When a slave was deemed not a person, but a thing marketable and transferable, the single principle judged sufficient to regulate the mutual conduct of the master and the domestic was, to command and to obey.  It seems still the sole stipulation exacted by the haughty from the menial.  But this feudal principle, unalleviated by the just sympathies of domesticity, deprives authority of its grace, and service of its zeal.  To be served well, we should be loved a little; the command of an excellent master is even grateful, for the good servant delights to be useful.  The slave repines, and such is the domestic destitute of any personal attachment for his master.  Whoever was mindful of the interests of him whose beneficence is only a sacrifice to his pomp?  The master dresses and wages highly his pampered train; but this is the calculated cost of state-liveries, of men measured by a standard, for a Hercules in the hall, or an Adonis for the drawing-room; but at those times, when the domestic ceases to be an object in the public eye, he sinks into an object of sordid economy, or of merciless caprice.  His personal feelings are recklessly neglected.  He sleeps where there is neither light nor air; he is driven when he is already exhausted; he begins the work of midnight, and is confined for hours with men like himself, who fret, repine, and curse.  They have their tales to compare together; their unhallowed secrets to disclose.  The masters and the mistresses pass by them in review, and little deem they how oft the malignant glance or the malicious whisper follow their airy steps.  To shorten such tedious hours, the servants familiarise themselves with every vicious indulgence, for even the occupation of such domestics is little more than a dissolute idleness.  A cell in Newgate does not always contain more corruptors than a herd of servants congregated in our winter halls.  It is to be lamented that the modes of fashionable life demand the most terrible sacrifices of the health, the happiness, and the morals of servants.  Whoever perceives that he is held in no esteem stands degraded in his own thoughts.  The heart of the simple throbs with this emotion; but it hardens the villain who would rejoice to avenge himself:  it makes the artful only the more cunning; it extorts from the sullen a cold unwilling obedience, and it stings even the good-tempered into insolence.

South, as great a wit as a preacher, has separated, by an awful interval, the superior and the domestic.  “A servant dwells remote from all knowledge of his lord’s purposes; he lives as a kind of foreigner under the same roof; a domestic, yet a foreigner too.”  This exhibits a picture of feudal manners.  But the progress of society in modern Europe has since passed through a mighty evolution.  In the visible change of habits, of feelings, of social life, the humble domestic has approximated to, and communicated more frequently even with “his lord.”  The domestic is now not always a stranger to “his lord’s purposes,” but often their faithful actor—­their confidential counsellor—­the mirror in which his lordship contemplates on his wishes personified.