itary 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
stood 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