Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

days after the cook’s desertion. I need not multiply illustrations of the helplessness of American housewives in the face of such disasters, and the possibility that these may befall any one of us. We have no redress. The women who helped organize the “Protective League” know this. The law does not protect the employer. Public opinion gives her no support. The cook whose fit of temper cost a kind mistress her life was recommended to me within a month after an event that should have shocked the moral sense of every housewife in the community, and recommended by a friend of the murdered woman and of myself. When I exclaimed in surprise, I was told: “We can not be judges of our neighbors’ domestic affairs.” There is no class spirit among us. For some reasons this is a matter of congratulation to us and the public. All that is needed to make the opening gulf between mistresses and maids impassible is organization on our part, which signifies open war. It is, nevertheless, I note in passing, patent that there should be a code of honor among us with regard to employment of those who have proved absolutely untrustworthy in other households. We are not true to one another in this matter, and our employées, who are held together by the unwritten laws of a union, none the less strong because nameless and informal, know this as well as we do. The knowledge is one of the most potent weapons in their armory. Let this pass for the present. I would direct your attention, my sister-worker in the home missionary field, to the brighter side of the vexed question. After forty years’ careful study of this matter of domestic service—study carried on in other lands as well as in our own—I record thankfully my conviction that the domestics in well-regulated American homes are better cared for, better paid and more thoroughly appreciated than any other class of working women in this country or abroad. I record, likewise and confidently, that the proportion of faithful, valued and even belovéd domestics among us