ncluding roast beef; profound
sleep in the dining room; heavy tea; then nothing whatever; church;
heavy supper; nothing whatever; then sleep. There is not much of this
left, and from the moment when Sunday concerts began and the picture
galleries were opened, when chess was played and the newspaper read, the
old solidities of the home trembled, for the home was an edifice from
which one could not take one stone.

In chorus with the cry for new pleasures, the reaction against the old
discomfort, came a more powerful influence still, because it was
direct--the servant problem. The Americans know this question, I think,
better even than the British, for in their country a violent democracy
rejects domestic service and compels, I believe, the use of recent
emigrants from old enslaved Europe who have not yet breathed the
aggressive and ambitious air that has touched the Stars and Stripes. In
Great Britain the crisis is not yet, and it may never come, for this is
not the English way. In England we are aware of a crisis only fifty
years later, because for that half-century we have successfully
pretended that there was no crisis. So we come in just in time for the
reaction, and say: "There you are. I told you nothing was changed." Yet,
so persistent is the servant problem that even England has had to take
some notice of it. As Mr. Wells said, the supply of rough, hardworking
girls began to shrink. It shrank because so many opportunities for the
employment of women were offered by the factories which arose in England
in the 'forties and the 'fifties, by the demand for waitresses, for
shorthand writers, typists, shopgirls, elementary schoolmistresses, etc.
The Education Act of 1870 gave the young English girls of that day a
violent shock, for it informed them of the existence of Paris, assisted
them toward the piano. And then came the development of the factory
system, the spread of cheapness; with the rise in wages came a rising
desire for pretty, cheap things almost as pretty as the dear ones;
substitutes for costly stuffs were found; compositions replaced ivory,
mercerized cotton rivaled silk, and little by little the young girl of
the people discovered that with a little cleverness she could look quite
as well as the one whom her mother called "Madam"; so she ceased to call
her "Madam." Labor daily grows more truculent, so there is no knowing
what she will call the ex-Madam next; but one thing is certain, and that
is that she