hat greater, more
intimate, more holy Services are there than these?

And yet we are degrading these services and loathing them and scoffing
at them and spitting upon them, first, by turning them over to the
lowest and least competent and worst trained classes in the world, and
then by yelling like spoiled children if our babies are neglected, our
biscuits sodden, our homes dirty, and our baths unpoured. Let one
suggest that the only cure for such deeds is in the uplift of the doer
and our rage is even worse and less explicable. We will call them by
their first names, thus blaspheming a holy intimacy; we will confine
them to back doors; we will insist that their meals be no gracious
ceremony nor even a restful sprawl, but usually a hasty, heckled gulp
amid garbage; we exact, not a natural, but a purchased deference, and we
leave them naked to insult by our children and by our husbands.

I remember a girl,--how pretty she was, with the crimson flooding the
old ivory of her cheeks and her gracious plumpness! She had come to the
valley during the summer to "do housework." I met and walked home with
her, in the thrilling shadows, to an old village home I knew well; then
as I turned to leave I learned that she was there alone in that house
for a week-end with only one young white man to represent the family.
Oh, he was doubtless a "gentleman" and all that, but for the first time
in my life I saw what a snare the fowler was spreading at the feet of
the daughters of my people, baited by church and state.

Not alone is the hurt thus offered to the lowly,--Society and Science
suffer. The unit which we seek to make the center of society,--the
Home--is deprived of the help of scientific invention and suggestion. It
is only slowly and by the utmost effort that some small foothold has
been gained for the vacuum cleaner, the washing-machine, the power tool,
and the chemical reagent. In our frantic effort to preserve the last
vestiges of slavery and mediaevalism we not only set out faces against
such improvements, but we seek to use education and the power of the
state to train the servants who do not naturally appear.

Meantime the wild rush from house service, on the part of all who can
scramble or run, continues. The rules of the labor union are designed,
not simply to raise wages, but to guard against any likeness between
artisan and servant. There is no essential difference in ability and
training between a subway guard and a