they are our slaves from morning until night, while, from some inscrutable and unjust arrangement of things, we, as far as they can discover, have nothing to do but to enjoy ourselves, and to spend constantly on the merest trifle of pleasure or adornment the sum which it costs them a whole week of incessant toil to earn. Worst of all, we take no care either of their happiness or their morals. We frown on their going out, on their having visitors, and are shocked if they go to a dance or the theatre; but we do nothing at all for their pleasure. If they are ill, we send them to the hospital; if they get into disgrace, we are but too apt to abandon them to the horrors of an unspeakable fate.
Did we employ them co-operately, however, all this could be improved. Seeing their mistresses actively engaged for the good of the community, and accepting labour as the natural and inevitable lot of woman, they would no longer have before their eyes that demoralizing ideal of indolent and luxurious fine-ladyism which has ruined so many pleasure-loving unfortunates, and must always be discouraging even to the industrious and sober-minded among them, but they would take heart in their work, and have a pride that their function of the great domestic organism should be perfectly fulfilled also. In turn, we could provide for their pleasure and improvement. We could give them a ball four times a year, celebrate their weddings, instruct them in the evenings, watch over them in sickness, rescue them from temptation, and, if they fell, help them back to respectability and virtue. When they married, by extending to their families the benefits of corporation (either by making themselves members, or by some other arrangement), we should often be able to continue them in the service of the association; and thus the same kind solicitude, life-long help and trust, and feeling of mutual interest which subsisted between mistress and servant under the old slave system, and veiled many of its deformities, might return, to make both happier and better than in the lawless selfishness of the present arrangement is possible.
