7 MARCH 1874, Page 11

A WORD FOR THE "MISSUSES."

THE well-meaning advocates of the "Maids" will drive their hobby a little too far, if they do not take care, and produce a furious reaction. "E. L. L.," for instance, in this month's Cortihill, fights the Servants' cause in a spirit as unfair as that exhibited by many of her clients, and provokes even those who, like ourselves, admit many of her principal propositions, into a state of mind which, being analysed, means merely,—" Well, then, it is a light, and we will see whether capital and labour are such unequal foes." We have been all our lives on the side of labour as the more feeble of the combatants, but "E. L. L.," like many Unionists, makes demands which kill all desire for fairness, or rather all possibility of acting in the spirit of fairness, and substitute for it an absolute determination to be master in one's own house. She pushes her case till there is no principle left in the matter, till the unlucky person who pays wages, and keeps the household going, and, on the whole, benefits servants as much as they benefit him, is regarded as a tolerated imbecile, fit to draw cheques, but of no other importance whatever in the house, which, without him, would have no existence at all. With her diatribes against

the old feudal system of domestic service we have some sym- pathy, although it is checked by a sense that if there are young girls in the house, the mistress or her housekeeper must look after them a little—say, one-tenth as much as she looks after her own children and nieces—or there will be trouble of a grave kind to be borne, not by the mistress, but by the girls themselves ; but if that system is abolished, there must be some other, and that other is free contract. You cannot get along without some principle of some kind son which to fall back, and feudalism being dead, . what other is there to be found except clear and resolute adherence to contract, modified only by character and by such friendship as may arise. "E. L. L." says female servants are badly treated from the beginning, being either sent down to the basement story—an arrangement of which, we confess, we never heard, except in a lodging-house, but which certainly does not injure the health of men-servants—or placed in the highest story of the house. The latter is very often the case, is a matter of necessity, and is in no way unjust:- Somebody must sleep there, i.e., in the healthiest and airiest rooms in the whole house, suppos- ing the climate to be English ; and which is it to be—the children, who have no free choice, or the servants, who have as much free choice as anybody else wanting wages has, and a great deal more? They can stipulate for the drawing-room floor, if they like, with- out any other check than we give to tradesmen who say they are very cheap, but they cannot send home goods. Doubt- less the master and mistress can change places with their servants, but, except under contract, why should they do it, or why should "E. L. L." expect it of them, any more than of those whom they employ, and to whom the desagremens of employment are thoroughly well known ? It is surely competent to householders to make contracts which involve sleeping on the fifth story without interference, if those contracts are free, more especially if, as is really the case, health is in no way affected. "E. L. L.," however, while rejecting the feudal claim altogether—which we also reject, holding, with her, that every servant has a clear right to depart in order to better herself or himself without leaving the slightest animosity behind, indeed, holding that no " gratitude " is due for a contract freely made and carefully observed, least of all gratitude from the payee to the payer—rejects also all notion of the right of the mistress to have any voice in the government of her own house. She says

‘! If the pleasures of servants are restricted, so is their sphere of edu- cation. Suppose for a moment that Betty was detected in any endeavour after improvement beyond the three R's ? Suppose she set herself to learn French or Gorman, to play the piano, to try her skill in paint and crayons ? Would it be allowed ? I think not. I think that a literary or artistic maid would rank as twin-sister with an immoral one, and that if she wanted to keep her place she would have to understand that the golden apples of the tree of knowledge never grew for her plucking, and that for a servant to be educated into the region of thought and the a3sthetics is a monstrosity calling for condemnation and dismissal. Some employers, and those by no means the minority, lament that servants are taught oven to read or write. They maintain that the more ignorant the woman the more likely the machine.. And a docile machine, a transferable slave— that is their ideal of a good servant. Yet there is no valid reason why a servant should not be well educated outside her professional duties— duties, let it be remembered, which cultured women consider so miserably unsatisfying, they think themselves degraded in performing, but which, ex revanche, are held to be all-sufficient for the hearts and brains of their poorer sisters. Even intellect and intellectual rights are questions of social status in our free England, and poverty has no claim to knowledge. Why not ? A box of crayons on the kitchen-table in the evening would not spoil the pastry in the morning, and a piano below stairs would sound no more inharmoniously than a piano above stairs ; and for my own part, I cannot see why Betty should not utilise her leisure in higher ways than that eternal sewing which she generally does so ill."

