SERVANTS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

Grey River Argus, Volume VII, Issue 521, 20 May 1869, Page 4

SERVANTS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

It is evident that the origin of the numerous labor saving contrivances in ! America is the lack of good servants ; but j in London the inhabitants have been complaining for years of the lack of good servants, and are yet very slow to intro-. duce servanfc-savingmachines. Americans, who know what the horrors of servantdom really are, cannot but regard these complaints as ill-founded. Everywhere in England, not excepting London, the servants seem astonishingly docile, civil, willing, and well-trained. The worst London maid-of-all-wbrk who ever transformed a lodging-house into a purgatory shines like an angel by contrast with her Irish sister in New York. The most stupid, negligent coachman in England is a perfect master of his business by contrast with his brother, the independent adopted fellow-citizen, who murders your horses in the United States. Perhaps the best servants we have had in America during the past twenty years were the black slaves in the South ; but they; were exceedingly lazy, wasteful, and expensive, so that I have often heard a Southern planter declare that he was the real slave forced to work for his negroes. But, thirty or forty years ago, there were a set of servants, mostly blacks* attached to Knickerbocker families in New York and New Jersey who were as near perfection, as men and women can become. Those' were the days of Dutch kitchens, Dutch dishes, Dutch neatness, and Dutch housewifery, now long past and never to return. With them faded away the old faithful race of servants, who honored and respected their employers, and were honored andrespected by all. Occasionally one happens upon a descendant of this race, with all the virtues of the good old stock; but the accident is very rare. j I- 1 remember one of them now — '■- a 1 negress named Diana — with whose culinary art no French cook could compete, and with whose merits as a woman: few •white women- 1 could compare. She lived only to show us what treasures we had lost. But the ; English servants, at their best, are precisely like these Knickerbocker snarvels. At their worst, they are so much better than the present race of servants in America, than any American who values his comfort more than r his democracy would do well to exchange countries for this reason alone. Nevertheless, we are right to flatter ourselves that we have no good servants because of our democracy. It is not pleasant to think of thousands of young men and women who grow up as servants in private houses with no ambition beyond exchanging their domestic servitude for the public servitude of a little landlordship and landladyship in a mine r tavern. In : America a coachman may win his way into Congress, and a servant-girl may marry a future President. If we must have either discomfort or feudalism, ; let us choose discomfort. But sometimes when I watch the English servants at work it occurs to me that, as there is nothing degrading in household service, and as Americans pay very dearly for it, surely it ought to be more honestly and ably performed even by embryo congress--1 men and the possible wives of presidents. If any remaining Pogram object to this sentiment as unrepubliean, I'll make.it stronger by suggesting that we should have in America stricter laws to compel our future rulers to give us fairer work 1 for our fair wages. Several of the booksellers, <&c., in Leeds have received notice from the authorities of the Branch Bank of England that they are liable to 14 years' imprisonment for selling, or exposing for sale, notes of the "Bank of Love," or any colorable imitation of a bank-note. A movement is on foot in Portsmouth . to prevent funerals on Sundays.