if it comes to statistics, I can bring counter-statements, numerous and
dire, from scores of Southern papers, of vagrancy, laziness,
improvidence, and wretchedness."
"Probably both are true," said I, "according to the greater or less care
which has been taken of the blacks in different regions. Left to
themselves, they tend downward, pressed down by the whole weight of
semi-barbarous white society; but when the free North protects and
guides, the results are as you see."
"And do you think the free North has salt enough in it to save this
whole Southern mass from corruption? I wish I could think so; but all I
can see in the free North at present is a raging, tearing, headlong
chase after _money_. Now money is of significance only as it gives
people the power of expressing their ideal of life. And what does this
ideal prove to be among us? Is it not to ape all the splendors and vices
of old aristocratic society? Is it not to be able to live in idleness,
without useful employment, a life of glitter and flutter and show? What
do our New York dames of fashion seek after? To avoid family care, to
find servants at any price who will relieve them of home
responsibilities, and take charge of their houses and children while
they shine at ball and opera, and drive in the park. And the servants
who learn of these mistresses,--what do they seek after? _They_ seek
also to get rid of care, to live as nearly as possible without work, to
dress and shine in their secondary sphere, as the mistresses do in the
primary one. High wages with little work and plenty of company express
Biddy's ideal of life, which is a little more respectable than that of
her mistress, who wants high wages with no work. The house and the
children are not Biddy's; and why should she care more for their
well-being than the mistress and the mother?
"Hence come wranglings and moanings. Biddy uses a chest of tea in three
months, and the amount of the butcher's bill is fabulous; Jane gives the
baby laudanum to quiet it, while she slips out to _her_ parties; and the
upper classes are shocked at the demoralized state of the Irish, their
utter want of faithfulness and moral principle! How dreadful that there
are no people who enjoy the self-denials and the cares which they
dislike, that there are no people who rejoice in carrying that burden of
duties which they do not wish to touch with one of their fingers! The
outcry about the badness of servants means just this: that everybody is
tired of self-helpfulness,--the servants as thoroughly as the masters
and mistresses. All want the cream of life, without even the trouble of
skimming; and the great fight now is, who shall drink the skim-milk,
which nobody wants. _Work_,--honorable toil,--manly, womanly
endeavor,--is just what nobody likes; and this is as much a fact in the
free North as in the slave South.
"What are all the young girls looking for in marriage? Some man with
money enough to save them from taking any care or having any trouble in
domestic life, enabling them, like the lilies of the field, to rival
Solomon in all his glory, while they toil not, neither do they spin; and
when they find that even money cannot purchase freedom from care in
family life, because their servants are exactly of the same mind with
themselves, and hate to do their duties as cordially as they themselves
do, then are they in anguish of spirit, and wish for slavery, or
aristocracy, or anything that would give them power over the lower
classes."
"But surely, Mr. Theophilus," said Jennie, "there is no sin in disliking
trouble, and wanting to live easily and have a good time in one's
life,--it's so very natural."
"No sin, my dear, I admit; but there is a certain amount of work and
trouble that somebody must take to carry on the family and the world;
and the mischief is, that all are agreed in wanting to get rid of it.
Human nature is above all things lazy. I am lazy myself. Everybody is.
The whole struggle of society is as to who shall eat the hard
bread-and-cheese of labor, which must be eaten by somebody. Nobody wants
it,--neither you in the parlor, nor Biddy in the kitchen.
"'The mass ought to labor, and _we_ lie on sofas,' is a sentence that
would unite more subscribers than any confession of faith that ever was
presented, whether religious or political; and its subscribers would be
as numerous and sincere in the Free States as in the Slave States, or I
am much mistaken in my judgment. The negroes are men and women, like any
of the rest of us, and particularly apt in the imitation of the ways and
ideas current in good society; and consequently to learn to play on the
piano, and to have nothing in particular to do, will be the goal of
aspiration among colored girls and women, and to do housework will seem
to them intolerable drudgery, simply because it is so among the fair
models to whom they look up in humble admiration. You see, my dear, what
it is to live in a democracy. It deprives us of the vantage-ground on
which we cultivated people can stand and say to our neighbor,--'The
cream is for me, and the skim-milk for you; the white bread for me, and
the brown for you. I am born to amuse myself and have a good time, and
you are born to do everything that is tiresome and disagreeable to me.'
