ood on the "right divine" of the
privileged classes, howsoever they might have risen up against
authorities themselves.

The first consequence of this state of things was a universal
rejection of domestic service in all classes of American-born society.
For a generation or two, there was, indeed, a sort of interchange of
family strength,--sons and daughters engaging in the service of
neighboring families, in default of a sufficient working force of
their own, but always on conditions of strict equality. The assistant
was to share the table, the family sitting-room, and every honor and
attention that might be claimed by son or daughter. When families
increased in refinement and education so as to make these conditions
of close intimacy with more uncultured neighbors disagreeable, they
had to choose between such intimacies and the performance of their
own domestic toil. No wages could induce a son or daughter of New
England to take the condition of a servant on terms which they thought
applicable to that of a slave. The slightest hint of a separate table
was resented as an insult; not to enter the front door, and not to sit
in the front parlor on state occasions, was bitterly commented on as a
personal indignity.

The well-taught, self-respecting daughters of farmers, the class most
valuable in domestic service, gradually retired from it. They
preferred any other employment, however laborious. Beyond all doubt,
the labors of a well-regulated family are more healthy, more cheerful,
more interesting, because less monotonous, than the mechanical toils
of a factory; yet the girls of New England, with one consent,
preferred the factory, and left the whole business of domestic service
to a foreign population; and they did it mainly because they would not
take positions in families as an inferior laboring class by the side
of others of their own age who assumed as their prerogative to live
without labor.

"I can't let you have one of my daughters," said an energetic matron
to her neighbor from the city, who was seeking for a servant in her
summer vacation; "if you hadn't daughters of your own, maybe I would;
but my girls ain't going to work so that your girls may live in
idleness."

It was vain to offer money. "We don't need your money, ma'am, we can
support ourselves in other ways; my girls can braid straw and bind
shoes, but they ain't going to be slaves to anybody."

In the Irish and German servants who took the place