£s.d.
House10000
Rates and taxes3300
Repairs, renewals, &c.5000
Two servants (rather better wages allowed)10000
Keep of self and wife10000
Wine, &c.12100
Clothes and pocket-money for wife7500
Clothes for husband10000
Coals1000
Insurance5000
Summer outing3000
Washing2600
Balance for incidentals313100
1,00000

And this larger balance would be drawn, upon for the extra expenses, such as entertaining and amusements, charities, and the thousand and one pleasant ways of spending money that are open to the possessor of the larger income, and are rigorously out of the reach of the owner of 500l. a year.

Then, too, there are all sorts and conditions of things to consider before laying down a law on the subject of apportioning the income; such for example as the consideration if the income dies with the husband, or if it may come from capital safely invested. In the former case the insurance ought to be very largely increased, as that is the only absolutely safe manner of saving one’s money. As a rule it costs about 27l. a year to insure the receipt of 1,000l. at death if the insurer is a young man, and I ask all intending bridegrooms to consider what this would mean if this be all the provision they can make for their brides, supposing they were to die and leave them with two or three little children and no other means. They could not live on 40l. a year, which is about all they would receive, and I therefore do trust all young men will seriously consider the matter before rushing into matrimony. At present a great many folk are like the ostrich, they bury their heads in the sands of present content and never consider the evil days that are before them. If they remain two, no one can blame them, but I do blame unendingly the selfish creatures who burden this overcrowded world with more genteel paupers. If people on small incomes insist on doing this, let them have the courage to bring up their daughters as upper servants and their boys to good honest trades; it is the genteel pauper, the girl who can paint a little, teach a little, and embroider a little, and the boy who, come what may, must wear a black coat or its equivalent in light tweeds, who have no right to be made to exist, and for whom the world has absolutely nothing to offer save a certain amount of snubs and a very large quantity of the unappetising dish known as the cold shoulder.

Therefore, if the income dies with the husband and there are children, a certain amount of money must be put aside annually for insurance; it ought to be enough to bring in 100l. a year to insure the wife from starvation when she is too old, too worn with all she has had to do to attempt to keep herself; and there should also be no false pride about the manner in which the children are educated; they should go to Board schools, where the teaching is excellent and far better than one can procure at ordinary small schools, which may be much more ‘genteel’ but will not be half as useful; for the Board schools are far and away better than anything that could be obtained from the wretchedly underpaid teachers who would be the girls’ portion. The necessary companionship with wretchedly poor and dirty children, which is the great drawback to a Board school education, could be mitigated if all those who are really worthy of the Board school education were to share it; and surely a good mother could tell her boys exactly what to avoid, and the lads could come straight home and simply be taught in the school. The girls would not need so much looking after, for they are far more conservative naturally than boys: boys will play with and talk to anyone; a girl very soon discriminates for herself, and will not play with another if she suspects her to be in the very smallest degree below her in the social scale.

It will be observed that I do not in the least take a sentimental view of life, for I feel that when one contemplates the terrible army of martyrs, the girls who have been ‘genteelly’ brought up and are ‘genteelly’ starving or living on their most unwilling and hard-working relations, one cannot say too much or write too much on this subject, and I cannot also but think that when there is the cry in the land that there undoubtedly is for more servants, more good and trustworthy lassies to help us with our domestic duties, and that when ladies in Australia are so pressed by their troubles and by the fact that they cannot get ‘help’ for love or money that they are actually driven to write to their papers to suggest that men may marry more wives than one, because no one but a wife is found to do house work, and that one wife is not sufficient for the purpose, it is quite time that the surplus maidens should consider whether it is quite as impossible to become a servant as it appears to be now. As decorators, governesses, and spoilers of canvas, they are undoubtedly not wanted, but they are required badly for simple domestic work, which is, none of it, half as hard as unlimited tennis, dancing all night, or rowing: not any of it half as unpleasant as is living on the begrudged charity of some relation, who wants all his hard-earned savings for his own children, or as degrading as is marrying the first man who asks them, and who can give them some sort of a home, for whom they have not the smallest respect—the very smallest amount of affection.

