One other point is worth consideration.  The “servant question” is one which looms larger and larger as a household difficulty.  There are stories of great and even royal households being left in critical moments at the mercy of servants’ tempers, of head cooks “on strike” or negligent personal attendants.  And from these down to the humblest employers of a general servant the complaint is the same—­servants so independent, so exacting, good servants not to be had, so difficult to get things properly done, etc.  These complaints give very strong warning that helpless dependence on servants is too great a risk to be accepted, and that every one in ordinary stations of life should be at least able to be independent of personal service.  The expansion of colonial life points in the same direction.  The “simple life” is talked of at home, but it is really lived in the colonies.  Those who brace themselves to its hardness find a vigour and resourcefulness within them which they had never suspected, and the pride of personal achievement in making a home brings out possibilities which in softer circumstances might have remained for ever dormant, with their treasure of happiness and hardy virtues.  It is possible, no doubt, in that severe and plain life to lose many things which are not replaced by its self-reliance and hardihood.  It is possible to drop into merely material preoccupation in the struggle for existence.  But it is also possible not to do so, and the difference lies in having an ideal.

To Catholics even work in the wilderness and life in the backwoods are not dissociated from the most spiritual ideals.  The pioneers of the Church, St. Benedict’s monks, have gone before in the very same labour of civilization when Europe was to a great extent still in backwoods.  And, when they sanctified their days in prayer and hard labour, poetry did not forsake them, and learning even took refuge with them in their solitude to wait for better times.  It was religion which attracted both.  Without their daily service of prayer, the Opus Dei, and the assiduous copying of books, and the desire to build worthy churches for the worship of God, arts and learning would not have followed the monks into the wilderness, but their life would have dropped to the dead level of the squatter’s existence.  In the same way family life, if toilsome, either at home or in a new country, may be inspired by the example of the Holy Family in Nazareth; and in lonely and hard conditions, as well as in the stress of our crowded ways of living, the influence of that ideal reaches down to the foundations and transfigures the very humblest service of the household.