ractical domestic duties.
The race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in
country-places, and made the bright, neat, New-England kitchens of old
times,--the girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, tackle a horse and
drive him, no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read
innumerable books,--this race of women, pride of olden time, is daily
lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily fatigued, languid
girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common
things. The great danger of all this, and of the evils that come from
it, is that society by-and-by will turn as blindly against female
intellectual culture as it now advocates it, and, having worked
disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately in the opposite
direction."

"The fact is," said my wife, "that domestic service is the great problem
of life here in America; the happiness of families, their thrift,
well-being, and comfort, are more affected by this than by any one thing
else. Our girls, as they have been brought up, cannot perform the labor
of their own families, as in those simpler, old-fashioned days you tell
of; and what is worse, they have no practical skill with which to
instruct servants, and servants come to us, as a class, raw and
untrained; so what is to be done? In the present state of prices, the
board of a domestic costs double her wages, and the waste she makes is a
more serious matter still. Suppose you give us an article upon this
subject in your 'House and Home Papers.' You could not have a better
one."

So I sat down, and wrote thus on

SERVANTS AND SERVICE.

Many of the domestic evils in America originate in the fact, that, while
society here is professedly based on new principles, which ought to make
social life in every respect different from the life of the Old World,
yet these principles have never been so thought out and applied as to
give consistency and harmony to our daily relations. America starts with
a political organization based on a declaration of the primitive freedom
and equality of all men. Every human being, according to this principle,
stands on the same natural level with every other, and has the same
chance to rise according to the degree of power or capacity given by the
Creator. All our civil institutions are designed to preserve this
equality, as far as possible, from generation to generation: there is no
entailed property, there are no hered