The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864

Is it not possible that we may be coming to—no servants at all? To me the signs seem to point that way. Cobbett said that in America public servant means master: he might add, if he were writing now, and so does private servant. Each house is divided against itself into two camps; hostile, though perhaps not in open war with each other: and Camp Kitchen has the advantage of position. Above stairs uneasy sits the employer, timid, conciliating, temporizing; seeing as little as he can, and overlooking half he sees; ready to change his habits and to subdue his tastes to suit the whims of the enemigos pagados, as the Spaniards call them, he has under his roof. Below stairs lounge the lordly employés (a charming newspaper neologism for hotel waiters, street sweepers, and railway porters), defiant, aggressive, and perfectly aware that they are masters of the situation. Daily they become more like the two Ganymedes of Griffith's boarding house: he called them Tide and Tide—because they waited on no man. They have long ceased to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and yet they accomplish less than before the era of modern improvements. It appears to be a law of domestic economy that work is inversely as the increase of wages. Nowadays, if a housekeeper visits a prison, he envies the whiteness of the floors and the brightness of the coppers he sees there, and thinks, with a sigh, how well it might be for his subscalaneans, if they could be made to take a course of neatness for a few months in some such an institution.

Vain wish! The future is theirs, and they know it. Their services will become gradually more worthless, until we shall find them only in grand establishments: mere appendages kept for fashion and for show; as useless as the rudimental legs of a snake, which he has apparently only to indicate the distinguished class in animated nature he may claim to belong to. We shall live to say, as Perrault sang:

'J'aperçus l'ombre d'un cocherTenant l'ombre d'une brosseNettoyant l'ombre d'un carrosse.'

Alas! I fear that even these shadows of servants will one day vanish and disappear from us altogether.

Time was when classes in society were as well defined as races still are. The currents ran side by side, and never intermingled. Some were born to furnish the blessings of life, and others to enjoy them. Some to wait, and others to be waited upon. The producing class accepted their destiny cheerfully, believed in their 'betters,' and were proud to serve them. The last eighty years have pretty much broken down these comfortable boundary lines between men. The feudal retainer, who was ready to give his life for his lord, the clever valet, who took kicks and caning as a matter of course when his master was in liquor or had lost at cards, even the old family servants, are species as extinct as the Siberian elephant, or the cave bear, or the dodo. And now the advance of the Union armies southward has destroyed the last lingering type of the servant post: the faithful black.

In this country there never was much distinction of classes. The unwillingness of New England help to admit of any superiority on the part of their masters has furnished many amusing stories. Later, when the Irish element penetrated into every kitchen, farmyard, and stable, floating off the native born into higher stations, service became limited to immigrants and to negroes. But the immigrant soon learned the popular motto, 'I'm as good as you are,' and only remained a serving man until he could save enough money to set up for himself: not a difficult matter in the United States; and never so easy as at this moment. The demands of the Government for soldiers and for supplies threaten us with a labor famine in spite of the large immigration. In Europe labor is scarce and in demand. Commerce, manufactures, colonization have outrun the supply. Wages have doubled in England and in France within the last twenty years, and are rising. With increase of wages comes always decrease of subordination. The knowledge of reading, now becoming general, and exercised almost exclusively in cheap and worthless newspapers, and the progress of the democratic movement, which for good or for evil is destined to extend itself over the whole earth, make the working classes restless and discontented. They chafe under restraints as unavoidable as illness or death. What floods of nonsense have we not seen poured out about the conflict between labor and capital? It is the old fable over again: the strife of the members against the belly.

