A Traveler from Altruria | Page 5

teach school in winter and serve at table in the summer are in a sort of provisional state, waiting for the process of natural selection to determine whether they shall finally be teachers or waiters."
"Yes, it might be stated in some such terms," I assented, though I was not altogether easy in my mind. It seemed to me that I was not quite candid with this most candid spirit. I added: "You know we are a sort of fatalists here in America. We are great believers in the doctrine that it will all come out right in the end."
"Ah, I don't wonder at that," said the Altrurian, "if the process of natural selection works so perfectly among you as you say. But I am afraid I don't understand this matter of your domestic service yet. I believe you said that all honest work is honored in America. Then no social slight attaches to service, I suppose?"
"Well, I can't say that, exactly. The fact is, a certain social slight does attach to service, and that is one reason why I don't quite like to have students wait at table. It won't be pleasant for them to remember it in after-life, and it won't be pleasant for their children to remember it."
"Then the slight would descend?"
"I think it would. One wouldn't like to think one's father or mother had been at service."
The Altrurian said nothing for a moment. Then he remarked: "So it seems that while all honest work is honored among you, there are some kinds of honest work that are not honored so much as others."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because some occupations are more degrading than others."
"But why?" he persisted, as I thought, a little unreasonably.
"Really," I said, "I think I must leave you to imagine."
"I am afraid I can't," he said, sadly. "Then, if domestic service is degrading in your eyes, and people are not willing servants among you, may I ask why any are servants?"
"It is a question of bread-and-butter. They are obliged to be."
"That is, they are forced to do work that is hateful and disgraceful to them because they cannot live without?"
"Excuse me," I said, not at all liking this sort of pursuit, and feeling it fair to turn even upon a guest who kept it up. "Isn't it so with you in Altruria?"
"It was so once," he admitted, "but not now. In fact, it is like a waking dream to find one's self in the presence of conditions here that we outlived so long ago."
There was an unconscious superiority in this speech that nettled me, and stung me to retort: "We do not expect to outlive them. We regard them as final, and as indestructibly based in human nature itself."
"Ah," said the Altrurian, with a delicate and caressing courtesy, "have I said something offensive?"
"Not at all," I hastened to answer. "It is not surprising that you did not get our point of view exactly. You will by-and-by, and then, I think, you will see that it is the true one. We have found that the logic of our convictions could not be applied to the problem of domestic service. It is everywhere a very curious and perplexing problem. The simple old solution of the problem was to own your servants; but we found that this was not consistent with the spirit of our free institutions. As soon as it was abandoned the anomaly began. We had outlived the primitive period when the housekeeper worked with her domestics and they were her help, and were called so; and we had begun to have servants to do all the household work, and to call them so. This state of things never seemed right to some of our purest and best people. They fancied, as you seem to have done, that to compel people through their necessities to do your hateful drudgery, and to wound and shame them with a name which every American instinctively resents, was neither republican nor Christian. Some of our thinkers tried to mend matters by making their domestics a part of their families; and in the life of Emerson you'll find an amusing account of his attempt to have his servant eat at the same table with himself and his wife. It wouldn't work. He and his wife could stand it, but the servant couldn't."
I paused, for this was where the laugh ought to have come in. The Altrurian did not laugh, he merely asked, "Why?"
"Well, because the servant knew, if they didn't, that they were a whole world apart in their traditions, and were no more fit to associate than New-Englanders and New-Zealanders. In the mere matter of education--"
"But I thought you said that these young girls who wait at table here were teachers."
"Oh, I beg your pardon; I ought to have explained. By this time