outrageous little kingdoms of insubordination, ignorance, lying, waste, sloth, carelessness, and dirt, that we unhappy home-queens have to subdue afresh every day, and every day more unsuccessfully, will all be merged as the good-for-nothing little German States are being swallowed by Prussia into a thoroughly organized, well-balanced central despotism, whose every department is arranged, down to its minutiæ, with the most scrupulous exactness, and where lynx-eyed matrons and officers have nothing else to do but to note that each servant does exactly the right thing at the right moment, and knows the place for everything and puts everything in its place.
Present Servitude a Relic of Slavery.
We mistresses who try to regulate independently these creatures who come to us we know not whence, and flit we know not where, little realize that we are bearing up the heavy fag-end of the once universal system under which not only domestic labour, but every possible species of agricultural and manufacturing art, was carried on in the houses or on the estates of their owners by slaves who could no more dream of giving their mistresses warning and leaving the following week, if they disapproved her arrangements, than they could hope to reverse the decrees of fate itself,—running away when there was nothing but slavery elsewhere to run to, not holding out those rosy inducements that of late the North did to the Southern bondwoman. Serfdom was at its last gasp in Queen Elizabeth's day, but the tradition of bondage remained for a hundred years or more. In Cromwell's time servants were only paid a few dollars a year; they seldom left their places, and were glad to transmit them to their children after them. But the disorganization begun by emancipation has culminated in our American chaos, where from its very foundation the domestic temple sways and fluctuates uneasily on its ever-changing basis of ill-trained and unprincipled service, creating an antagonistic feeling which renders the