Gradually has sprung up the feeling that it is degrading to be a servant; a terrible lion in the path of the quiet housekeeper in search of assistants. There may arise some day a purer and a wiser state of society, wherein the relation of master and man will be satisfactory to both. A merchant exercises a much sharper control over his clerk than over any servant in his house, and it is cheerfully submitted to. The soldier, who is worse paid and worse fed than a servant, is a mere puppet in the hands of his officers, obliged to obey the nod of twenty masters, and to do any work he may be ordered to, without the noble privilege of 'giving notice;' and yet there is never any difficulty in obtaining a reasonable supply of soldiers—because clerks and soldiers do not think themselves degraded by their positions, and servants do. It may be a prejudice, but it is one which drives hundreds of women, who might be fat and comfortable, to starve themselves over needlework in hovels; and often to prefer downright vice, if they can hope to conceal it, to virtue and a home in a respectable family. Any logic, you perceive, is quite powerless against a prejudice of this size and strength.

But is it altogether a prejudice? Is it not a sound view of that condition of life?

I confess that it has long been a matter of surprise to me that men should be found willing to hire themselves out for domestic service in a country where bread and meat may so easily be obtained in other ways, and where even independent manual labor is so often considered derogatory to the dignity of the native born. To do our dirty work that it disgusts us to do for ourselves, to stand behind our chairs at table, to obey our whims and caprices, to have never a moment they can call their own, to keep down their temper when we lose ours, to be compelled to ask for permission to go out for a walk, seems to me a sad existence even with good food and wages.

The fact is, my dear Continental, that the relation between master and servant has to be readjusted to suit the times. Indeed it is readjusting itself. We see the signs, although we may not perceive their significance. Our life is a dream. I use this venerable saying in another sense than the one generally intended by it: I mean that we live half our lives, if not more, in the imagination; and that the imagination of every-day people is a dream made up of feelings brought together from the habits, theories, and prejudices of the past of all lands and all nations of men. The reality that was once in them has long since been out of them; yet these vague and shadowy fancies are all-powerful and govern our actions. So that morally we go about like maskers in the carnival, dressed in the old clothes of our ancestors. With this difference, that most of us do not see how shabby and threadbare they are, and how unsuited to our present wants. And the few who do see this have an inbred fondness for the old romantic rags, and wear some of them in spite of their better judgment. Our moneyed class cling in particular to the dream of an aristocracy, and love to look down upon somebody. The man who made his fortune yesterday calls to-day's lucky fellow a nouveau riche and a parvenu. The counter jumper who has snatched his thousands from a sudden rise in stocks, is sure to invest some of his winnings in the tatters of feudalism, sports a coat of arms on his carriage, has liveries, talks of his honor as a gentleman, and expects from his servants the same respect that a baron of the Middle Ages received from his hinds. It is a dream of most baseless fabric. John and Thomas, with their dislike of the word servant, their surliness and their impudence, swing too far, perhaps, in the other direction, but they are more in unison with the spirit of the age than their masters. I have seen an ardent democrat, who had roared equal rights from many a stump, furious with the impertinence of a waiter, whose answer, if it had come from an equal, he would scarcely have noticed. And was not the waiter a man and a fellow voter? What distinction of class have we in this country? It is true that the property qualification we have discarded in our political system we have retained as our test of social position. Indeed, no abstract rights of man can make up the difference between rich and poor. But Fortune is nowhere so blind nor so busy in twirling her wheel; and our two classes are so apt to change places, that frequently the only difference between the master and the footman who stands behind him, is the difference of capital. And Europe is treading the same democratic path as ourselves, limping along after us as fast as her old legs will carry her. The time will come when the class from which we have so long enlisted recruits for our batteries de cuisine will find some other career better suited to their expanded views.

What then? Do you suggest that we may lay a hand upon the colored element, after the example of our honored President? But

'While flares the epaulette like flambeauOn Corporal Cuff and Ensign Sambo,'

can you expect either of these distinguished officers to leave the service of the United States for ours? What with intelligent contrabandism, emancipation, the right of suffrage, and the right to ride in omnibuses, we fear that their domestic usefulness will be sadly impaired.

