the Bedchamber, the Keepers of the Robes, and the Knights of the Bath, the highest nobility that hedged an anointed king.  Nor does it differ today in what the mother does for the child or the daughter for the mother, in all the personal attentions in the old-fashioned home; this is Service!  Think of what Friend has meant, not simply in spiritual sympathies, but in physical helpfulness.  In the world today what calls for more of love, sympathy, learning, sacrifice, and long-suffering than the care of children, the preparation of food, the cleansing and ordering of the home, personal attendance and companionship, the care of bodies and their raiment—­what greater, more intimate, more holy Services are there than these?

And yet we are degrading these services and loathing them and scoffing at them and spitting upon them, first, by turning them over to the lowest and least competent and worst trained classes in the world, and then by yelling like spoiled children if our babies are neglected, our biscuits sodden, our homes dirty, and our baths unpoured.  Let one suggest that the only cure for such deeds is in the uplift of the doer and our rage is even worse and less explicable.  We will call them by their first names, thus blaspheming a holy intimacy; we will confine them to back doors; we will insist that their meals be no gracious ceremony nor even a restful sprawl, but usually a hasty, heckled gulp amid garbage; we exact, not a natural, but a purchased deference, and we leave them naked to insult by our children and by our husbands.

I remember a girl,—­how pretty she was, with the crimson flooding the old ivory of her cheeks and her gracious plumpness!  She had come to the valley during the summer to “do housework.”  I met and walked home with her, in the thrilling shadows, to an old village home I knew well; then as I turned to leave I learned that she was there alone in that house for a week-end with only one young white man to represent the family.  Oh, he was doubtless a “gentleman” and all that, but for the first time in my life I saw what a snare the fowler was spreading at the feet of the daughters of my people, baited by church and state.

Not alone is the hurt thus offered to the lowly,—­Society and Science suffer.  The unit which we seek to make the center of society,—­the Home—­is deprived of the help of scientific invention and suggestion.  It is only slowly and by the utmost effort that some small foothold has been gained for the vacuum cleaner, the washing-machine, the power tool, and the chemical reagent.  In our frantic effort to preserve the last vestiges of slavery and mediaevalism we not only set out faces against such improvements, but we seek to use education and the power of the state to train the servants who do not naturally appear.

Meantime the wild rush from house service, on the part of all who can scramble or run, continues.  The rules of the labor union are designed, not simply to raise wages, but to guard against any likeness between artisan and servant.  There is no essential difference in ability and training between a subway guard and a Pullman porter, but between their union cards lies a whole world.