THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION ON SERVANT GIRLS.
THE discussion on Tuesday, on the great Servant question, by the British Association, was very natural and very amusing, but did not tend, we fear, greatly to edification. It was a capital subject to take up in the range of Economic Science, and we do not smile because Mr. Forster was President of the section, for if the Association ever achieved any direct and palpable result which all human beings could ,understand, it would be far more respected than it is, and we wish it to be respected. No doubt the proper subject of the Association is the Ultimate Atom, but still as there are a million of servants of all kinds in London alone, and nearly half a million of employers who would like to be in better relations with them, even a serious society may have a word to say about their status. Mrs. King had a good many words, but in spite of Mr. Forster's praise, we do not think they were precisely words of wisdom. She spoke too much from the American point of view, and ignored the peculiarities of Britons with too complete a superciliousness. She wants, as reported in the Times, to help both employers and employed, especially employed ; and her idea for the purpose is that the middle-class in towns should give up separate residences, " which are failures," and lodge in huge co- operative clubs, or mansions, or hotels, where everything that could be done without servants should be done, and all service, strictly so called, should be performed by women arriving in relays of three,—the first to clean up, the second to cook, and the third to be the guardians of the night. That would, she says, in the end be cheap; servants living at home would have time for the piano, and the mistresses would be much relieved from labour. Indeed, Mrs. King does not want the better class even to understand domestic management, saying that servants will never be good while their employers know anything about service. Well, we have no parti- cular abstract objection to all that. The work of the huge barracks called houses in Vienna is actually done in that way,- each house- hold subscribing for sweeping, cleaning, cooking, and so on, though not, unfortunately, for those sanitary arrangements on which Mrs. King lays a slightly ridiculous, though it may be necessary, stress. [She is all wrong, as any doctor would tell her, and her theory very nearly killed the Prince of Wales.] The club arrangement, however, is possible ; and we believe that trained indoor servants, living at home, could be created as easily as trained coachmen, and would, in some few cases, be much happier, while the apparently nonsensical rule about the mistresses' ignorance is fall of sound sense, no servant being worth a half- penny who needs more than general directions, or is ever " driven around." All that is, in the main, sound, as are most of Mrs. King's ideas about the way in which her clubs or mansions should be organised ; but she entirely fails to meet two or three rather serious points. In the first place, she has not met the grand difficulty, the national character, which is as inherently opposed to living in these clubs, as it is to living in the grand hotels which their unfortunate shareholders thought would pay so well, and which in New York do pay, though often at a price Englishwomen will be loth to risk. The Eng- lishman does not want a joint stock co-operative phalanstere, however perfect in its organisation, or however economical or use- ful to promote flirtation between the sexes ; but a house of his own, where he is master, where things go his way, and not the com- munity's way,—where he can live in slippers, play with his children without dread lest his childless neighbours should resent the riot, and be to all intents and purposes in a separate planet. He detests hordes of spies such as the relays of educated charwomen would be, wants to see as few new faces as possible, declines to introduce promiscuous lodgers to his wife, and would rather dine in the hall on a mutton chop, than have his own tastes superseded by half- cold relays of food he does not like sent up from a co-operative reatauration. He wants isolation, and would as soon not live, as have to live practically en pension. His club ? Stuff about his club. A married man likes his club well enough, on occasion, just as he can live at the table dhôte on the Continent ; but his life is in his home, and his object in heaping cash together is to have his home to himself, of the kind he likes, and as secluded from external influence as money and management can secure. That is very weak, and unphilosophical, and un-Continental? Very much so, but that is English ; and if co-operative living were as cheap as it is expensive, the Englishman would still rather live in a sanded kitchen of his own, seeking cheapness as the old farmers used to do, than be told that he must stick to a certain dinner- hour and be waited on by servants he will never see again. Mrs. King is only recommending well-managed lodgings, and anything more inferior to home than well-managed lodgings can hardly be conceived. Mr. Forster, indeed, rather approved an experiment which he was careful to say be was too old to try for himself— he would be a nice inmate of co-operative chambers, if we understand him at all, very like the helmet in the Castle of Otranto! —bat almost every Englishman and every Englishwoman is too old also. He wants his ways and she wants her economies and extravagances to be separate, to be screened from observation, to be their own business alone. What is to become of the children, for instance? Just imagine relays of professional day and night nurses for them, the faces they would make, the treatment they would receive, and the general effect upon their characters. They might as well be bred Americans at once, and they are wanted to be English. Most men, and we think, all women, like all close service to be done by people they personally like and respect, and not by relays of women whom they could know nothing about, and whom they would trust about as much as they would trust cabmen. Mrs. King would be horrified if anybody suggested relays of wives, but really most motherly women would be almost equally aggravated by relays of nurses, whom any properly dispositioned child would pronounce "horrors," and try to put emphatically down. If bachelors and spinsters like to make boarding-houses gigantic, let them do it ; but if such houses do not grow notorious for spites, quarrels, and scandals, English human nature must be very different from American.
