lioration
came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did.
Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after
the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused; nor is
it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves
thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be up and doing more
than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For
the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to
thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace
the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year
servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to
exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and
I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping through the library of
the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess
that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs.
Sidney Webb's 'History of Trade Unionism' the means of appearing to know
much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade
union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done
without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down
the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servants'
campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous
and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been
worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and
more, on the contrary, do they glide--long before the War they had begun
gliding--away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed
conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to
despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not
been taught to read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the
mischief. Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments
on them in 1872--But there is no use in repining. What's done can't
be undone. On the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone.
Housework, for example. What concessions by the governing classes, what
bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?

Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually,
and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing
classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male
and