The 'My Lady Ludlows' of the Old World can stand on their platform and
lecture the lower classes from the Church Catechism, to 'order
themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters'; and they can base
their exhortations on the old established law of society by which some
are born to inherit the earth, and live a life of ease and pleasure,
and others to toil without pleasure or amusement, for their support and
aggrandizement. An aristocracy, as I take it, is a combination of human
beings to divide life into two parts, one of which shall comprise all
social and moral advantages, refinement, elegance, leisure, ease,
pleasure, and amusement,--and the other, incessant toil, with the
absence of every privilege and blessing of human existence. Life thus
divided, we aristocrats keep the good for ourselves and our children,
and distribute the evil as the lot of the general mass of mankind. The
desire to monopolize and to dominate is the most rooted form of human
selfishness; it is the hydra with many heads, and, cut off in one place,
it puts out in another.
"Nominally, the great aristocratic arrangement of American society has
just been destroyed; but really, I take it, the essential _animus_ of
the slave system still exists, and pervades the community, North as well
as South. Everybody is wanting to get the work done by somebody else,
and to take the money himself; the grinding between employers and
employed is going on all the time, and the field of controversy has only
been made wider by bringing in a whole new class of laborers. The Irish
have now the opportunity to sustain their aristocracy over the negro.
Shall they not have somebody to look down upon?
"All through free society, employers and employed are at incessant
feud; and the more free and enlightened the society, the more bitter the
feud. The standing complaint of life in America is the badness of
servants; and England, which always follows at a certain rate behind us
in our social movements, is beginning to raise very loudly the same
complaint. The condition of service has been thought worthy of public
attention in some of the leading British prints; and Ruskin, in a
summing-up article, speaks of it as a deep ulcer in society,--a thing
hopeless of remedy."
"My dear Mr. Theophilus," said my wife, "I cannot imagine whither you
are rambling, or to what purpose you are getting up these horrible
shadows. You talk of the world as if there were no God in it, overruling
the selfishness of men, and educating it up to order and justice. I do
not deny that there is a vast deal of truth in what you say. Nobody
doubts that, in general, human nature _is_ selfish, callous, unfeeling,
willing to engross all good to itself, and to trample on the rights of
others. Nevertheless, thanks to God's teaching and fatherly care, the
world has worked along to the point of a great nation founded on the
principles of strict equality, forbidding all monopolies, aristocracies,
privileged classes, by its very constitution; and now, by God's
wonderful providence, this nation has been brought, and forced, as it
were, to overturn and abolish the only aristocratic institution that
interfered with its free development. Does not this look as if a
Mightier Power than ours were working in and for us, supplementing our
weakness and infirmity? and if we believe that man is always ready to
drop everything and let it run back to evil, shall we not have faith
that God will _not_ drop the noble work he has so evidently taken in
hand in this nation?"
"And I want to know," said Jennie, "why your illustrations of
selfishness are all drawn from the female sex. Why do you speak of
_girls_ that marry for money, any more than men? of _mistresses_ of
families that want to be free from household duties and
responsibilities, rather than of masters?"
"My charming young lady," said Theophilus, "it is a fact that in
America, except the slaveholders, women have hitherto been the only
aristocracy. Women have been the privileged class,--the only one to
which our rough democracy has always and everywhere given the
precedence,--and consequently the vices of aristocrats are more
developed in them as a class than among men. The leading principle of
aristocracy, which is to take pay without work, to live on the toils and
earnings of others, is one which obtains more generally among women than
among men in this country. The men of our country, as a general thing,
even in our uppermost classes, always propose to themselves some work or
business by which they may acquire a fortune, or enlarge that already
made for them by their fathers. The women of the same class propose to
themselves nothing but to live at their ease on the money made for them
by the labors of fathers and husbands. As a consequence, they become
enervated and indolent,--averse to any bracing, wholesome effort, either
mental or physical. The unavoidable responsibilities and cares of a
family, instead of being viewed by them in the light of a noble
life-work, in which they do their part in the general labors of the
world, seem to them so many injuries and wrongs; they seek to turn them
upon servants, and find servants unwilling to take them; and so selfish
are they, that I have heard more than one lady declare that she didn't
care if it was unjust, she should like to have slaves, rather than be
plagued with servants who had so much liberty. All the novels, poetry,
and light literature of the world, which form the general staple of
female reading, are based upon aristocratic institutions, and
impregnated with aristocratic ideas; and women among us are constantly
aspiring to foreign and aristocratic modes of life rather than to those
of native, republican simplicity. How many women are there, think you,
that would not go in for aristocracy and aristocratic prerogatives, if
they were only sure that they themselves should be of the privileged
class? To be 'My Lady Duchess,' and to have a right by that simple title
to the prostrate deference of all the lower orders! How many would have
firmness to vote against such an establishment merely because it was bad
for society? Tell the fair Mrs. Feathercap, 'In order that you may be a
duchess, and have everything a paradise of elegance and luxury around
you and your children, a hundred poor families must have no chance for
anything better than black bread and muddy water all their lives, a
hundred poor men must work all their lives on such wages that a
fortnight's sickness will send their families to the almshouse, and that
no amount of honesty and forethought can lay up any provision for old
age.'"
