So I sat down, and wrote thus on

SERVANTS AND SERVICE.

Many of the domestic evils in America originate in the fact, that, while society here is professedly based on new principles, which ought to make social life in every respect different from the life of the Old World, yet these principles have never been so thought out and applied as to give consistency and harmony to our daily relations.  America starts with a political organization based on a declaration of the primitive freedom and equality of all men.  Every human being, according to this principle, stands on the same natural level with every other, and has the same chance to rise according to the degree of power or capacity given by the Creator.  All our civil institutions are designed to preserve this equality, as far as possible, from generation to generation:  there is no entailed property, there are no hereditary titles, no monopolies, no privileged classes,—­all are to be as free to rise and fall as the waves of the sea.

The condition of domestic service, however, still retains about it something of the influences from feudal times, and from the near presence of slavery in neighboring States.  All English literature, all the literature of the world, describes domestic service in the old feudal spirit and with the old feudal language, which regarded the master as belonging to a privileged class and the servant to an inferior one.  There is not a play, not a poem, not a novel, not a history, that does not present this view.  The master’s rights, like the rights of kings, were supposed to rest in his being born in a superior rank.  The good servant was one who, from childhood, had learned “to order himself lowly and reverently to all his betters.”  When New England brought to these shores the theory of democracy, she brought, in the persons of the first pilgrims, the habits of thought and of action formed in aristocratic communities, Winthrop’s Journal, and all the old records of the earlier colonists, show households where masters and mistresses stood on the “right divine” of the privileged classes, howsoever they might have risen up against authorities themselves.

The first consequence of this state of things was a universal rejection of domestic service in all classes of American-born society.  For a generation or two, there was, indeed, a sort of interchange of family strength,—­sons and daughters engaging in the service of neighboring families, in default of a sufficient working-force of their own, but always on conditions of strict equality.  The assistant was to share the table, the family sitting-room, and every honor and attention that might be claimed by son or daughter.  When families increased in refinement and education so as to make these conditions of close intimacy with more uncultured neighbors disagreeable, they had to choose between such intimacies and the performance of their own domestic toil.  No wages could induce a son or daughter of New England to take the condition of a servant on terms which they thought applicable to that of a slave.  The slightest hint of a separate table was resented as an insult; not to enter the front-door, and not to sit in the front-parlor on state-occasions, was bitterly commented on as a personal indignity.