This great department of national activity is generally (though by no means universally) in a poorer estate to-day than ever before in the history of the country; that is, tested by the ideals of labor toward which we are supposed to be working, it shows less progress.
Instead of being dignified, it has been demeaned.

No other honest work in the country so belittles a woman socially as housework performed for money.

It is the only field of labor which has scarcely felt the touch of the modern labor movement; the only one where the hours, conditions, and wages are not being attacked generally; the only one in which there is no organization or standardization, no training, no regular road of progress.

It is the only field of labor in which there seems to be a general tendency to abandon the democratic notion and return frankly to the standards of the aristocratic regime.

The multiplication of livery, the tipping system, the terms of address, all show an increasing imitation of the old world's methods.