Household industry we must constantly remember never rises to the level of a regular trade. It is service--not "skilled labour." What is done there is done under no broad light of public improvement, but is merely catering to the personal tastes and habits, whims and fancies of one family. The lady of the house is by no means a captain of industry. She is not a trainer and governor of able subordinates, like the mate of a ship or the manager of a hotel. Her position is not one of power, but of helplessness. She has to be done for and waited on. Whatever maternal instinct may achieve at first hand in the woman-who-does-her-own-work, it does _not_ make competent instructors. When the lady of the house's husband gets rich enough she hires a house-keeper to engage, discharge, train, and manage the housemaids.
Here and there we do find an efficient lady of the house who can do wonders even with this stream of transient incapacity, but the prominence of the servant-question proves her rarity. If all ladies of houses could bring order out of such chaos, could meet constant needs by transient means, the subtleties of refined tastes by the inefficiencies of unskilled labour, then nothing more need be said. But the thing cannot be done. The average house-mistress is not a servant-charmer and the average housemaid is _necessarily incapable_. This is what should be squarely faced and acknowledged. The kind of work that needs to be done to keep a modern home healthy, comfortable, and refined, cannot be done--can never be done--by this office-boy grade of labour. Because home industry is home industry, because it has been left aborted in the darkness of private life while other industries have grown so broad and high in the light of public life, we have utterly failed to recognise its true value.
These industries, so long neglected and misused, are of supreme importance. The two main ones--the preparation of food and the care of children--can hardly be over-estimated in value to the race. On the one the health of the world mainly depends, yes, its very life. On the other the progress of the world depends, and that is more than life. That these two great social functions should be left contentedly to the hands of _absolutely the lowest grade of labour in our civilisation_ is astounding. It is the lowest grade of labour not because it is performed by the lowest class of labour--humanity can grow to splendid heights from that beginning, and does so every day; but it is the lowest because it is carried on in the home.