Page:Co-operative housekeeping.djvu/76

63 relation of mistress and servant but a cold-blooded bargain, formed in suspicion and dissolved with pleasure on the slightest provocation.

All our trouble comes because we are going against the spirit of the age, which revolts against submission to an individual will, but freely subjects itself to the despotism of an organization. American-born girls, as we all know, have long abandoned domestic service for the factory, the shop, and the district school; and the Irish girls are following their example, so that under the present system it is a grave question where, when Irish emigration ceases, the servants of the next generation are to come from. Even without this problem to trouble us, however, with the American idea deeply implanted in servants that the maid is as good as the mistress, it is absurd to hope for obedience and respect, and the only way to control them is by the unalterable laws and regulations of an organized corporation. The community would need fewer of them, their wages would be higher, and as service would then be as "respectable" and "independent" as factory work, and (owing to the good meals and lodgings we could easily provide for them) far more comfortable, a much better class of women would go into it than we ever see in our families, while even those who do so badly in private houses, by the accurate division of labour, and the having only one kind of thing to attend to all day long, would reach a higher standard of perfection than with their present diversity of duties they are capable of.

The new system would also bring about a reform in the mistresses, for we are scarcely less to blame than the servants. Often we do not understand work ourselves, and expect more off them than is reasonable. Lounging over a magazine or a piece of fancy-work, and making less downright exertion in a week than they do in a day, we complain of their indolence and inefficiency, forgetting that practically