A SECRET SERVICE.
THERE is only one class in the community which has not been represented in fiction or in poetry, and that is the servant class. Domestic service is romanceless. Trae, we can point to a few nurses who have adorned a tale—a few men of the old Caleb Balderstone type who live in literature—but for the most part the great writers of the world have let servants alone, or have used them as a convenient peg for the necessary comic relief. Modern writers lay their scenes almost everywhere, but not in the kitchen. We can hardly conceive a writer who could set a cook or a kitchen-maid, a butler or a footman, in a tragic light. With their brothers and sisters in the cottage and the workshop it is all different. The elements of romance are all around them, but they cannot take them into the servants' hall.
Almost all women of the middle class believe that all women below the last circle of that class should be initiated into life through the door of domestic service. Primary edu- cation for girls, they consider, ought to be entirely directed to the making of capable servants, and a mother who has turned out a daughter at sixteen able to "take a place" has fulfilled the whole duty of mother- hood. If any woman belonging to the great class which employs servants, be she a duchess or "a working mistress," has a favour to any little girl in the parish, her one thought is to get that little girl into good service, and if the child's mother stands in the way of the scheme, the would-be bene- factress will consider her a fool or worse.
On the other hand, how few people above the servant class —however little above—can endure to think that any one of their children could ever be in service. They desire that their daughters should work—they know that a proportion of them must work, at any rate for the first few years of their youth—but the thought that those daughters might ever be servants is terrible to them. From time to time attempts are made to give employment to gently born girls by fitting them for domestic service. Now and then a capable young woman who would have succeeded in any undertaking succeeds in this, but part of her success lies in the acknowledged fact that she is "not in the least like a servant." Roughly speaking, "service" remains a close society—never entered from above. This almost universal consensus of opinion that it is good. for a girl of a certain class to be a servant taken in connexion with the intense distaste for the profession which is felt above that class is not very easy to understand. Of course selfish feelings influence the employer to a certain extent. Anything like a real shortage of servants would disorganize society from a woman's point of view altogether. It would fall to women to reorganize it, and the great majority of women shrink in- stinctively from change. Moreover thousands of them in this particular process of change would be worked to death. To keep the ranks of service full is plainly to their interest. On the other hand the selfish motive is never the whole motive where sufficient numbers of people are concerned. The average woman is benevolent towards the young, and would not advocate for her humbler young sisters a.
life she believed unhappy. There can, indeed, be no doubt that the average servant steps up when she enters her first place. She sees a way of life which is above, so far as refinement is concerned, the life to which she has been accustomed. She is better housed, better fed, better cared for in almost every way, than she was before she left her parents' roof. Also the whole middle and upper classes, who surely comprise the most sensible women in the world, will assure her with one voice that her new duties are in no possible sense derogatory, and that she will be thankful during her whole life for the training she is about to receive.
Do all these good women mean what they say P We think they do ; but it is odd that not even those whose daughters stand nearest in point of education and upbringing to the servant class can brook the thought of service, while a little higher up "the offer of the House" would seem almost less of an insult than the offer of "a good place" to a penniless orphan. We believe that the explanation of the solicitude shown by the well-off women to get girls into service comes of the solicitude we all feel to see the necessitous clothed and fed and comfortable. As to the dread of service felt by those whose relations have not come of the servant class, we believe it to be chiefly the dread of the unknown. It is only outwardly that we really know servants. Why do they find no place in the literature of the hour P It must be because we do not know their society sufficiently well to depict it. We cannot make them real, so to speak, and the reading public, could not tell whether the picture was true or no. In the presence of their em- ployers they act a part ; and what they are like off the stage we do not know. Like all actors, however, they are deeply affected by their profession, and like all professions domestic service cultivates certain virtues to the exclusion of others. Paramount among the virtues of servants is loyalty ; but here, again, we find an element of secrecy. Where loyalty to their fellows ends and loyalty to their employers begins the most experienced head of a household will admit she does not know. Sometimes loyalty seems an inadequate word for the quality we are trying to describe. What we mean might be better called a measure of voluntary identification. The use of the plural pronouns " we " and "us" seems to come natural to them from the moment they enter domestic service. Who every heard of a servant who felt envy ; or who grudged his master and mistress their possessions, their money, or their luck? All good servants bask in the reflection of every good which happens to "the family." On the other hand this loyalty breaks down in unexpected places and is terminable at will. The interests of the dearest family go for nothing when they clash with the esprit de corps of the profession, and ambition seems to blot out in a moment the attachments of years. The exact nature of this ambition, too, is not to be gauged from the outside. It is not wholly financial nor wholly social—it concerns amenities which are never defined outside the guild, so to speak, but which everyone within appears to understand. What is "a good family" No employer knows. It may mean a large income, or an established position, or a household offering matrimonial prospects to its dependents. We are inclined to think it means all these things in one. At any rate it means some- where where servants from less good families go to "better themselves." Sincerity is a quality which usually accompanies loyalty, but the soil of service hardly favours the growth of common sincerity, though a modified variety takes good root in it, as is well proved by the frank faces of a thousand comely maids. Nevertheless the modifications have not been analysed and are not generally understood. Again, no one can quite account for the effective manner in which servants act together. Actuated, as it seems, by some electric sympathy, they adopt without initiation a code and a manner. With- out a union they have raised wages, without a journal (so far as the present writer knows), without a meeting-place, without any organization whatever, they have brought about amelio- ration after amelioration in their condition. They have, of course, one great advantage over every other section of hand- workers : they really know their employers, and are in a position to judge exactly how much those employers will or can do for them, and where they will or must draw a line and proclaim a lock-out. The servants in any such family know more than the family friends about its members' expenditure, and probably more than any but their most intimate relations about their attitude towards money. Servants' wages are still rising visibly, and their circum- stances are becoming more and more comfortable. Naturally the well-wishers of the poor desire to see them in service. At the same time, as with the rapid heightening of the standard of luxury servants become a more important and more skilled class, so they become a class more apart, cut off, as it were, from the ordinary life of the world. They have no domestic life of their own, and have no right of entry into that of their employers. Their friendships must be founded for the most part in convenience, and must he made to be broken. It is not wonderful that as the world becomes increasingly self-conscious the desire to enter service should not increase in proportion to its apparent attractions, and that housekeepers should regard with alarm a growing dislike on the part of young women to plunge into a strange world whose tacit laws and conventions are only learned from within.
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