s is mine, and no one has a right
to prescribe what I shall do with it'--that, in most cases, she has
no recognized right to invite any one to come and see her, and
therefore can have no full and satisfying sense of home--that many
mistresses go so far as to claim the regulation of her dress--that
even in mature age and by the kindest employers she is treated more
as a child to be taken care of than as a responsible, grown-up
woman, able to think and judge for herself. These are substantial
drawbacks to the lot of the pampered menial.... These complaints of
the readiness of servants to leave their places are based on the
assumption that they are under obligations to their employers. In
many cases, no doubt, they are, though probably least so where
gratitude is most expected. But, at any rate, employers are also
under obligations to them. When one thinks of all servants do for
us, and how little, comparatively, we do for them, it appears that
the demand for gratitude might come more appropriately from the
other side. It is an old saying that we value in others the virtues
which are convenient to ourselves, and this is curiously
illustrated in the popular ideal of a good servant. In the master's
estimate besides the indispensable physical qualification of
vigorous health--diligence, punctuality, cleverness, readiness to
oblige, and rigid honesty, of a certain sort, are essentials.'

We would look long through our laundries and kitchens for the
'hardworked, underfed scrub' of the above extract; and the 'servant who
has not from week to week, and month to month, a moment that she can
call her own, a single hour of the day or night, of which she can say,
This is mine,' etc., does not belong to so numerous a class that her
sorrows in this respect invoke commiseration in the public journals. But
great as is the difference still between English and American servants,
as indicated by the above extract, the former are in a steadily
'progressive' state, and every year brings them nearer in their
condition to the happy--and, fortunately for the rest of mankind, as yet
anomalous--state of American domesticdom. An article in the London
_Saturday Review_ thus comments upon this progress:

'It seems to be too generally forgotten that servants are a part of
the social system, and that, as the social system changes, the