The Standard AND PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE. (PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY AND SATURDAY.) WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 15, 1875.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 333, 15 December 1875, Page 2

The Standard AND PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE. (PUBLISHED EVERY WEDNESDAY AND SATURDAY.)

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 15, 1875.

" We shall sell to no man justice or right: We shall deny to no man justice or right: We shall defer to no man justice or right.”

The wonderful continuance of the demand for domestic -and their scarcity all over' the Colony, indicates, at least, one of tt?o things, if not both. Either tho condiunn of the middle classes must be importing so as to enable them to employ more house servants, or. there nftist be a large amount of marrying going on ; both, perhaps, may in some measure be true. There can be little doubt, at all events, that women of the domestic class do readfly get' husbands in the Colony, and there can be equally little doubt that they are not the only class that marry. We see by last year’s returns that the number of marriages within the Colony was 2,800, and we may presume that the larger proportionof these necessitated the employment of female “helps,”

or else settled some of the domestic class inhomesof their own. Thereis no sign of any slackening in the demand for servants, and wages do not come down. But it seems they are not so very much better off at Home, at least if quality as well as quantity of labor is taken into account. The complaints are loud in England, and have been so for some time past, that it is almost impossible to get good female servants for the household. So much is this now the case that a lady—a Mrs. Crayshaw —has been advocating after some personal experience, a new plan, that of employing gentlewomen who have been left without means of support, as “ helps ” in the kitchen, instead of the class usually employed. Mrs. Crayshaw states, in a paper read before the British Association at Bristol, that having employed ladies in her own establishment for twelve months as upper servants, not a single change took place among the women servants during the whole time, but in the next ten months, where the superior servants were not ladies, there were no less than seven changes. We suppose it would take some trouble to persuade Colonial young ladies of the necessity or the dignity of such a position. It will be some time before we shall see “ sweet girls graduating in their golden hair,” in the kitchen to cook our dinners for us. But it is worth while for young ladies to remember that there is no knowing, in the uncertainties of Colonial life, how they may be some day situated, and hence it is extremely desirable they should have such an idea of the “ dignity of labor ” as to make themselves mistresses of good housewifery in all its branches from cooking downwards ; for we may well put that useful art at the top as the most scientific and important of the whole. They could then in any emergency, themselves, keep a household in decent order and comfort. Why should we not have here, as in Melbourne, cooking classes? It would be at least one step in the rivht direction. There would doubtless, be great competition among the bachelors for the hand of any young lady who distinguished herself by obtaining from such a source a culinary diploma. The best definition given of the genus homo is said to be that “ man is a cooking animal,” and woman is to be regarded as the cooking part of man.