Oh for machinery! automaton flunkies, requiring only to be wound up and kept oiled! What a housekeeping Utopia! Thomson foreshadowed a home paradise of this kind when he wrote the 'Castle of Indolence:'

'You need but wish, and, instantly obeyed,Fair ranged the dishes rose and thick the glasses played.'

But as yet invention has furnished no reapers and mowers for within doors. We have only dumb waiters; poor, creaking things, that break and split, like their flesh-and-blood namesakes, and distribute the smell of the kitchen throughout the house. Heine once proposed a society to ameliorate the condition of the rich. He must have meant a model intelligence office. I wish it had been established, for we may all need its aid.

What are we to do when we come to the last of the servants? Darwin says that the Formica rufescens would perish without its slaves; we are almost as dependent as these confederate ants. Our social civilization is based upon servants. Certainly, the refinements of life, as we understand it, could not exist Without them, and it is difficult to see how any business of magnitude could be carried on. Briareus himself could not take care of a large country place, with its stables, barns, horses, cattle, and crops, even if Mrs. B. had the same physical advantages, and was willing to help him. Must we tempt them back by still larger salaries, or increase their social consideration, telling them, as a certain clergyman once said of his order, that 'they are supported, and not hired'?—changing the word help, as we have servant, into household officer or assistant manager, or adopt a Chinese euphemism, such as steward of the table or governor of the kitchen? Fourier does something of this kind; in his system the class names of young scullions are cherubs and seraphs! Or shall we adopt the coöperative plan of Mill and others, and offer John an interest in the family—say, possibly, the position of resident son-in-law after ten years of honesty, sobriety, and industry—with a seat at table in the mean while? Or must all the work be done by women, and a proprietor have to seal his Biddies more sanctorum in Utah? Or might not poor relations, now confessedly nuisances, be made useful in this way? Some marquis asked Sophie Arnould why she did not discharge her stupid porter? 'I have often thought of it,' she answered, 'mais que voulez vous, c'est mon père.'

These resources failing, we must drop to the simplest form of existence: hut, hovel, or shanty; where my lord digs and is dirty, and her ladyship, guiltless of Italian, French, and the grand piano, cooks, scrubs, darns, and keeps the peace between the pigs and the children. Or else we must come to socialism, in the shape of Brook Farm communities, or phalanstères à la Fourier, or, worse than either, to mammoth hotels. American tastes incline that way. There we may live in huge gilded pens, as characterless as sheep in the flock, attended upon by waiters, chambermaids, and cooks, who will have a share in the profits, and consequently will be happy to do anything to increase the income of their house.

I see no other remedy, and I offer this great social problem to the serious thoughts of your readers.

Yours ever, G. V.

APHORISMS.—NO. XIII

It was a frequent exclamation of Herder the Great: 'Oh, my life, that has failed of its ends!' and many of us, no doubt, find ourselves disposed to indulge in the same lament. But it deserves careful attention; no man's life fails of its true end unless through some grievous moral fault of his own.

The true end of life is that we may 'glorify God, and enjoy Him forever.' How this may be attained, as far as outward circumstances or activities are concerned, we can hardly judge for ourselves: but there is one sure test; and that is in the duties of our station. If we honestly perform them, and especially as under the teachings of the gospel of Christ, there can be no real and permanent failure. We shall have done what we were set to do upon the earth; and with this we may well be content.

OUR GREAT AMERICA

The republican government of the United States, when first originated by the fathers of the commonwealth, was regarded by the old fossil despotisms with secret dread and a strange foreboding; and neither the ridicule which they heaped upon it, nor the professed contempt wherewith its name was bandied from throne to throne, could wholly mask their trepidation. They looked upon it, in the privacy of their chambers, as the challenge of a mighty rebellion of the people against all kingly rule and administration; they saw in it the embodiment of those popular ideas of freedom, equality, and self-government, which for so many centuries had been struggling for adequate utterance in England and France, and they knew that the success of this sublime experiment must eventually break asunder the colossal bones of the European monarchies, and establish the new-born democracy upon their ruins.

