Mr. Froude's attempt to secure from the American public a
favorable judgment on the dealings of England with Ireland has
had one good result--though we fear only one--in leading to a
little closer examination of the real state of American opinion
about Irish grievances than it has yet received. He will go back
to England with the knowledge--which he evidently did not possess
when he came here--that the great body of intelligent Americans
care very little about the history of "the six hundred years of
wrong," and know even less than they care, and could not be
induced, except by a land-grant, or a bounty, or a drawback, to
acquaint themselves with it; that those of them who have ever
tried to form an opinion on the Anglo-Irish controversy have
hardly ever got farther than a loose notion that England had most
likely behaved like a bully all through, but that her victim was
beyond all question an obstreperous and irreclaimable ruffian,
whose ill-treatment must be severely condemned by the moralist,
but over whom no sensible man can be expected to weep or
sympathize.
The agencies which have helped to form the popular idea of the
English political character are well known; those which have helped
to deprive the Irish of American sympathy--and which, if Mr. Froude
had judiciously confined himself to describing the efforts made by
England to promote Irish well-being _now_, would probably have made
his lectures very successful--are more obscure. We ourselves pointed
out one of the most prominent, and probably most powerful--the
conduct of the Irish servant-girl in the American kitchen. To this
must of course be added the specimen of "home rule" to which the
country has been treated in this city; but we doubt if this latter
has really exercised as much influence on American opinion as some
writers try to make out. A community which has produced Butler,
Banks, Parker, Bullock, Tweed, Tom Fields, Oakey Hall, Fernando
Wood, Barnard, and scores of others whom we might name, as the
results of good Protestant and Anglo-Saxon breeding, cannot really
be greatly shocked by the bad workings of Celtic blood and Catholic
theology in the persons of Peter B. Sweeny, Billy McMullen, Jimmy
O'Brien, Reddy the Blacksmith, or Judge McCunn. It is in the kitchen
that the Irish iron has entered into the American soul; and it is in
the kitchen that a great triumph was prepared for Mr. Froude, had he
been a judicious man. The memory of burned steaks, of hard-boiled
potatoes, of smoked milk, would have done for him what no state
papers, or records, or correspondence of the illustrious dead can
ever do; it had prepared the American mind to believe the very worst
he could say of Irish turbulence and disorder. Not one of his
auditors but could find in his own experience of Irish cooking
circumstances which would probably have led him to accept without
question the execution of Silken Thomas, the massacre of Drogheda,
or even the Penal Laws, as perfectly justifiable exercises of
authority, and would certainly have made it easy for him to believe
that English rule in Ireland at the present day is beneficent beyond
example.
Nevertheless, we are constrained to say that in our opinion a
great deal of the odium which surrounds Bridget, and which has
excited so much prejudice, not only against her countrymen, but
against her ancestors, in American eyes, has a very insufficient
foundation in reason. There are three characters in which she is
the object of public suspicion and dislike--(1) as a cook; (2) as a
party to a contract; (3) as a member of a household. The charges
made against her in all of these have been summed up in a recent
attack on her in the _Atlantic Monthly_, as "a lack of every quality
which makes service endurable to the employer, or a wholesome life
for the servant."
And the same article charges her with "proving herself, in
obedience, fidelity, care, and accuracy, the inferior of every
kind of servant known to modern society." Of course, there is
hardly a family in the country which has not had, in its own
experience, illustrations of the extravagance of these charges.
There is probably nobody who has long kept servants, who has not
had Irish servants who were obedient, faithful, careful, and even
accurate in a remarkable degree. But then it must be admitted that
this indictment is a tolerably fair rendering, if not of the actual
facts of the case, at least of the impression the facts have left
on the mind of the average employer. This impression, however, needs
correction, as a few not very recondite considerations will show.
As a cook, Bridget is an admitted failure. But cooking is, it is
now generally acknowledged, very much an affair of instinct, and
this instinct seems to be very strong in some races and very weak
in others, though why the French should have it highly developed,
and the Irish be almost altogether deprived of it, is a question
which would require an essay to itself. No amount of teaching
will make a person a good cook who is not himself fond of good
food and has not a delicate palate, for it is the palate which
must test the value of rules. We may deduce from this the
conclusion, which experience justifies, that women are not
naturally good cooks. They have had the cookery of the world in
their hands for several thousand years, but all the marked
advances in the art, and indeed all that can be called the
cultivation of it, have been the work of men. Whatever zeal women
have displayed in it, and whatever excellence they have achieved
in it, have been the result of influences in no way gastronomic,
and which we might perhaps call emotional, such as devotion to
male relatives, or a desire to minister to the pleasure of men in
general. Few or no women cook a dinner in an artistic spirit, and
their success in doing it is nearly always the result of
affection or loyalty--which is of course tantamount to saying
that female cookery as a whole is, and always has been,
comparatively poor.
As a proof of this, we may mention the fact--for fact we think it
is--that the art of cooking among women has declined at any given
time or place--in the Northern States of the Union, for
instance--_pari passu_, with the growth of female independence. That
is, as the habit or love of ministering to men's tastes has become
weaker, the interest in cookery has fallen off. There are no such
cooks among native American women now as there were fifty years ago;
and passages in foreign cookery books which assume the existence
among women of strong interest in their husbands' and brothers'
likings, and strong desire to gratify them, furnish food for
merriment in American households. Bridget, therefore, can plead,
first of all, the general incapacity of women as cooks; and,
secondly, the general falling off in the art under the influence of
the new ideas. It may be that she _ought_ to cultivate assiduously
or with enthusiasm a calling which all the other women of the
country ostentatiously despise, but she would be more than human if
she did so. She imitates American women as closely as she can, and
cannot live on the same soil without imbibing their ideas; and
unhappily, as in all cases of imitation, vices are more easily and
earlier caught than virtues.
