is obedient to the last degree, and his civility reaches the point of absolute polish.  When he performs a service his air is impassive, but if he is addressed his face assumes a quietly good-humoured expression, and he contrives to make his temporary employer feel as though it was a pleasure to attend upon him.  All over our country we find that politeness between employer and servant is mutual.  Here and there we find a well-dressed ruffian who thinks he is doing a clever thing when he bullies a servant; but a gentleman is always considerate, quiet, respectful; and he expects consideration, quietness, and respect from those who wait upon him.  The light-footed, cheerful young women who serve in hotels and private houses are nearly always charmingly kind and obliging without ever descending to familiarity; in fact, I believe that, if England be taken all round, it will be found that female post-office clerks are the only servants who are positively offensive.  They are spoiled by the hurried, captious, tiresome persons who haunt post-offices at all hours, and in self-defence they are apt to convert themselves into moral analogues of the fretful porcupine.  Perhaps the queenly dames in railway refreshment-rooms are almost equal to the post-office damsels; but both classes are growing more good-natured—­thanks to Charles Dickens, Mr. Sullivan, and Mr. Punch.

But the American servant exhibits no such weakness as civility; he is resolved to let you know that you are in the country of equality, and, in order to do that effectually, he treats you as a grovelling inferior.  You ask a civil question, and he flings his answer at you as he would fling a bone at a dog.  Every act of service which he performs comes most ungraciously from him, and he usually contrives to let you plainly see two things—­first, he is ashamed of his position; secondly, he means to take a sort of indirect revenge on you in order to salve his lacerated dignity.  A young English peer happened to ask a Chicago servant to clean a pair of boots, and his tone of command was rather pronounced and definite.  That young patrician began to doubt his own identity when he was thus addressed—­“Ketch on and do them yourself!” There was no redress, no possible remedy, and finally our compatriot humbled himself to a negro, and paid an exorbitant price for his polish.

Here we have an absurdity quite fairly exposed.  The young American student who acts as a reporter or waiter during his college vacation is nearly always a respectful gentleman who neither takes nor allows a liberty; but the underbred boor, keen as he is about his gratuities, will take even your gifts as though he were an Asiatic potentate, and the traveller a passing slave whose tribute is condescendingly received.  In a word, the servant goes out of his way to prove that, in his own idea, he is quite fit to be anybody’s master.  The Declaration of Independence informs us that all men are born equal; the transatlantic servant takes that with a certain reservation, for he implies that, though men may be equal in a general way, yet, so far as he is concerned, he prefers to reckon himself the superior of anybody with whom business brings him into contact.