That they saw truly and judged wisely in these respects, the history of modern Europe, and the current revolutions of our time, bear ample testimony. There is no luck nor chance in human events, but all things follow each other in the legitimate sequences of law. The American republic is no bastard, but a true son and heir of the ages; and sprang forth in all its bravery and promise from the mammoth loins of the very despotism which disowns and denounces it.

We have a full and perfect faith in the mission of this republic, which breaks open a new seal in the apocalypse of government, and unfolds a new phase in the destiny of mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. After the dismemberment of the Roman Empire, we do not see how it was possible for society to have assumed any other form than that of kings and princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was the grand, primal, leading, and executive idea of it. What learning and culture existed was confined to the guild of the ecclesiastics, and they, for the most part, ruled the rulers as well as the people, by virtue of their intelligence. It required many centuries to usher in the dawn of unfettered thought, and generate the idea of liberty. And when at last the epoch of Protestantism arrived, and Luther, who was the exponent and historical embodiment of it, gathered to its armories the spiritual forces then extant in Europe, and overthrew therewith the immemorial supremacy of kings and priests over the bodies and souls of men, he made all subsequent history possible, and was the planter of nations, and the founder of yet undeveloped civilizations.2

It would, however, be by no means difficult, were it in accordance with our present design and purpose, to show that the first germ of republican liberty sprang into life amid the sedges and savage marshes of uncultivated ages, far remote even from the discovery of America, and trace it through successive rebellions, both of a political and religious character, from and before the times of Wycliffe, down to Oliver Cromwell and George Washington; for all through English history it has left a broad red mark behind it, like the auroral pathway of a conqueror. The first man who prayed without book, and denied the authority of the church over the human soul, as the brave Loilards did, was the pioneer of Protestantism and the father of all the births which ushered this mighty epoch upon the stage of the world; Protestantism, which means so much and includes so many vast emprises—establishing for freedom so grand a battle ground, and for philosophy and learning so wide and magnificent a dominion.

The same spirit which made nonconformists of the first seekers and worshippers of God apart from the churches and cathedrals of Rome, in the sublimer cathedrals of nature, when the Roman hierarchy was master of Europe—made republicans also of the first rebels who resisted the tyranny of kings. Political and religious liberty are the two sides of the democrat idea, and have always marched hand in hand together. They culminated in England during the Commonwealth, and became thenceforth the base and dome of popular government.

The republic of America was born of this idea, and is the last great birth of Protestantism, big already with the destinies of mankind. Here, upon this mighty platform, these destinies, as we believe, have to be wrought out by their final issues, and close the drama of human development. All things are possible for America under the beneficent institutions and laws of the republic, now that the hideous skeleton of black slavery is to pollute the soil no more nor make brother war against brother any more on account of it; and at no distant period the awful conflict which at present shakes the earth with the thunder of its clashing and embattled hosts, shall give lasting place to the interchanges of commerce and the peaceful enterprises of civil life.

It was impossible that American society could hold together with this accursed African vulture eating at its heart. Nor could the aristocratic idea of the South, which slavery had interwoven through every fibre of the people, through all the forms of its social condition, and into all its State laws and institutions, exist side by side with the democratic idea of the North, without an inevitable conflict sooner or later. The present war is but a renewal of the old battles which make up the sum of history, between liberty and despotism, civilization and barbarism. No one can doubt in whose hands will be the victory; and happy will the result be for future generations.

Hitherto we have exhibited to the world the amazing spectacle of a republic which, proclaiming the freedom and equality of every one of its subjects, holds four millions of men in a terrible and appalling bondage. So frightful a mockery of freedom, perpetrated in her great name, and sanctioned by tradition and the authority of law, could not, ought not, be suffered to grin its ghastly laughter in the face of the world. And when the hour was ripe, and the doomsday of the monstrous iniquity was proclaimed aloud by the dreadful Nemesis of God, the people of the free North clothed themselves in the majesty of the nation, and rose as one man to sweep it from the soil in whirlwinds of fire and wrath.