But, says Mrs. King, the arrangement would be so nice and comfortable for servants, who now are made almost slaves. We question if female servants would find the arrangement nice at all. In the first place, two-thirds of them would be dismissed, being superseded by clever, quick-handed waiters and upholsterers' men, who would do the waiting and cleaning work, as they do in France, a dozen times better than the women , who would not worry about trifles, and whose "characters " are matters important only to themselves. Indeed, we are not quite sure they would not supersede everybody but the nurses, many of the existing "pro- prieties" being conventional rules which in India, parts of Italy, and Russia are dispensed with and forgotten. The remaining one-third would just work themselves to death by doing two relays instead of one, the one not being quite sufficient to pay all the expenses incidental to separate housekeeping, even when they surrender the overfull food the present arrange- ment secures them every day. Has Mrs. King considered bow large a portion eating makes up of a modern servant's wishes, or the inferiority of the food she would get on any system of wages the present world would bear? They would have men's society, she says, which they want. Well, absurd rules about followers are kept up in some parts of England and by some silly people, and Mrs. King there hits a weak spot ; but let her talk for ten minutes to any decent Englishwoman of any class above a lodginghouse- keeper, and her ideas of the society English servants get would receive a very considerable and, it might be, disagreeable ex- pansion. They have, as a rule, out of lodginghouses, all the society they want. No class marries so quickly, so universally, or, on the whole, so well. As to the other idea which runs through her specu- lation, of servants being more familiarly and affectionately treated, —more like governesses she means—there is sense and good-feeling enough in it, but very little practicability. Governesses do not think themselves at all so well off as servants do, and in a large majority of households are regarded in the light of necessary nuisances. They can be borne with for the few years of education, they are still kept apart, and as to bearing with strangers in their position and rank throughout the whole of life, we had better import Chinese.
The discussion on Mrs. King's paper was, as might have been expected from the subject, rather amusingly childish. Mr. de Meschin led off by saying that perhaps if wives helped their husbands in the City things might go better, as if we all wanted to go home to wives tired out with the same thoughts, and cares, and anxieties as our own ; and Sir Lushiugton Tilson thought "unselfishness on all sides would make this country a spectacle of concord and good-will." Certainly it would, and if we all bought boots which hurt our corns without complaining, bootinalcers would be amiable tradesmen ; but the object of buying boots being comfort—that is, selfishness — complaint and recrimination are still, and are likely to be, essential to the process. A mental attitude of pulpy good-will to everybody is not the object of human training. Does Sir Lushington buy his boots out of philanthropy or to please himself, judging rightly that his only obligations to the bootmaker are to state his wishes clearly, to treat him civilly, and to pay his bill in proper time ? Miss Becker introduced a diversion of the subject by complaining that women made their own clothes, society having as yet only reached the spinning-jenny stage ; but she looks forward with rapture to a time when economic management should begin, and clothes be cut out by competent persons, and made in factories. As that happens to be the precise plan now pursued by the upper ten thousand, that must be sensible advice for servants, and we can only trust that her conscience will be unaffected by the results of the advice. All we can say is, as the result of much reading of reports, that dressmaking in factories for the rich in- volves something much nearer slavery than anything else in this country, and that dressmaking in factories for the poor would soon become an intolerable abomination. The Haymarket is recruited quite fast enough without that addition made by misery to vice. Even Mr. Forster was infected by his position, and talked for once in his life inconsequent twaddle, saying that Mrs. King's paper was very able, which is just what, as reported, it is not ; observing that no duty is more binding than that of a mistress to her servants, that duty being precisely what Mrs. King wants to be rid of and finally observing that he should like to see the experiment tried, though at the cost of somebody else's peace, contentment, and usefulness for work. He did indeed put down the notion that servants were rather worse off than labourers, the fact being that, except in the very unusual amount of temptation they are exposed to, they are better off than any labouring class in the country, and suffer only from the caprices of a class of employers now rapidly dying out, who cannot get over the feudal notion that they are entitled to gratitude for being well served, and to an unlimited interference which they would never dream of exercising upon tradesmen.
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