The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 | Page 2

and therefore can have no full and satisfying sense of home--that many mistresses go so far as to claim the regulation of her dress--that even in mature age and by the kindest employers she is treated more as a child to be taken care of than as a responsible, grown-up woman, able to think and judge for herself. These are substantial drawbacks to the lot of the pampered menial.... These complaints of the readiness of servants to leave their places are based on the assumption that they are under obligations to their employers. In many cases, no doubt, they are, though probably least so where gratitude is most expected. But, at any rate, employers are also under obligations to them. When one thinks of all servants do for us, and how little, comparatively, we do for them, it appears that the demand for gratitude might come more appropriately from the other side. It is an old saying that we value in others the virtues which are convenient to ourselves, and this is curiously illustrated in the popular ideal of a good servant. In the master's estimate besides the indispensable physical qualification of vigorous health--diligence, punctuality, cleverness, readiness to oblige, and rigid honesty, of a certain sort, are essentials.'
We would look long through our laundries and kitchens for the 'hardworked, underfed scrub' of the above extract; and the 'servant who has not from week to week, and month to month, a moment that she can call her own, a single hour of the day or night, of which she can say, This is mine,' etc., does not belong to so numerous a class that her sorrows in this respect invoke commiseration in the public journals. But great as is the difference still between English and American servants, as indicated by the above extract, the former are in a steadily 'progressive' state, and every year brings them nearer in their condition to the happy--and, fortunately for the rest of mankind, as yet anomalous--state of American domesticdom. An article in the London Saturday Review thus comments upon this progress:
'It seems to be too generally forgotten that servants are a part of the social system, and that, as the social system changes, the servants change with it. In the days of our great-grandmothers, the traditions of the patriarchal principle and the subtile influences of feudalism had not died out. 'Servitude' had scarcely lost its etymological significance, and there was something at least of the best elements of slavery in the mutual relation of master and servant. There was an identification of interests; wages were small; hiring for a year under penal obligations was the rule of domestic service; and facilities for changing situations were rare and legally abridged. It was as in married life; as the parties to the contract were bound to make the best of each other, they did make the best of each other. Servants served well, because it was their interest to do so; masters ruled well and considerately, for the same practical reason. Add to this that the class of hirers was relatively small, while the class of hired and the opportunities of choice were relatively large. These conditions are now reversed. As education has advanced, the social condition of the class from which servants are taken has been elevated, and it is thought to be something of a degradation to serve at all. 'I am a servant, not a slave,' is the form in which Mary Jane asserts her independence; and she is only in a state of transition to the language of her American cousin, who observes, 'I am a help, not a servant.' It is quite true that there are no good servants nowadays, at least none of the old type; and the day is not perhaps so very distant when there will be no servants at all.'
The servant classes of France, Germany, and the other Continental countries, seem to be, to a great extent, free from the faults that beset those of England and America. A recent number of Bell's Weekly Messenger thus discusses this difference:
'The truth is that among the Celtic and Sclavonian families service is felt to be honorable; those engaged in it take it up as a respectable and desirable condition. They are as willing to acknowledge it as the physician, the lawyer, or the clergyman is to admit and be proud of their own. A French female servant, at least away from Paris, wears a dress which marks at once what she is. She is not ashamed of her condition, and nowhere is there such real attachment between servants and their employers as in France. In England, on the other hand, it is difficult to persuade a young girl to accept domestic service; she requires what she imagines to be something