I knew how to direct my servants, and what it was reasonable
and proper to expect of them; and then, as you say, I shouldn't be
dependent on all their whims and caprices of temper. I dread those
household storms, of all things."

Silently pondering these anxieties of the young expectant housekeeper, I
resumed my pen, and concluded my paper as follows.

* * * * *

In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the
superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants to
a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land of
liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is. They
are for the most part the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the wonder
is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the Celtic
blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should be the
measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic arrangements.
But, so long as things are so, there will be constant changes and
interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring
interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work,
whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are,
the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little
strength,--no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She
knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to keep
her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of looking at
all these things which makes them particularly hard and distasteful to
her. She does not escape being obliged to do house-work at intervals,
but she does it in a weak, blundering, confused way, that makes it twice
as hard and disagreeable as it need be.

Now what I have to say is, that, if every young woman learned to do
house-work and cultivated her practical faculties in early life, she
would, in the first place, be much more likely to keep her servants,
and, in the second place, if she lost them temporarily, would avoid all
that wear and tear of the nervous system which comes from constant
ill-success in those departments on which family health and temper
mainly depend. This is one of the peculiarities of our American life
which require a peculiar training. Why not face it sensibly?

The second thing I have to say is, that our land is now full of
motorpathic institutions to which women are sent at great expense to
have hired ope