A FREQUENT and naive complaint one hears, is of the unsatisfactoriness of servants generally, and their ingratitude and astonishing lack of affection for their masters, in particular.
"After all I have done for them," is pretty sure to sum up the long tale of a housewife's griefs.Of all the delightful inconsistencies that grace the female mind, this latter point of view always strikes me as being the most complete.I artfully lead my fair friend on to tell me all about her woes, and she is sure to be exquisitely one-sided and quite unconscious of her position.
"They are so extravagant, take so little interest in my things, and leave me at a moment's notice, if they get an idea I am going to break up.Horrid things! I wish I could do without them! They cause me endless worry and annoyance." My friend is very nearly right, - but with whom lies the fault?
The conditions were bad enough years ago, when servants were kept for decades in the same family, descending like heirlooms from father to son, often (abroad) being the foster sisters or brothers of their masters, and bound to the household by an hundred ties of sympathy and tradition.But in our day, and in America, where there is rarely even a common language or nationality to form a bond, and where households are broken up with such facility, the relation between master and servant is often so strained and so unpleasant that we risk becoming (what foreigners reproach us with being), a nation of hotel-dwellers.Nor is this class-feeling greatly to be wondered at.The contrary would be astonishing.