hen two
more clauses of the tenth Commandment will lose their meaning. For
a long time to come we shall go on grudging our neighbour his
house--there's no doubt about that; but even as his ox and ass have
ceased to enter into practical ethics because our average neighbour
doesn't possess either, so we hear it is to be with his servant and
his maid.

They have had their day. There are no domestic servants at the
registries; the cap and apron, than which no uniform ever more
enhanced a fair maid or extenuated a plain one, will be found only in
the war museum, as relics of ante-bellum practice; we shall sluice our
own doorsteps in the early morning hours, receive our own letters from
the postman, have our own conversations with the butcher's young man
at the area gate; and in time, perhaps, learn how it may be possible
to eat a dinner which we have ourselves cooked and served up. Better
for us, all that, it may well be; but will it be better for our girls?
I am sure it will not.

Domestic service, I have said, is an employment which literature has
always approved. From Gay to Hazlitt, from Swift to Dickens, there
have been few writers of light touch upon life who have not had a kind
eye for the housemaid. There's a passage somewhere in Stevenson for
which I have spent an hour's vain hunting, which exactly hits the
centre. The confidential relationship, the trim appearance, not
without its suggestion of comic opera and the soubrette of the
_Comedie Francaise_, the combined air of cheerfulness and respect
which is demanded, mind you, on either side the bargain--all this is
acutely and vivaciously observed in half a page by a writer who never
missed a romantic opening in his days. The profession, indeed, has
never lacked romance in real life. Strangeness has persistently
followed beauty in and out of the kitchen. The number of old
gentlemen who have married their cooks is really considerable.
Younger gentlemen, whose god has been otherwhere, have married
their housemaids. A Lord Viscount Townshend, who died in 1763 or
thereabouts, did so in the nick of time, and left her fifty thousand
pounds. Tom Coutts the banker, founder of the great house in the
Strand, married his brother's nursemaid, and loved her faithfully for
fifty years. She gave him three daughters who all married titles; but
she was their ladyships' "dear Mamma" throughout; and Coutts himself
saw to it that where he dined she dined also. There's nothing in cast