Our American domestic service is a loosely woven web, full of snarls and knots.

It is time that the great national principle that government must depend upon the consent of the governed, should be studied and applied to the matter in hand.

We, the wage-payers, are the governed, and without our consent.

The recent attempt to enforce this retroverted law upon a grand scale, in calling a mighty railway corporation to account for the discharge of a dozen or so out of several thousand employes, is no stronger proof of this curious reversal of positions than the demand of my whilom cook that I should set my hand to a lie.
I caught her once in a falsehood so flagrant that I commended the rule of truth-speaking to her moral sense, and asked how she reconciled the sin with her knowledge of what was right.
Her answer was ready: "Oh, there's no sin in a lie that doesn't hurt yer neighbor!" Judged even by this easygoing principle, I should sin in penning the reference without which Katy intimates that she will not withdraw her foot from my house.

She looms before me,--vulgar, determined, irrational and ignorant,--the impersonation of the System under which we cringe and groan.
"What would you do ?" I ask a friend, who is a successful housewife.
She shrugs her shoulders.
"Oh, swim with the tide! Not to give the certificate will be equivalent to boycotting yourself.