Now, of course there are disagreeable details about house work, and scrubbing cannot be pleasant, but surely the ‘scrubber’ could come in daily and do up the worst of the ‘chores,’ as the Yankees say; and what is the rest? Waiting at table, not half as unpleasant as selling at fancy fairs; opening and answering the door, not half as hateful as bringing one’s wretched little painted match-boxes and tambourines to an overstocked guild, or a most unsympathising and equally overstocked shopman, who is often far more impertinent than any caller ever could be to the lowest maid in the establishment; and I personally should prefer to make beds, wash china, dust rooms, and clean silver to hanging about listlessly in a shabby frock, knowing quite well that I could never have another unless some reluctant relation gave me one she would much rather have given to her own children; and I cannot recollect any duties which would be expected from the girls which I have not enumerated above, or that they could not honestly undertake in a sheltered home and under proper matronly care.

And if all servants were ladies—and I see no reason why every servant should not be a lady if she tries—think how much more our houses would be our own than they are at present! Even with the best of maids there are always places in it and corners where we feel we cannot go exactly when and where we like, and where, try as we will, we cannot be absolutely sure that thorough cleanliness prevails and where, moreover, we cannot be ‘decorative’ because all our efforts are frustrated by those who cannot shake off their early training and can no more refrain from smashing china and scraping paper off the walls than they can learn to trust us implicitly and in their turn allow us to trust them.

Remember, I personally never can nor will join in the fearful outcry against the maids which I hear on all sides of me. I have related my own experiences in Vol. I. of this book, ‘From Kitchen to Garret’ and I have not one word to add or take from what I have said there. I still maintain, if you take your servants young and train them yourself, and if you don’t expect perfection and show that you mean to be obeyed, you will have no trouble; but you will never have perfect service until you can have ladies in your house, whose ladyhood will ensure the perfect trustworthiness, the honesty, the cleanliness that no cottage-bred girl can ever give, because she can never be taught to really comprehend the necessity of all these particulars.

Mrs. Crawshay’s scheme of lady helps has, I believe, quite collapsed; at all events, one hears nothing about it now; but I see no reason why an earnest effort should not be made to try sending our superfluous girls to Australia as lady helps, and then, if that succeeds, trying them in England, where there seems to me to be a real and crying want of good domestic servants. I am only judging from other people’s woes; for, although I dare say I have mine before me, I have not experienced them yet, and have always been able to find what I wanted without any undue exertion on my part. Of course the house would have to be reorganised to some extent. The bedrooms would have to be as fresh and pretty as one could make them; and, above all, we must reform our kitchens, which are at present the most unhealthy, disagreeable, and odious rooms in the whole house, as they are undoubtedly the ugliest, and where, in ordinary households, the unfortunate maids have winter and summer to sit while the cooking is done, and in heat that I wonder allows them to live at all, and that must exasperate their tempers as much as it must try their constitutions.

Now let us consider the ideal house and the ideal kitchen, and I cannot see myself why both should not exist; let us build our washing-stands so that hot and cold water are able to be turned into the basin which can overtip and empty itself; smaller conveniences could be managed in the same manner, and all the housemaid would have to do would be to wipe out the basins daily, to sweep up the pieces with the ‘Ewbank’ carpet-sweeper, which makes no dust and picks up every morsel off the floor, to make the beds and dust, the very making of the beds being simplified by the chain and hair mattresses now general. All that has to be done is to turn the mattress daily, to spread the under blanket and sheet absolutely smoothly over it and tuck them in, to replace the bolster and pillows, and the over supply of blankets, &c., carefully straightened and tucked in. Is that harder than tennis, more menial, forsooth, than living on one’s relations, or husband-hunting genteelly under the greatest of all difficulties, the difficulty of looking nice and merry, and being good-tempered, on absolutely no means at all?