A GREAT SOCIAL PROBLEM.
My dear Continental:
When the meteorological question was despatched, ladies have long had a habit of calling upon their servants to furnish them with small talk; high wages, huge appetites, daintiness, laziness, breakage, impertinence, are fruitful topics which they daily treat exhaustively; always arriving at the hopeless conclusion: 'Did you ever hear of anything like it?' and 'I wonder what we are coming to!'
Is it not possible that we may be coming to—no servants at all? To me the signs seem to point that way. Cobbett said that in America public servant means master: he might add, if he were writing now, and so does private servant. Each house is divided against itself into two camps; hostile, though perhaps not in open war with each other: and Camp Kitchen has the advantage of position. Above stairs uneasy sits the employer, timid, conciliating, temporizing; seeing as little as he can, and overlooking half he sees; ready to change his habits and to subdue his tastes to suit the whims of the enemigos pagados, as the Spaniards call them, he has under his roof. Below stairs lounge the lordly employés (a charming newspaper neologism for hotel waiters, street sweepers, and railway porters), defiant, aggressive, and perfectly aware that they are masters of the situation. Daily they become more like the two Ganymedes of Griffith's boarding house: he called them Tide and Tide—because they waited on no man. They have long ceased to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and yet they accomplish less than before the era of modern improvements. It appears to be a law of domestic economy that work is inversely as the increase of wages. Nowadays, if a housekeeper visits a prison, he envies the whiteness of the floors and the brightness of the coppers he sees there, and thinks, with a sigh, how well it might be for his subscalaneans, if they could be made to take a course of neatness for a few months in some such an institution.
Vain wish! The future is theirs, and they know it. Their services will become gradually more worthless, until we shall find them only in grand establishments: mere appendages kept for fashion and for show; as useless as the rudimental legs of a snake, which he has apparently only to indicate the distinguished class in animated nature he may claim to belong to. We shall live to say, as Perrault sang:
'J'aperçus l'ombre d'un cocher
Tenant l'ombre d'une brosse
Nettoyant l'ombre d'un carrosse.'
Alas! I fear that even these shadows of servants will one day vanish and disappear from us altogether.
Time was when classes in society were as well defined as races still are. The currents ran side by side, and never intermingled. Some were born to furnish the blessings of life, and others to enjoy them. Some to wait, and others to be waited upon. The producing class accepted their destiny cheerfully, believed in their 'betters,' and were proud to serve them. The last eighty years have pretty much broken down these comfortable boundary lines between men. The feudal retainer, who was ready to give his life for his lord, the clever valet, who took kicks and caning as a matter of course when his master was in liquor or had lost at cards, even the old family servants, are species as extinct as the Siberian elephant, or the cave bear, or the dodo. And now the advance of the Union armies southward has destroyed the last lingering type of the servant post: the faithful black.
In this country there never was much distinction of classes. The unwillingness of New England help to admit of any superiority on the part of their masters has furnished many amusing stories. Later, when the Irish element penetrated into every kitchen, farmyard, and stable, floating off the native born into higher stations, service became limited to immigrants and to negroes. But the immigrant soon learned the popular motto, 'I'm as good as you are,' and only remained a serving man until he could save enough money to set up for himself: not a difficult matter in the United States; and never so easy as at this moment. The demands of the Government for soldiers and for supplies threaten us with a labor famine in spite of the large immigration. In Europe labor is scarce and in demand. Commerce, manufactures, colonization have outrun the supply. Wages have doubled in England and in France within the last twenty years, and are rising. With increase of wages comes always decrease of subordination. The knowledge of reading, now becoming general, and exercised almost exclusively in cheap and worthless newspapers, and the progress of the democratic movement, which for good or for evil is destined to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of the members against the belly.
Gradually has sprung up the feeling that it is degrading to be a servant; a terrible lion in the path of the quiet housekeeper in search of assistants. There may arise some day a purer and a wiser state of society, wherein the relation of master and man will be satisfactory to both. A merchant exercises a much sharper control over his clerk than over any servant in his house, and it is cheerfully submitted to. The soldier, who is worse paid and worse fed than a servant, is a mere puppet in the hands of his officers, obliged to obey the nod of twenty masters, and to do any work he may be ordered to, without the noble privilege of 'giving notice;' and yet there is never any difficulty in obtaining a reasonable supply of soldiers—because clerks and soldiers do not think themselves degraded by their positions, and servants do. It may be a prejudice, but it is one which drives hundreds of women, who might be fat and comfortable, to starve themselves over needlework in hovels; and often to prefer downright vice, if they can hope to conceal it, to virtue and a home in a respectable family. Any logic, you perceive, is quite powerless against a prejudice of this size and strength.