The fact is, the English
people don't go to other countries to get their servants. Their way is
like a factory consuming its own smoke. The surplus young women, and
there must always be a lot of them, are used up in domestic service.
Now, if an American poor girl is good enough to be a first-class
servant, she wants to be something else. Sooner than go out to service
she will work twice as hard in a shop, or even go into a factory.
I have talked a good deal about this to Jone, and he says I'm getting
to be a philosopher; but I don't think it takes much philosophizing to
find out how this case stands. If house service could be looked upon in
the proper way, it wouldn't take long for American girls who have to
work for their living to find out that it's a lot better to live with
nice people, and cook and wait on the table, and do all those things
which come natural to women the world over, than to stand all day
behind a counter under the thumb of a floor-walker, or grind their
lives out like slaves among a lot of steam-engines and machinery. The
only reason the English have better house servants than we have is that
here any girl who has to work is willing to be a house servant, and
very good house servants they are, too.
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