This state of things is very hard both upon mistresses and servants, but it is not irremediable, and the remedy must come from the upper of the two classes.  Schools are as necessary for servants as they are for other people; they must be taught their calling before they can practise it; and schools for servants must therefore be instituted.  With schools will come certificates of merit, and servants will then be paid for what they can really do, and not, as now, in proportion to their powers of audacity of assertion.

MEN-SERVANTS.

The subject of men-servants is by no means of such universal interest as that of maid-servants, and those who suffer from them are not only less numerous, but less deserving of pity; as a lady of limited means once put it in my hearing, ’They can better afford to be robbed and murdered’ On the other hand, whatever truth may be in the dogma that where a woman is bad she is worse than a bad man, it is certain that when a man-servant is bad he can do more mischief than a bad maid-servant.  In many cases he is a necessity, not because folks are rich, but because they have large families, and the service is consequently too heavy to be undertaken solely by women.  I have known many householders who, weary of the trouble and annoyance given by men-servants, have resolved to engage only those of the other sex, and who have had to resort to men-servants again for what may be called physical reasons.

When this happens, however, both master and mistress should agree to the arrangement, or at all events be both informed that it has been made.  Only last autumn a lady friend of mine adopted it in the absence of her husband abroad, and forgot to apprise him of it by letter.  He arrived home late at night, and, letting himself in with a latch-key, took the strange man for a burglar, and was almost the death of him by strangulation before he could explain that he was the new butler.

No woman can bring up a luncheon or dinner tray for a dozen people twice a day without sooner or later coming to grief with it.  And here it is appropriate to say that in places where there is much heavy work it is only reasonable that wages should be higher than where the work is light.  Whereas, upon such irrational grounds is our whole system of domestic service built, that this is hardly ever taken into consideration.  Since the servant is told beforehand what he or she will have to do, it is taken for granted that the conditions are acceptable to them; whereas, the fact is that the capability of performing their duties is the very last thing to enter their minds.  They cannot afford to remain ‘out of a situation,’ and therefore take the first that offers itself as a stopgap, with no more intention of permanently remaining there than a European who accepts an appointment in Turkey, and with the same object—­namely, to make as much as possible out of the Turks in the meantime.