"Come now, sir," said Jennie, "don't tell me that there are any girls or
women so mean and selfish as to want aristocracy or rank so purchased!
You are too bad, Mr. Theophilus!"
"Perhaps they might not, were it stated in just these terms; yet I
think, if the question of the establishment of an order of aristocracy
among us were put to vote, we should find more women than men who would
go for it; and they would flout at the consequences to society with the
lively wit and the musical laugh which make feminine selfishness so
genteel and agreeable.
"No! It is a fact, that, in America, the women, in the wealthy classes,
are like the noblemen of aristocracies, and the men are the workers. And
in all this outcry that has been raised about women's wages being
inferior to those of men there is one thing overlooked,--and that is,
that women's work is generally inferior to that of men, because in every
rank they are the pets of society, and are excused from the laborious
drill and training by which men are fitted for their callings. Our fair
friends come in generally by some royal road to knowledge, which saves
them the dire necessity of real work,--a sort of feminine
hop-skip-and-jump into science or mechanical skill,--nothing like the
uncompromising hard labor to which the boy is put who would be a
mechanic or farmer, a lawyer or physician.
"I admit freely that we men are to blame for most of the faults of our
fair nobility. There is plenty of heroism, abundance of energy, and love
of noble endeavor lying dormant in these sheltered and petted daughters
of the better classes; but _we_ keep it down and smother it. Fathers and
brothers think it discreditable to themselves not to give their
daughters and sisters the means of living in idleness; and any
adventurous fair one, who seeks to end the ennui of utter aimlessness by
applying herself to some occupation whereby she may earn her own living,
infallibly draws down on her the comments of her whole
circle:--'Keeping school, is she? Isn't her father rich enough to
support her? What could possess her?'"
"I am glad, my dear Sir Oracle, that you are beginning to recollect
yourself and temper your severities on our sex," said my wife. "As
usual, there is much truth lying about loosely in the vicinity of your
assertions; but they are as far from being in themselves the truth as
would be their exact opposites.
"The class of American women who travel, live abroad, and represent our
country to the foreign eye, have acquired the reputation of being
Sybarites in luxury and extravagance, and there is much in the modes of
life that are creeping into our richer circles to justify this.
"Miss Murray, ex-maid-of-honor to the Queen of England, among other
impressions which she received from an extended tour through our
country, states it as her conviction that young American girls of the
better classes are less helpful in nursing the sick and in the general
duties of family life than the daughters of the aristocracy of England;
and I am inclined to believe it, because even the Queen has taken
special pains to cultivate habits of energy and self-helpfulness in her
children. One of the toys of the Princess Royal was said to be a cottage
of her own, furnished with every accommodation for cooking and
housekeeping, where she from time to time enacted the part of
housekeeper, making bread and biscuit, boiling potatoes which she
herself had gathered from her own garden-patch, and inviting her royal
parents to meals of her own preparing; and report says, that the
dignitaries of the German court have been horrified at the energetic
determination of the young royal housekeeper to overlook her own
linen-closets and attend to her own affairs. But as an offset to what I
have been saying, it must be admitted that America is a country where a
young woman can be self-supporting without forfeiting her place in
society. All our New England and Western towns show us female teachers
who are as well received and as much caressed in society, and as often
contract advantageous marriages, as any women whatever; and the
productive labor of American women, in various arts, trades, and
callings, would be found, I think, not inferior to that of any women in
the world.
