entertained entirely for his personal good, the saving of his own soul, and the beautifying of his own reputation. With servants it is not so; their virtues and good qualities are regarded only as so many conveniences and advantages to the party who engages them; they are examined, inquired into, and tested, as if they were so many "points," on which human cattle must be warranted 66 sound," to be fit for domestic service. A servant is hired in exactly the same spirit as a horse or a dog is bought; no sort of responsibility is felt at receiving a fellow-creature under our charge; no sort of accountability is recognised for the way in which servants are to be directed and governed whilst under our control. We do not go to a bazaar and buy slaves, as they do in the East, but we trade in all the higher moral and spiritual qualities, hiring them for ten or twenty pounds a year, and considering them merely as so many convenient qualifications in a set of beings into whose power we and our possessions are in some degree placed. We require a servant to be honest, because without that our most earnest watchfulness cannot defend ourselves and our teacaddies from depredations; they must be sober, because otherwise our wine cellars will not be sacred, and a drunken servant, besides other practical disabilities, may chance to set the house on fire; and so on through the whole catalogue, we look at all their qualities as they affect us, and our own interests in their practical working; but as far as concerns the servants themselves, the human beings from whose soul these qualities are emanating, we take as little account of them, and feel as little interest about their individual history, their hopes, schemes, and prospects in life, and know as little of them as we do about the dogs and cats which walk in and out of our rooms, or the poultry in the court-yard. When we discharge a servant we ask no more questions of what becomes of him, than when we sell a horse to some one who can pay for it.

Servants live in closer intimacy with those with whom they dwell than the nearest relations,-they dwell under the same roof for months and years-they see closely, and know the character of each individual, as neither lover nor friend can pretend to do; yet, with all this, there is no fellowship, no identification of interests,— the connection is liable to be dissolved any instant; they receive their wages, and go forth, none knows whither, and, most likely, servants and masters never behold each other's face again; for it is held a principle of good housekeeping "not to allow old servants

to come about the place." What can be more frightful than this state of things, when we think of it?

"

Everybody would lay claim to "common humanity," as it is called; and yet domestic servants have, we fear, a terribly short allowance meted to them. We are not speaking of any individual acts of cruelty tangible enough for the law to provide for in a way more or less clumsy, but of the intense want of fellow feeling exhibited with regard to servants. Ladies who would be indignant at any imputation on their humanity, make no scruple of declaring that " so long as a servant does her work, they never interfere with her; and that, for their part, they seldom speak to a servant." Others declare they never allow laughing or loud talking in the kitchen." The dress of servants is under strict surveillance. A lady of our acquaintance once parted with an excellent servant because she refused to part with a band of black velvet, which she had a fancy for wearing round her neck. Few mistresses allow "followers to their servants, although flirtation and lovers may be their own staple amusement. When spoken hardly to, with or without reason, servants are apt to be dismissed at a moment's warning, if their frail nature takes fire, and prompts them to answer again,—for the most angelic mistress will declare," she can stand anything but insolence in a servant." They are taken into a family to do their work, like so many animated dusters and brooms, or kitchen ranges; no kindness or interest is expected from them; and, indeed, any manifestation of feeling on their part is regarded with suspicion; they are not treated with as possessing any human feelings; and the indignant remonstrance of servants, in seasons of great provocation, "that they have feelings like others," is not uncalled for. Some mistresses dislike good-looking servants-others think it sets off their house to have handsome ones; but it is quite a quality to be liked or disliked, never considered a human personality. The horror servants have "of falling ill" is painful to see; for if the disorder be fever, or anything contagious, they are sent to the hospital or fever ward; if they have an accident that incapacitates them from work, they are discharged, if possible, before actually laid up, to keep clear of the charge of positive inhumanity. And what becomes of sick servants? Nothing can be conceived more homeless, helpless, and forlorn, than their condition; far worse than that of ordinary poor people, for they have, generally speaking, been well fed, and kept n a state of bodily comfort and accommodation, till they are, like

