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 . 12, 1861.] take into the account. As for the reasons of the celibacy, there are several;—the over-proportion of women in towns,—the absence of opportunity for forming acquaintance,—and the caution of women who know that they must exchange a life of external luxury for hard privation in a cottage, or behind a little shop; but, whatever the cause, the employer should remember the fact, and render the case as natural and easy as she can. She will not seclude her maidens from all amusement; and she will not interdict “followers,” when once assured that the “followers” are relatives or respectable friends. If truly wise, she will cultivate the intelligence of her servants by books, newspapers, and conversation. That is the kind of house where the husband and children hear nothing of kitchen troubles; where nothing is locked up but papers, and where housekeeping is so much the cheaper for it that the neighbour who locks up everything is sure she is robbed, and insults her servants by suspicion more and more, till they leave her to “cook her own dinner,” and “answer her own door.” She is probably not robbed; but daily allowances of butter, sugar, spices, flour, &c., are sure to be all consumed, whereas, when the stores are open to use as wanted, the natural quantity only is taken.

Here we have the one sort of service,—the old-fashioned one,—and still, I hope and believe, the natural and durable method which on the whole prevails in our country, however little we hear of it amidst the clamour of complaint under the latest working of the other.

The other method is one of mere compact between the seller and buyer of that kind of labour which is called domestic service. Some of the employers say that they do not wish their servants to stay “too long;” that they get better service and more respectful manners from new servants, and therefore find or make occasion to part in a year or so. Others are in a state of constant fret that their domestics will not settle for many months together. All are dissatisfied; and, in my opinion, all who are dissatisfied are unreasonable. The one sort of mistress cannot expect to give, and never to receive, an unwelcome warning to part; and the other has no right to suppose her way of hiring appendages to be anything more than a bargain of the day.

If the ladies of England want to have well-qualified domestics, they must provide the means. Either they must bestir themselves to get training-schools, or other educational aids, instituted; or they must themselves instruct their servants; or they must pay high for service, and take with it whatever liabilities it may bring. To these conditions there is no alternative but going without servants.

Those same liabilities create the most clamour. We are wearied with complaints of the puppyism of the men, and the dressiness and affectations of the women, in the servants’ hall; and the complainants seem to think that a new curse has descended upon the land. It is far otherwise, as literature and tradition show. It is thirty years since a nobleman, a member of the Cabinet, a simple-minded and quiet man as could be, used to tell of a candidate for his butler’s place. Just as the newspapers now tell of the cook or nursemaid of last week, the aspirant was more full of his own requirements than of his master’s. Lord drew him out by repeated inquiries:—“Anything else?” and, when he had been told all about the “leisure hours,” the “liberty to invite friends,” and to “entertain them with a bottle,” and the “salary of three hundred a-year,”—he replied, “Say another hundred, and I will be your butler.” This is just like what we hear now,—and what Horace Walpole heard in his day, and what is heard in every generation of high life. The difference is in the increasing independence and loftier pecuniary claims of the class of domestic servants.

In our generation, as in all that went before, the sins and disgraces of the order are an ugly reflexion of those of their employers. If the only four-post bedsteads (and “curtains that close at the foot”) in some great houses are in the servants’ rooms, they are there because luxurious gentry in the last generation coddled themselves in such beds: and in twenty years, saucy servants will be seen insisting on having airy German beds, like the aristocracy. If valets lounge and yawn, and mince their words, and affect profound indifference to everything but their own indulgence, it is because they have seen these ways in their masters. If crinolines embarrass the kitchen and nursery, and the servants’ pew at church, it is because they embarrass the family dinner-table also, and the conservatory, and the carriage. If candidates for the kitchen and nursery talk, when they come to be hired, of their “compacity” as cook, and of their inability to “dispense without” a choice of joints or fish at the servants’ dinner, it is because they have had no sensible education in the first place, and that they have witnessed a reign of shams and self-seeking, in the next.

If this view of domestic service is anything like the truth, the facts will show, better than any preaching from any Hermit, what may be done, and what is to be hoped from it.

We must all be sorry for those sufferers under the present evils of transition, who are themselves innocent; and, indeed, for all who are at the moment helpless: but my own predominant impression is that the most ill-used class is that of the servants, who are expected to do what nobody has offered to teach them, and incited to imitation of qualities which they suppose to be “genteel,” and then spoken of with disgust and wrath for the natural consequences of the social influences under which they have lived. When the middle-class men of England become contented with their station and its attributes, the men-servants of the country will cease to caricature their vulgarities. When the women of England learn housekeeping, as our grandmothers did and our grand-daughters will, maid-servants will once more understand their business. Meantime, if masters and mistresses do not know how to check luxury and idleness, and rebuke affectation and insolence under their own roof, they have nothing to do but hold their tongues about their own trials, and silently satisfy themselves how much of their share of the “nuisance of domestic service” is of their own