tical skill with which to instruct servants, and servants come to
us, as a class, raw and untrained; so what is to be done? In the
present state of prices, the board of a domestic costs double her
wages, and the waste she makes is a more serious matter still. Suppose
you give us an article upon this subject in your 'House and Home
Papers.' You could not have a better one."

* * * * *

So I sat down, and wrote thus on

SERVANTS AND SERVICE

Many of the domestic evils in America originate in the fact that,
while society here is professedly based on new principles which ought
to make social life in every respect different from the life of the
Old World, yet these principles have never been so thought out and
applied as to give consistency and harmony to our daily relations.
America starts with a political organization based on a declaration of
the primitive freedom and equality of all men. Every human being,
according to this principle, stands on the same natural level with
every other, and has the same chance to rise, according to the degree
of power or capacity given by the Creator. All our civil institutions
are designed to preserve this equality, as far as possible, from
generation to generation: there is no entailed property, there are no
hereditary titles, no monopolies, no privileged classes,--all are to
be as free to rise and fall as the waves of the sea.

The condition of domestic service, however, still retains about it
something of the influences from feudal times, and from the near
presence of slavery in neighboring States. All English literature, all
the literature of the world, describes domestic service in the old
feudal spirit and with the old feudal language, which regarded the
master as belonging to a privileged class and the servant to an
inferior one. There is not a play, not a poem, not a novel, not a
history, that does not present this view. The master's rights, like
the rights of kings, were supposed to rest in his being born in a
superior rank. The good servant was one who, from childhood, had
learned "to order himself lowly and reverently to all his betters."
When New England brought to these shores the theory of democracy, she
brought, in the persons of the first pilgrims, the habits of thought
and of action formed in aristocratic communities. Winthrop's Journal,
and all the old records of the earlier colonists, show households
where masters and mistresses st