, to reprove them
in the presence of company, while yet they require that the
dissatisfaction of servants shall be expressed only in terms of respect?
A woman would not feel herself at liberty to talk to her milliner or her
dress-maker in language as devoid of consideration as she will employ
towards her cook or chambermaid. Yet both are rendering her a service
which she pays for in money, and one is no more made her inferior
thereby than the other. Both have an equal right to be treated with
courtesy. The master and mistress of a house have a right to require
respectful treatment from all whom their roof shelters; but they have no
more right to exact it of servants than of every guest and every child,
and they themselves owe it as much to servants as to guests.

In order that servants may be treated with respect and courtesy, it is
not necessary, as in simpler patriarchal days, that they sit at the
family-table. Your carpenter or plumber does not feel hurt that you do
not ask him to dine with you, nor your milliner and mantua-maker that
you do not exchange ceremonious calls and invite them to your parties.
It is well understood that your relations with them are of a mere
business character. They never take it as an assumption of superiority
on your part that you do not admit them to relations of private
intimacy. There may be the most perfect respect and esteem and even
friendship between them and you, notwithstanding. So it may be in the
case of servants. It is easy to make any person understand that there
are quite other reasons than the assumption of personal superiority for
not wishing to admit servants to the family-privacy. It was not, in
fact, to sit in the parlor or at the table, in themselves considered,
that was the thing aimed at by New-England girls,--these were valued
only as signs that they were deemed worthy of respect and consideration,
and, where freely conceded, were often in point of fact declined.

Let servants feel, in their treatment by their employers, and in the
atmosphere of the family, that their position is held to be a
respectable one, let them feel in the mistress of the family the charm
of unvarying consideration and good manners, let their work-rooms be
made convenient and comfortable, and their private apartments bear some
reasonable comparison in point of agreeableness to those of other
members of the family, and domestic service will be more frequently
sought by a superior and self-re