ies who have
to employ servants; and if what shall be advanced in these pages shall
have the effect of stimulating others more competent to thought upon the
subject, with a view to practical suggestions for the amelioration of
the universal difficulty, much will have been gained.

The chief evils we have to consider on the part of servants are,
briefly, ignorance, wastefulness, untidiness, pertness, or downright
impudence, and what is called 'independence,' a term which all
housekeepers thoroughly understand. I leave out of the category the
vices of intemperance and dishonesty, which, although lamentably
prevalent among the class to which we are accustomed to look for our
main supply of domestics, yet do not belong, as do the other faults I
have named, to the entire class, and I gladly set them down as moral
obliquities, as likely to be exceptional in the class under
consideration as in any other. With regard to the other specified
failings, every housekeeper will allow that it is so much the rule for a
servant to be afflicted with the whole catalogue, that the mistress who
discovers her hired girl to be possessed of a single good quality, the
reverse of any I have named, as for example, economy, neatness, or a
conscientious devotion to the interests of her employers, although she
may utterly lack any other, fears to dismiss her, for fear that the next
may prove an average 'help,' and have not a solitary good point. A girl
who combines all the above-named good qualities is a rare treasure
indeed, and the possessor of the prize is an object of envy, wide and
hopeless.

In commenting upon the causes which produce bad servants, I shall
confine myself more especially to those which develop in them the faults
of wastefulness, impudence, and 'independence,' both because every
housekeeper will allow that they are the most common as well as trying
of all, and because it is only for them, I confess freely, I have any
hope of suggesting a remedy. Ignorance of their duties is chronic in all
Irish and German girls when they first go out to service, and their
acquirement of the requisite knowledge depends very much upon the amount
of such knowledge possessed by the housekeeper who has the privilege of
initiating them. Untidiness is almost equally universal among the same
classes, and, being a natural propensity, is extremely difficult of
eradication. It may be stated, however, that given an average
'greenhorn,' Irish or German, th