Slavery has been an unmitigated curse to America in every one of its aspects and especially to the South, out of which it has eaten, with its revengeful and retributive teeth, all the vitalities and grandeurs of character which belong to the uncorrupted Anglo-Saxon race. It has destroyed all the incentives to industry, all self-reliance, and enterprise, and the sterner virtues and moralities of life. It has put a ban upon trade and manufactures, and a premium upon indolence. The white population—the poor white trash, as the very negroes call them—are ignorant, brutal, and live in the squalor of savages. It has driven literature and poetry, art and science, from its soil, and robbed religion of all its humanity and beauty. Worse than this, if worse be possible, it has darkened with the shadow of its apparition the minds of the Southerners themselves, and defaced their highest attributes—confounding within them the great cardinal distinctions between right and wrong, until, abandoned by Heaven, they were given over to their own lusts, and to a belief in the lie which they had created under the very ribs of the republic.

We do not speak this as partisans, nor in any spirit of enmity against the South as a political faction. It is the fact which concerns us, and which we deal with as history, and not here and now in any other sense. Nor do we blame the Southern aristocracy for riding so long on the black horse, which has at last thrown and killed them. For proud and insolent as they have ever shown themselves in their bearing toward the North, they were in reality mere pawns on the chessboard of Fate, necessary tools in working out the game of civilization on this continent. Who can calculate the sum of the divine forces which the institution of slavery, and its blasphemous reversion of the commands of the Decalogue, and all its cruel outrages and inhuman crimes, have awakened in the souls of the freemen of the North? The loathsomeness of its example and the infernal malice of its designs against liberty and truth, righteousness and justice, and whatsoever holy principles in life and government the saints, martyrs, and apostles of the ages have won for us, by their agony and bloody sweat upon scaffolds and funeral pyres—regarding them as a cheap purchase, though paid for by such high and costly sacrifices—these appalling instances, we say, have at last produced so powerful a reaction in the national mind that millions of men have marshalled themselves into avenging armies to rid the earth of their presence.

That, too, was fated and necessary, and a part of the predestined programme. The nation could not progress with this corrupting monster in its pathway; and the battle between them has not come an hour too soon. The monster must be exterminated, and that, too, without mercy and without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of mandrakes and the clank of chains.

This obstruction removed, there is, as we said above, no height of greatness which the American people may not reach. Then, and then only, shall we begin to consolidate ourselves into a nation, with a distinct organon of principles, feelings, and loyalties, to which the mighty heart and brain of the people shall throb and vibrate in pulsations of sublime unity. At present we are only a people in the making, and very few there are calling themselves Americans who have any idea of what America is and means in relation to history. By and by we shall all apprehend the riddle more wisely, and be more worthy of the great name we bear.

In the meanwhile it is no marvel that we are not a homogeneous people. Our time has not come for that, and may yet lie afar off in the shadowy centuries. Consider how and through what alien sources we have multiplied the original population of the associated colonies as they existed when our fathers raised them to a nationality. There is not a nation in all Europe, to say nothing of Asia and the islands, which is not represented in our blood and does not form a part of our lineage. It is true that the old type predominates, and that we have the virtues and the vices of the Anglo-Saxons in us; but we are far too individual at present, Celt and Dane and Spaniard and Teuton, and all the rest of our motley humanities, will have to be fused into one great Anglo-American race, before we can call ourselves a distinct nation. It took England many centuries to accomplish this work, and fashion herself into the plastic form and comeliness of her present unity and proportion. We, who work at high pressure and make haste in our begettings and growth, can scarcely hope to make a national sculpture at all commensurate with the genius of the people and the continent, in one or two or even half a dozen generations; for we cannot coerce the laws of nature, although it is quite certain, from what we have done, that we can perform anything within the range of possible achievement.