She can make, too, an economical defence of the most powerful
kind, to the attacks on her in this line, and it is this: that
whether her cooking be bad or good, she offers it without
deception or subterfuge, at a fair rate, and without compulsion;
that nobody who does not like her dishes need eat them; and that
her defects of taste or training can only be fairly made a cause
of hatred and abuse when she does work badly, which somebody else
is waiting to do better, if she would get out of the way. She has
undertaken the task of cooking for the American nation, not of
her own motion, but simply and solely because the American nation
could find nobody else to do it. She does not, therefore, occupy
the position of a broken-down or incompetent artist, but of a
volunteer at a fire, or a passer-by when you are lying in the
ditch with your leg broken.
The plain truth of the matter is, that the whole native population
of the United States has almost suddenly, and with one accord,
refused to perform for hire any of the services usually called
"menial" or indoor. The men have found other more productive fields
of industry, and the women, under the influence of the prevailing
theory of life, have resolved to accept any employment at any wages
sooner than do other people's housework. The result has been a
demand for trained servants which the whole European continent could
not supply if it would, and which has proved so intense that it has
drawn the peasantry out of the fields _en masse_ from the one
European country in which the peasantry was sufficiently poor to be
tempted, and spoke or understood the American language. No such
phenomenon has ever been witnessed before. No country before has
ever refused to do its own "chores," and called in an army of
foreigners for the purpose. To complain bitterly of their want of
skill is therefore, under the circumstances, almost puerile, from an
economical point of view; while, to anyone who looks at the matter
as a moralist, it is hard to see why Bridget, doing the work badly
in the kitchen, is any more a contemptible object than the American
sewing-girl killing herself in a garret at three dollars a week, out
of devotion to "the principle of equality."
As a party to a contract, Bridget's defects are very strongly
marked. Her sense of the obligation of contracts is feeble. The
reason why this particular vice excites so much odium in her case
is, that the inconveniences of her breaches of contract are
greater than those of almost any other member of the community.
They touch us in our most intimate social relations, and cause us
an amount of mental anguish out of all proportion to their real
importance. But her spirit about contracts is really that of the
entire community in which she lives. Her way of looking at her
employer is, we sincerely believe, about the way of looking at
him common among all employees. The only real restraint on
laborers of any class among us nowadays is the difficulty of
finding another place. Whenever it becomes as easy for clerks,
draughtsmen, mechanics, and the like to "suit themselves" as it
is for cooks or housemaids, we find them as faithless. Native
mechanics and seamstresses are just as perfidious as Bridget, but
incur less obloquy, because their faithlessness causes less
annoyance; but they have no more regard in making their plans for
the interest or wishes of their employer than she has, and they
all take the "modern view" of the matter. What makes her so fond
of change is that she lives in a singularly restless society, in
which everybody is engaged in a continual struggle to "better
himself"--her master, in nine cases out of ten, setting her an
example of dislike to steady industry and slow gains. Moreover,
domestic service is a kind of employment which, if not sweetened
by personal affection, is extraordinarily full of wear and tear.
In it there is no real end to the day, and in small households,
the pursuit and oversight, and often the "nagging," of the
employer, or, in other words, the presence of an exacting,
semi-hostile, and slightly contemptuous person is constant. This
and confinement in a half-dark kitchen produce that nervous
crisis which sends male mechanics and other male laborers,
engaged in monotonous callings, off "on a spree." In Bridget's
case it works itself off by a change of place, with a few days of
squalid repose among "her own people" in a tenement-house.
As regards her general bearing as a member of a household, she
has to contend with three great difficulties--ignorance of
civilized domestic life, for which she is no more to blame than
Russian moujiks; difference of race and creed on the part of her
employer (and this is one which the servants of no other country
have to contend with); and lastly, the strong contempt for
domestic service felt and manifested by all that portion of the
American population with which she comes in contact, and to which
it is her great ambition to assimilate herself. Those who have
ever tried the experiment of late years of employing a native
American as a servant, have, we believe, before it was over,
generally come to look on Bridget as the personification of
repose, if not of comfort; and those who have to call on native
Americans, even occasionally, for services of a quasi-personal
character, such as those of expressmen, hotel clerks, plumbers,
we believe are anxious to make their intercourse with these
gentlemen as brief as possible. Most expressmen are natives, and
are freemen of intelligence and capacity, but they carry your
trunk into your hall with the air of convicts doing forced labor
for a tyrannical jailer. If the spirit in which they discharge
their duties--and they are specimens of a large class--were to
make its way into our kitchens, society would go to pieces.
In short, Bridget is the legitimate product of our economical,
political, and moral condition. We have called her, in our
extremity, to do duties for which she is not trained, and having
got her here have surrounded her with influences and ideas which
American society has busied itself for fifty years in fostering
and spreading, and which, taking hold of persons in her stage of
development, work mental and moral ruin. The things which
American life and manners preach to her are not patience,
sober-mindedness, faithfulness, diligence, and honesty, and
eagerness for physical enjoyment. Whenever the sound of the new
gospel which is to win the natives back to the ancient and noble
ways is heard in the land, it is fair to expect that it will not
find her ears wholly closed, and that when the altar of duty is
again set up by her employers, she will lay on it attractive
beefsteaks, potatoes done to a turn, make libations of delicious
soup, and will display remarkable fertility in "sweets," and an
extreme fondness for washing, and learn to grow old in one
family.