extra only for work that was necessitated by unusual events in the family life.

In families where only one employee is kept, naturally the occasions for asking her to work overtime arise more frequently than in families where there are two or more employees, especially if there be small children in the family. Yet these occasions need not come very often, if the housewife bears in mind that even with only one employee, she has eight hours every day at her own disposal; she ought to plan her outside engagements accordingly. Her liberty from household cares during these eight hours can only be gained though by having efficient and trustworthy assistants in her home, and she can never obtain these unless she abandons her old fashioned methods of housekeeping. She must grant to household employees the same rights and privileges given to business employees; she must apply business principles to housework. A great power lies in the hands of the modern housewife, a power as yet only suspected by a few, which, if properly wielded, can raise housework from its present undignified position to the place it ought to occupy, and that is in the foremost rank of manual labor for women.