ENGLISH V. COLONIAL LIFE FOR GIRLS. [To rim Emma or
THE " Erscraroz."
experience of English ladles, being derived from a different and, I think, wider point of view than some of your correspondents, coincides entirely with the "Colonial's" experience as opposed to the English. I was for some years working on a semi-charitable registry for placing out young girls in service. They were respectable, healthy girls who had had some training, and only wanted overlooking to become good servants. Now my experience was that it was the rarest thing to find a mistress (they were largely young married women) who had the smallest knowledge of the details of housework, cooking, cleaning, or even how the work should be arranged. Their cry was : "I leave all that to the servants. I pay wages, and expect the girls to know their work. can't be expected to sit at home all day and look after the servants." And then the good old times are harped upon, which will most certainly come back only when the mistresses know the work of a house better than their servants do. Colonial life is spoken of as a remedy for the listless lives of many Englishwomen. I have had some experience of girls going out as lady-helps to Canada, and I must say it is not an encouraging one. It is not the hardness of the work, nor the climate, nor the people they are thrown with that Make for failure, but the entire want of " character " in the glee themselves. Their home education has -unfitted them for serious methodical work of any kind; the solitude of farm life upsets their balance. Having nothing in the, way of mental training, they become hysterical, nervous, and finally break down altogether. I also venture to think that a wider experi- ence of settlers' wives, especially in Colonies where there is no native labour, would greatly modify the views of "One who Sees Both Sides" on the adaptability of Englishwomen. I know of more than one case where the wife has left her husband and returned to her friends broken down mentally or morally under the strain of an unaccustomed life. The con- clusion I have come to is that few girls who have lived the usual English middle-class life of tennis, croquet, and endless small sociabilities, of little visits; Mudie and all he stands for, are in the least fitted for a life of loneliness, independence, and hard regular work. But, of course, there are active, strong, energetic girls for whom there is no life like the Colonial. Still, I would urge, and urge again, on any girl who thinks of either emigrating or marrying a settler : Be very, very sure of ydurself. The risk is enorinous, except for certain
comparatively rare characters.—I am, Sir, &e., . - REG/STRAD.
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