notion as to the position and rights of servants which is quite different from this.  Is it not a common feeling that a servant is one who may be treated with a degree of freedom by every member of the family which he or she may not return?  Do not people feel at liberty to question servants about their private affairs, to comment on their dress and appearance, in a manner which they would feel to be an impertinence, if reciprocated?  Do they not feel at liberty to express dissatisfaction with their performances in rude and unceremonious terms, to reprove them in the presence of company, while yet they require that the dissatisfaction of servants shall be expressed only in terms of respect?  A woman would not feel herself at liberty to talk to her milliner or her dress-maker in language as devoid of consideration as she will employ towards her cook or chambermaid.  Yet both are rendering her a service which she pays for in money, and one is no more made her inferior thereby than the other.  Both have an equal right to be treated with courtesy.  The master and mistress of a house have a right to require respectful treatment from all whom their roof shelters; but they have no more right to exact it of servants than of every guest and every child, and they themselves owe it as much to servants as to guests.

In order that servants may be treated with respect and courtesy, it is not necessary, as in simpler patriarchal days, that they sit at the family-table.  Your carpenter or plumber does not feel hurt that you do not ask him to dine with you, nor your milliner and mantua-maker that you do not exchange ceremonious calls and invite them to your parties.  It is well understood that your relations with them are of a mere business character.  They never take it as an assumption of superiority on your part that you do not admit them to relations of private intimacy.  There may be the most perfect respect and esteem and even friendship between them and you, notwithstanding.  So it may be in the case of servants.  It is easy to make any person understand that there are quite other reasons than the assumption of personal superiority for not wishing to admit servants to the family-privacy.  It was not, in fact, to sit in the parlor or at the table, in themselves considered, that was the thing aimed at by New-England girls,—­these were valued only as signs that they were deemed worthy of respect and consideration, and, where freely conceded, were often in point of fact declined.

Let servants feel, in their treatment by their employers, and in the atmosphere of the family, that their position is held to be a respectable one, let them feel in the mistress of the family the charm of unvarying consideration and good manners, let their work-rooms be made convenient and comfortable, and their private apartments bear some reasonable comparison in point of agreeableness to those of other members of the family, and domestic service will be more frequently sought by a superior and self-respecting class.  There are families in which such a state of things prevails; and such families, amid the many causes which unite to make the tenure of service uncertain, have generally been able to keep good permanent servants.