Household Service Is Honorable

HOUSEHOLD SERVICE IS HONORABLE

By Sir EDWIN ARNOLD

Year by year, generation after generation, the daughters of the poor pass in hundreds of thousands from the narrow means and lowly culture of the cottage or the tenement into the atmosphere of a HIGHER social state. They go from what is often a pinched and noisy or quarrelsome home into some family where they will day by day, whatever other drawbacks there may be, live amid good manners, measured speech, and IDEAS OF REFINEMENT, progress and the march of events.

They receive, insensibly and gratuitously, an extremely valuable expansion of thought, feeling and view of life, and the more capable among them quickly learn something of WHAT IS BEST in their mistresses and their manners. Most of them partake of much the same food as is provided for those to whom they minister and share comforts largely similar to those which their superiors enjoy.

They pick up, or at any rate may pick up, much information USEFUL TO THEM AFTERWARD as wives, mothers, cooks and nurses, and if they be careful and dutiful they can help the people at home and save up money to make a little start for themselves and their husbands when they marry.

The main portion of them will marry, for these girls lead healthy lives, become robust, well fed and attractive far beyond their sisters and social equals in the factory, the shop or the crowded tenement. Thus, family by family and year after year, the daughters of the poor become in a true sense, for a longer or shorter period, THE CHILDREN AND CHARGE OF THE WELL TO DO CLASSES, and in this way takes place that silent blending together of higher and lower strata of cultivated and uncultivated natures which nobody could have invented or organized, but which has worked so well in spite of bad mistresses, ungrateful domestics and the FOOLISH PASSION for what the latter call freedom. This keeps numbers of their class out of good service and prevents many who have been lucky enough to find kind employers from reaping the prodigious benefits of their early serving time.