What, then, are the conditions under which improvement in domestic service is possible?
First of all must come that attitude of mind that is willing to recognize not only the impossibility of separating domestic service from other parts of the household life, but still more the impossibility of separating the economic conditions within the household from the economic conditions without, a willingness to give up a priori reasoning in regard to domestic employments and to study the historical and economic development of the household. All superficial treatment of the question must fail of securing the desired results, and all treatment must be superficial that does not rest on the solid basis of economic history and theory.
Granted, then, the existence of economic conditions in the household, the method of procedure is the same as in all other fields of action. In medicine the first step is to diagnose the case; in law, to take evidence; in mathematics, to state the problem; in science, to marshal the facts. No set of a priori principles can be assumed in the household with the expectation that the household will conform to them. Investigation to-day stands at the door of every entrance into a new field and bars the way to any attempt to force a passage without its aid. The household has been slow to accept the inexorable fact that it must demolish its Chinese wall of exclusion and throw open its facts to investigation, but this is the inevitable end.
Next to the household, the most conservative element in society is the school. Yet the school is already yielding to the spirit of the times. It has been pointed out in a recent number of the “Atlantic Monthly”[13] that the profession of teaching, starting with a definite and final code of principles of education, has clung tenaciously to it, and it is but to-day that the occupation is realizing that it can make progress only as progress is made in other fields, and that is through scientific investigation; only to-day is it coming to appreciate that all conclusions to be valid must be based on facts. Every occupation has passed through the same experience and the law of progress that governs all development will work itself out in the household. Minds open to conviction and trained to scientific investigation are the prerequisites for an improved condition in domestic service.
Is it said that this discussion of the subject has dealt only with its economic phases and has ignored the ethical side? Alas, life is everywhere one long protest against a varying standard of ethics. Shall we separate the ethics of household service from the ethics of the shop, the ethics of the factory, the ethics of the professions? Shall we be governed by one code in the family, by another code in the church, by a third code in the school, and a fourth code in the state? Is the subject of ethics to be divided and pigeon-holed in compartments labeled “ethics for domestic service,” “ethics for skilled labor,” “ethics for unskilled labor,” “ethics for employers,” and “ethics for employees?” Who shall separate any question in economics, nay more, any question in life from its ethical phases? Who shall declare that the ethical code for one is not the ethical code for all?
It is said that every book is but the elaboration of a single idea. In a similar way all discussion of domestic service must have its beginning and its end with the idea that no improvement is possible that is not inaugurated by that class in society that sees most clearly the economic as well as the ethical elements involved in it, and that work by the slow methods of careful, patient investigation is the only way by which its difficulties, all too evident, may be lessened, not for ourselves but for those who shall come after us.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Works of Swift, XI, 365-441.
[12] Cited from Remarks on the Life and Writings of Swift, p. 179, in Works of Swift, XI, 365.