The petition of many housewives recently sent to Washington to beg that "the restriction upon immigration now in force may be lifted in the case of women who seek to enter the United States to engage in domestic labor" on the ground of a household need, dire and widespread, is an indication that many women, perhaps most, look forward to a continuance of the present conditions of domestic work but with ever-new sets of domestic workers from other lands.

Their attitude in this particular is wholly mistaken.

Even if the races from all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to even learn how to do good work in those kitchens.

The first chance they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open field of harvest would take them away.

And this is not because the work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will long accept it.