THE DUKE AND THE BUTLERS.
TI1HE Duke of Sutherland being a Duke, and one of the richest 1 personages in the kingdom, is perhaps the best man to lead an attack upon butlers' perquisites. Any person of less degree or less wealth might be accused of "wishing to save his money," or " meanness," or " closeness," or " pettiness," or " over-carefulness," or some other of the many phrases and epithets which English- men have invented to disparage the only great virtue they cannot practise, and therefore cannot endure. From peer to ploughman every man among us is at heart extravagant, thinks better of him who borrows than of him who lends, considers a certain lavishness of temper one of the best marks of character, instead of being, as it is, a sign of imperfect justice. A Duke who owns a county, however, not to mention mines worth the county thrice over, can- not readily be accused of thrift, any more than of any lesser vice, and a man clad in a panoply of social immunities makes a capital social leader against any social abuse. Leaders, however, when thus accoutred are apt to be a little adventurous in their choice of a route, and we fear his Grace is leading everybody into a eel de sac sure to be stoutly defended, very difficult to carry, and very nearly useless when possession has been obtained. He has struck bravely enough at one symptom of a very annoying social disease,
but has hit, we greatly fear, on the wrong medicine to exhibit. There can be no doubt that the habit among tradesmen of grant- ing per-centages to servants has grown into a very serious nuisance. Originally confined to the upper servants in very great households, it has descended through all ranks and conditions, till in districts far removed from Belgravia, and among families indefinitely less prosperous than the Gowers, the grocer will make presents to the maid of all work to secure her good word in the purchase of tea and black-lead. That at least is the original formula, but the accidental douceur soon increases until the servant first exacts an annual gift from every tradesman, then levies regular black-mail under threat of denunciation for bad articles, and finally demands a regular per-centage as the price of continued custom. The extent of the demand, too, increases, till the tradesman is com- pelled to add it on to the bill, either by a steady increase of price, which is the practice among respectable purveyors, or by false charges introduced into the books, and forgotten when the purchaser glances at the quarter's account. So eager in fact is the pressure, that nothing would surprise us less than a combination of tradesmen to fix a, certain rate, and pay so many farthings in every shilling spent. That is the Indian system, so well understood that masters. frequently claim the servants' money when they chance to pay without their inter- vention, and it does not work particularly ill. The servant has no temptation to deal with one man more than another, the master gets the benefit of competition, and the per-tentage acts in fact as a rate-in-aid of wages. In England, however, where no such =a- tom is acknowledged, a per-tentage mixes itself up with the seer different question of perquisites, or, as the Americans rightly call. them, " stealings," and both together degenerate into an organized system of theft. The butler levies toll on the wine-bin as he doers on the tradesmen, the cook flings joints into the dripping and bribes the butcher to send in thrice the proper weight of fat—one of the commonest and least detectable of practices—the footboy sells empty bottles, all the servants entertain friends without per- mission—a practice which, by the way, a magistrate has just decided to be' legal theft, and punishable as such,--and the cost of the household increases till the employer, almost bewildered, declarer' that nobody will be able to live under the general rise in prices. Then comes suspicion, then remonstrance, and then the eternal difficulty as to the right of refusing characters without positive evidence. The system is bad, how bad may best be gathered from an impudent letter published in the Times of Wednesday. The writer, probably a butler, asserts coolly that the per-tentage is all right, because if it were not paid the butler might go to Covent Garden or Billingsgate, and so save his master 20 per cent., and the tradesman must "prevent the possibility of such transactions." In other words, he is bound to bribe the servant to cheat his mas- ter out of one-fifth of his expenditure in order to retain one-sixth for himself—a really delightful bit of trade morality. Moreover, says this correspondent, if the per-tentage is not paid. the butler has a temptation to pocket his master's money or employ it, an argn- ment which amounts to this—that systematic theft must be per- mitted lest occasional theft should be too tempting. If those are the ideas current either among servants or tradesmen, it is high. time even for a Duke to bestir himself for household reform.
Nobody, we imagine, questions the evil, but the point is the remedy. The Duke of Sutherland threatens dismissal both to servants and tradesmen ; but the threat is a very idle one, even in his own case, and would be no remedy as a general rule. It is idle in his own case, because to fulfil it he must find out a specific act of bribery, which it is the interest of briber and bribes not to tell him of, and which does not concern any fourth observer. It would be useless in humbler households, because continually checked by the exceeding reluctance to change. Dukes can always get servants, could get them if they never paid them at all, for such is the flunkeyism of English society that to have served a Duke for a twelvemonth is to a butler or footman equivalent to an annuity for life, of some twenty pounds a year. Ordinary people have more trouble in getting decent servants, and there is a large class to whom new servants are an inexpressible bore. They will pat up with anything rather than change frequently, and deliberately pocket their losses rather than be put to the annoyance of repeat- ing afresh the necessary drill. It is these for whom a working remedy has to be found. Dukes can always get along. If a Duke of Sutherland cannot find somebody just as honest as his employer himself through whom to give every order and pay every bill that is his fault, not the tradesmen's or the servants' either. The efficacy of that device is clearly proved by the fact that there are tradesmen who never paid a servant's per-tentage in their lives, such as booksellers, simply because their dealings are always directly with, the purchaser. It is lesaer households with which we sympathize, and for them we believe there are no reme- dies except those successful in every other kind of business—short accounts, strict investigation, and personal superviaion.. If wives are too fins ladies to look after their own business their husbauds must be plundered, and householders who are stupid enough to pay their bills quarterly deserve the heavy interest they are certain to pay, and the overcharges they are nearly sure to find. Weekly payments, personal orders, and rigid investigation soon make per-centages useless and. unprofitable to the tradesman. The only other preventive would_ be the one which this generation at least is never likely- to obtain—the• existence of some degree of confidence between masters and servants. When a go- vernment wishes to abolish a consul's fees it arranges with him the salary which will meet the loss, and there is an end of the matter on both sides. Thousands of employers, would pay higher wages to be quite-secure of honesty ; they. da it incessantly in their places of business, but then when neither class trusta the other what is to make them, seauxe? A race of servants excessively dear, perfectly trustworthyi. and willing to do a fair day's work, like artizans or ploughmen, would be the greatest of boons to English society, but then where is the proof that the servant who claimed the wages of abstinence would not in addition try for the profits of systematic theft? The confidence may grow up, and probably will, with the spread of education, which will enable the two classes to understand one another better, but till then there is little help for it except to buy economy with trouble or ease by a certain amount of waste. Dukes can have both, ease and thrift by selecting honest stewards, but smaller people must make up their minds that in the household,, as in business, it is the master's eye which alone secures the combination of economy and success.
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