This is the very madness of servantgalism, as visible in Australia and New England, and destroys the notion of contract altogether.

We do not believe that in our day any mistress could or would interfere with a servant for learning German, but why is she bound to tolerate the nuisance of a badly played piano ? It is no worse than the piano upstairs ? Yes, it is worse, just as, according to the old conundrum, two pigs squeaking under a gate are worse than one, the piano on the basement being an addition to the piano on the drawing-room floor. Let "E. L. L." just try the ex- periment of living in a "terrace," a "crescent," or a "row," and see whether the piano next door is or is not an addition to her comfort. She will find it as intolerable as any well-organised household of the middle-class would find a piano in the kitchen. It would be better and easier to do without servants entirely, as many Viennese do, than to put up with such an endless and incurable nuisance.

We entirely agree that, as matter of expediency, the less mistresses follow their servants about the better, because suck following makes servants ill-tempered, and by destroying willingness, produces inefficiency ; but "E. L. L." is surely talking nonsense when she condemns the practice on moral grounds, as if it were something not only silly, but base and oppressive. Why is it base and oppressive, any more than the incessant watch- fulness of a shopwalker over shop-boys, or of a bank manager over bank clerks? It is sometimes the only way of getting work properly finished, and when it is done by a housekeeper, instead of a lady—that is, by a person much more inclined to be tyrannical — is thought the most natural thing in the world. The refusal of leave in sickness or trouble is no doubt, under most circumstances, an oppression, but the refusal of the right to " answer "—that is, to argue against a distinct order—is a mere matter of discipline, and strong language apart, no more degrades a servant than it degrades a First Lieutenant when his Captain reprimands him on the quarter-deck. No doubt many mistresses are harsh about illness, though many more are not, bilk what is the rationale of all this irritation ?—

" Servants have a proverb among themselves, mournfully true andsa mournfully suggestive : 'Service is no inheritance.' There is not only the demoralising impossibility of drawing any great prizes in the sor- did lottery of brooms and saucepans into which they have put their all —not only the impossibility of chance of making a solid provision for their future, save in the case of the upper servants of high-clan houses—but no length or fidelity of services constitutes a claim for sap- port when the working-time is over and old age has come on. Even in the case of a nurse who stands nearest to the family, and who has to give more than mere time and professional deftness—a loving care that wages cannot buy nor repay—if she is to the mind of her mistress she is kept during the baby years when she is wanted, but no sooner is the nursery empty than she is found superfluous and dismissed. To ho sure, in some good, loving households she is made one of the family for her life ; but these are comparatively rare instances, and, for the most part, Nurse, however devoted she has been, is kept just for so long as she is of use in her department and not a moment beyond. All her maternal care of the children, her close attendance that rarely knows a break, the patience she must have with fractious tempers—a patience that the mother could not exercise, but that she expects to buy from a stranger for so much money and other considerations—her watchful days and sleep- less nights, all are forgotten if a raffle comes upon the smooth surface of the conventional manners prescribed for servants, or if she has out- lived the repeopling of the cradle. And if this is true of Nurse, it Is doubly so of every other servant."

Supposing the mistress to grant "E. Is. L.'s" propositions, will the maid grant them too,—will any servant, that is, agree to remain when a better position is open to her ? Will the "good servant" put up for years with the incidental disagreeables of household life as the "good mistress" is

asked to do ? Certainly not, and where is the justice of asking unusual forbearance and kindness only from One side ? The case of the nurse is, no doubt, hard, but why is it harder than that of the mistress who receives warn- ing just as she has begun to trust her nurse, and finds her children miserable for weeks ? There ought surely, if contracts

are to be of this kind, to be some equality in them ; but "E. L. L." holds all the rights to be on one side and all the duties on the other, and would apparently agree with the Revolutionary Judge who decreed that a man's freehold did not belong to him, "be- cause you and yours have had it a thousand years, and it is time the poor plaintiff should have a turn."