canary birds, unable to help themselves, and feeling doubly the hardships to which they are exposed when turned adrift. Servants have seldom any home to go to when out of places, and what bonds of relationship they may have, are generally of the slightest kind; their lodging houses are, generally speaking, nothing better than houses of ill fame. No class of persons hang so loosely on society as domestic servants. They have no one to care for them--they are become strangers to the houses where they once dwelt for months, or, it may be, years-they belong to nothing and nobody; therefore, is it any wonder they should become hardened, neutralized, and thoroughly demoralised, by the habit of changing from place to place, till all idea of a permanent home is lost, come to seem an impossibility? Consider, moreover, the frightful hardships to which they are exposed, if, on leaving one place, they are not provided with another; for, as we have said, they have no homes, and their lodgings are not better than brothels. If we think of the close contact in which this class of people come with ourselves, with our children, (for, try as we may, it is impossible to prevent all communication) we may well shudder at the frightful evil lying within our very doors, and to which the supine indifference and selfish indolence of those who stand towards them in the responsible position of masters and mistresses has conduced; and NOT any remarkable depravity in the unhappy beings themselves. The present generation of servants is thoroughly demoralized, and the evil will go on increasing, unless some change in the relation between master and servant takes place. The improvement must begin from above. It is the masters and mistresses who must reform their whole system of treating their domestics, before any improvement can be looked for in the servants themselves; they are the victims to a vicious and selfish system. The present mode of treating them is unchristian in the highest degree. The relation between master and servant is not a bond of mutual convenience, but a sacred responsibility; and no man or woman has a right to take human beings into their service, and throw them off, without taking some sort of care what becomes of themwithout seeing them safe in some sort of haven. We have confined our remarks principally to the case of female servants, and have said nothing of the thousands of footmen thrown out of place at the end of every London season, permanently influenced in their health from late hours, and exposure to all kinds of weather. The intense bodily exhaustion caused by standing so many hours each

day-the combination of extreme fatigue, and moral indolence; depraved alike in body and mind, they are draughted off to the hospitals, to live or die-no one caring for them. A man can always make his way somehow or another, they are in all cases better off than women. Female servants are dreadfully to be pitied their fate is fearful. As a body they are as bad as they can be hard, foolish, and demoralised; but they have become so in consequence of the cold-blooded, false, even cruel kind of relationship that has arisen between them and their masters—it is their greatest misery that they are bad. There are certain points in the actual working of our present social system, which are far worse than any which exist under any systems we stigmatize as barbarous and unchristian. We have no slaves,-our servants are free; but the actual freedom consists in having nobody bound to care for them, no one moved to do so by interest, and no humanity to supply the place of it. In the East, a female slave who bears a child to her master, becomes at once a free woman, and he is bound to provide for her. Amongst us there is a feeling of reprobation against a man who should abuse his position to seduce his servant, but there is no help for it if he does; he is bound to no reparation, the woman must endure the consequences, and get along as well as she can.

In point of fact, whatever may be the value of female chastity, it is a virtue nobody thinks of insisting upon in a servant: it is well known that it rarely, almost never, exists :- -therefore no questions are ever asked about it. If a woman be discovered in a lapse, whilst in a service, she is, as a matter of course, discharged at once, with much virtuous indignation;-but if she be a good servant in other respects, it is no practical disability to her, as it entails no inconvenience on her next mistress, who would have to wait a long time if she were rigidly to inquire into such matters.

This is a frightful state of things to contemplate existing in the bosom of a Christian country, in the home of almost every individual of the educated and higher classes ;—it is an evil that comes close home to us all,-and goes on generating and increasing day after day. The generality of servants as they now exist are not fit inmates for a decent family, and "chubb locks and "patent detectors," placed on our sideboards and cupboards, speak very distinctly to that point. "Common locks and keys"—as a lady said to us the other day-" are no longer any safeguard." Masters and mistresses have themselves to thank ;-they have

behaved as though they were little gods, and the distance between themselves and their domestics infinite; as if there were no sort of relation between them but the work they wanted done.

Human beings cannot live together on such terms-the consequence is, servants league together and make common cause against their masters to defraud them in every way-and do nothing they are not obliged to do; evils generate evil. There is no specific for remedying the mischief, no definite line of conduct can be laid down-the change required must begin in the SPIRIT in which domestics are hired and treated.

Those who begin the form will, we are aware, have much to endure; "a forlorn hope" must always be served either by heroes or martyrs, and they who attempt, in their own example, to reform the present system of treating servants must expect to be disappointed and imposed upon, and very possibly see very little fruit of their labours. The evil has been too long growing to yield to the first efforts. Servants, as they now stand, are, as a body, enough to disgust the most philanthropic; they are so ignorant and prejudiced that they seem hardly to have any human feelings to work upon, and it will require a long course of good treatment before they will be able to understand it, or to believe that it does not conceal some snare. They possess, in general, no one quality that can be depended upon, hence the complaint of their ingratitude, and the bitter disappointments in those that have for a while seemed exceptions to the ordinary run of servants; their moral sense is very torpid at the best, and the common inconsistencies and short-comings of human nature seem exaggerated in them. Much patience and forbearance, and charitable construction of words and deeds, is needed with the best of them, and it must be recollected that servants have no laws of "good breeding"-no education to restrain the expression of what they feel tempted to do: great allowance needs to be made on this score. If a feeling of conscientiousness can be developed, all practical workings of good qualities will follow-for what seem to be good qualities in them now, are too often mere appearances induced by the restraint and necessity of their position. A Quaker lady-a most estimable woman-who was matron of a Servants' Home, on a limited scale, instituted by a few friends to afford an asylum to respectable female servants out of place, told us she was obliged to give it up, on account of the conduct of those who became inmates. They were all servants coming out of decent places, who could