is not irremediable, and the remedy must come from the upper of
the two classes. Schools are as necessary for servants as they are for
other people; they must be taught their calling before they can
practise it; and schools for servants must therefore be instituted.
With schools will come certificates of merit, and servants will then be
paid for what they can really do, and not, as now, in proportion to
their powers of audacity of assertion.

_MEN-SERVANTS._

The subject of men-servants is by no means of such universal interest
as that of maid-servants, and those who suffer from them are not only
less numerous, but less deserving of pity; as a lady of limited means
once put it in my hearing, 'They can better afford to be robbed and
murdered' On the other hand, whatever truth may be in the dogma that
where a woman is bad she is worse than a bad man, it is certain that
when a man-servant is bad he can do more mischief than a bad
maid-servant. In many cases he is a necessity, not because folks are
rich, but because they have large families, and the service is
consequently too heavy to be undertaken solely by women. I have known
many householders who, weary of the trouble and annoyance given by
men-servants, have resolved to engage only those of the other sex, and
who have had to resort to men-servants again for what may be called
physical reasons.

When this happens, however, both master and mistress should agree to
the arrangement, or at all events be both informed that it has been
made. Only last autumn a lady friend of mine adopted it in the absence
of her husband abroad, and forgot to apprise him of it by letter. He
arrived home late at night, and, letting himself in with a latch-key,
took the strange man for a burglar, and was almost the death of him by
strangulation before he could explain that he was the new butler.

No woman can bring up a luncheon or dinner tray for a dozen people
twice a day without sooner or later coming to grief with it. And here
it is appropriate to say that in places where there is much heavy work
it is only reasonable that wages should be higher than where the work
is light. Whereas, upon such irrational grounds is our whole system of
domestic service built, that this is hardly ever taken into
consideration. Since the servant is told beforehand what he or she will
have to do, it is taken for granted that the conditions are acceptable
to them; whereas, the fact is that the capabi