Shall I pass it on?

This is the moral question I would sift from what my readers may regard as trivial and commonplace details.  The fact that my experience is so common as to seem trite, is the most startling feature in the case.  Our American domestic service is a loosely woven web, full of snarls and knots.  It is time that the great national principle that government must depend upon the consent of the governed, should be studied and applied to the matter in hand.  We, the wage-payers, are the governed, and without our consent.  The recent attempt to enforce this retroverted law upon a grand scale, in calling a mighty railway corporation to account for the discharge of a dozen or so out of several thousand employes, is no stronger proof of this curious reversal of positions than the demand of my whilom cook that I should set my hand to a lie.

I caught her once in a falsehood so flagrant that I commended the rule of truth-speaking to her moral sense, and asked how she reconciled the sin with her knowledge of what was right.

Her answer was ready:  “Oh, there’s no sin in a lie that doesn’t hurt yer neighbor!”

Judged even by this easygoing principle, I should sin in penning the reference without which Katy intimates that she will not withdraw her foot from my house.  She looms before me,—­vulgar, determined, irrational and ignorant,—­the impersonation of the System under which we cringe and groan.

“What would you do?” I ask a friend, who is a successful housewife.

She shrugs her shoulders.

“Oh, swim with the tide!  Not to give the certificate will be equivalent to boycotting yourself.  The news of your contumacy will spread like prairie fires.  You will be baited and banned beyond endurance.”

“But—­my duty to my neighbor?”

“Thanks to the prevailing rule in these affairs, your neighbor knows how little a written reference is worth.  She will satisfy the proprieties by reading it, and form her own opinion of the girl.  When Katy has worn out her saucepans and patience, your successor in misfortune will give her clean papers to the next place.  It is a sort of endless chain of suffering.  Then, there is the humane side of the question.  A recommendation of some sort is a form most housewives insist upon.  You may be taking the bread out of a ‘girl’s’ mouth by denying her a scrap of paper.”

Nevertheless, I shall not give Katy a reference.  I have said to her in plain but temperate terms: 

“You are a poor cook.  You are wasteful, dirty, ill-tempered and impertinent.  You have been a grievous trial and a money loss to me.  I am willing to write this down, together with the statement that you are sober, strong and quick to learn, and that you would probably work well under a stricter mistress than I have time to be.”

She has informed me in intemperate terms, that “it is aisy to see you are no leddy, an’ fer the matter o’ that, no Christian, ayther, or you’d not put sech an insult on to an honest, harrd-wurkin’ girrl as has her livin’ to git.”