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

do with it'--that, in most cases, she has no

recognized right to invite any one to come and see her, 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