or fall according to their individual
intelligence, industry, and moral worth. So long as everything is not
strictly in accordance with our principles of democracy, so long as
there is in any part of the country an aristocratic upper class who
despise labor, and a laboring lower class that is denied equal
political rights, so long this grinding and discord between the two
will never cease in America. It will make trouble not only in the
South, but in the North,--trouble between all employers and
employed,--trouble in every branch and department of labor,--trouble
in every parlor and every kitchen.

"What is it that has driven every American woman out of domestic
service, when domestic service is full as well paid, is easier,
healthier, and in many cases far more agreeable, than shop and factory
work? It is, more than anything else, the influence of slavery in the
South,--its insensible influence on the minds of mistresses, giving
them false ideas of what ought to be the position and treatment of a
female citizen in domestic service, and its very marked influence on
the minds of freedom-loving Americans, causing them to choose _any_
position rather than one which is regarded as assimilating them to
slaves. It is difficult to say what are the very worst results of a
system so altogether bad as that of slavery; but one of the worst is
certainly the utter contempt it brings on useful labor, and the
consequent utter physical and moral degradation of a large body of the
whites; and this contempt of useful labor has been constantly
spreading like an infection from the Southern to the Northern States,
particularly among women, who, as our friend here has truly said, are
by our worship and exaltation of them made peculiarly liable to take
the malaria of aristocratic society. Let anybody observe the
conversation in good society for an hour or two, and hear the tone in
which servant-girls, seamstresses, mechanics, and all who work for
their living, are sometimes mentioned, and he will see that, while
every one of the speakers professes to regard useful labor as
respectable, she is yet deeply imbued with the leaven of aristocratic
ideas.

"In the South the contempt for labor bred of slavery has so permeated
society, that we see great, coarse, vulgar _lazzaroni_ lying about in
rags and vermin, and dependent on government rations, maintaining, as
their only source of self-respect, that they never have done and never
will do a str