they scarcely realize the fact that inside the
humble, dingy little dwellings whole families are crowded into single
rooms, share each other's beds, and are even thankful to find sleeping
accommodation upon the floor.

But everybody appreciates and understands the servant question. That
touches the comfort of the individual too nearly to be ignored. The
rapid extinction of good servants, the insolence and inefficiency of the
average domestic--these are facts of everyday life that will come home
to the suffering upper and middle classes. It is not because they are
educated that domestic servants have deteriorated, however, but on
account of the profound state of ignorance in which their elementary
schooling has left them, leading them to the misapprehension that, from
the standpoint of culture, they are as good as anybody and certainly
above their menial position.

Servants have as little need of French verbs and hieroglyphics as the
ploughboy or the dairymaid. There are many useful things that might be
learnt by a person who wished to be trained for domestic service; but
it is rare enough to find a cook that, amongst other items of a liberal
education, has been given cooking lessons. In this respect education is
like food: what is one man's meat is another man's poison. We do not
wish to teach book-keeping to a washerwoman, or fancy ironing to a
private secretary. Then, why stuff artisans, domestic servants, and farm
labourers with common denominators and the rules of syntax? It may be
highly satisfactory to schoolteachers to succeed in making their class
read aloud passages from Shakespeare and Milton without dropping more
than fifty per cent. of the aspirates, or mispronouncing more than half
a dozen multi-syllabic words. But, unfortunately, there is no demand for
parlourmaids who can quote 'Hamlet' amid the intervals of waiting at
table, or for page-boys capable of spouting 'Paradise Lost' for the
intellectual improvement of the servants' hall.

Perhaps these instances show as well as anything the grotesque absurdity
of collecting a number of children together, and attempting to teach
them things that they are not fitted to do, whilst no effort is made to
cultivate in each individual the faculties that are really capable of
development. It is not in the least surprising that occupations
involving manual labour are for the most part filled with dissatisfied
and incompetent grumblers, who have been obligingly provid