II.
ENUMERATION OF NEGRO DOMESTIC SERVANTS.
Recent Reform in Domestic Service.—Reform in the administration of the household has been called a "belated reform," one that has been so long a time in gaining the ear of intelligent people that it must somehow make up for lost time and gain a little on other reforms before it can hope to come abreast of the progress of the age. In view of the fact that college-bred women in greater numbers are assuming responsibility for the administration of the household, at the same time that reform of domestic service is being agitated, it is natural to think that the one thing partly accounts for the other. It is certainly true that the question is now for the first time being treated scientifically by some of the most intelligent women in the country. The Civic Club of Philadelphia has done honorable pioneer work in attempting to establish a standard of work and wages for domestic servants, and other similar clubs are following in their footsteps. Also, there is beginning to be a literature on the subject, best represented by Charles Booth's Study of Household Service in the eighth volume of his "Life and Labour of the People," and by the admirable work entitled "Domestic Service" by Miss Lucy M. Salmon, Professor of History at Vassar College. In the latter work, which is easily the best authority on this much discussed but little understood subject, the doctrine of survival through adaptation is for the first time applied to the economics of the household. One result has been the conviction that much of the friction in the modern household arises from its lack of adaptation to the civilization of to-day, and will disappear when domestic service gets in line with the march of progress and ceases to try to meet modern needs by the employment of mediæval methods. The higher is dependent on the lower, and as our social reforms deal with the houses and food of the poor for the sake of higher things than mere physical well being, so all our reforms must
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