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 tolls 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 a'n'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 a'n't going to be slaves to anybody."

In the Irish and German servants who took the place of Americans in
families, there was, to begin with, the tradition of education in favor
of a higher class; but even the foreign population became more or less
infected with the spirit of democracy. They came to this country with
vague notions of freedom and equality, and in ignorant and uncultivated
people such ideas are often more unreasonable for being vague. They did
not, indeed, claim a seat at the table and in the parlor, but they
repudiated many of those habits of respect and courtesy which belonged
to their former condition, and asserted their own will and way in the
round, unvarnished phrase which they supposed to be their right as
republican citizens. Life became a sort of domestic wrangle and struggle
between the employers, who secretly confessed their weakness, but
endeavored openly to assume the air and bearing of authority, and the
employed, who knew their power and insisted on their privileges. From
this cause domestic service in America has had less of mutual kindliness
than in old countries. Its terms have been so ill understood and defined
that both parties have assumed the defensive; and a common topic of
conversation in American female society has often been the general
servile war which in one form or another was going on in their different
families,--a war as interm