"Furthermore, the history of the late war has shown them capable of
every form of heroic endeavor. We have had hundreds of Florence
Nightingales, and an amount of real hard work has been done by female
hands not inferior to that performed by men in the camp and field, and
enough to make sure that American womanhood is not yet so enervated as
seriously to interfere with the prospects of free republican society."
"I wonder," said Jennie, "what it is in our country that spoils the
working-classes that come into it. They say that the emigrants, as they
land here, are often simple-hearted people, willing to work, accustomed
to early hours and plain living, decorous and respectful in their
manners. It would seem as if aristocratic drilling had done them good.
In a few months they become brawling, impertinent, grasping, want high
wages, and are very unwilling to work. I went to several
intelligence-offices the other day to look for a girl for Marianne, and
I thought, by the way the candidates catechized the ladies, and the airs
they took upon them, that they considered themselves the future
mistresses interrogating their subordinates.
"'Does ye expect me to do the washin' with the cookin'?'
"'Yes.'
"'Thin I'll niver go to that place!'
"'And does ye expect me to get the early breakfast for yer husband to be
off in the train every mornin'?'
"'Yes.'
"'I niver does that,--that ought to be a second girl's work.'
"'How many servants does ye keep, ma'am?'
"'Two.'
"'I niver lives with people that keeps but two servants.'
"'How many has ye in yer family?'
"'Seven.'
"'That's too large a family. Has ye much company?'
"'Yes, we have company occasionally.'
"'Thin I can't come to ye; it'll be too harrd a place.'
"In fact, the thing they were all in quest of seemed to be a very small
family, with very high wages, and many perquisites and privileges.
"This is the kind of work-people our manners and institutions make of
people that come over here. I remember one day seeing a coachman touch
his cap to his mistress when she spoke to him, as is the way in Europe,
and hearing one or two others saying among themselves,--
"'That chap's a greenie; he'll get over that soon.'"
"All these things show," said I, "that the staff of power has passed
from the hands of gentility into those of labor. We may think the
working-classes somewhat unseemly in their assertion of self-importance;
but, after all, are they, considering their inferior advantages of
breeding, any more overbearing and impertinent than the upper classes
have always been to them in all ages and countries?
"When Biddy looks long, hedges in her work with many conditions, and is
careful to get the most she can for the least labor, is she, after all,
doing any more than you or I or all the rest of the world? I myself will
not write articles for five dollars a page, when there are those who
will give me fifteen. I would not do double duty as an editor on a
salary of seven thousand, when I could get ten thousand for less work.
"Biddy and her mistress are two human beings, with the same human wants.
Both want to escape trouble, to make their life comfortable and easy,
with the least outlay of expense. Biddy's capital is her muscles and
sinews; and she wants to get as many greenbacks in exchange for them as
her wit and shrewdness will enable her to do. You feel, when you bargain
with her, that she is nothing to you, except so far as her strength and
knowledge may save you care and trouble; and she feels that you are
nothing to her, except so far as she can get your money for her work.
The free-and-easy airs of those seeking employment show one thing,--that
the country in general is prosperous, and that openings for profitable
employment are so numerous that it is not thought necessary to try to
conciliate favor. If the community were at starvation-point, and the
loss of a situation brought fear of the almshouse, the laboring-class
would be more subservient. As it is, there is a little spice of the
bitterness of a past age of servitude in their present attitude,--a
bristling, self-defensive impertinence, which will gradually smooth away
as society learns to accommodate itself to the new order of things."
"Well, but, papa," said Jennie, "don't you think all this a very severe
test, if applied to us women particularly, more than to the men? Mr.
Theophilus seems to think women are aristocrats, and go for enslaving
the lower classes out of mere selfishness; but I say that we are a great
deal more strongly tempted than men, because all these annoyances and
trials of domestic life come upon us. It is very insidious, the
aristocratic argument, as it appeals to us; there seems much to be said
in its favor. It does appear to me that it is better to have servants
and work-people tidy, industrious, respectful, and decorous, as they are
in Europe, than domineering, impertinent, and negligent, as they are
here,--and it seems that there is something in our institutions that
produces these disagreeable, traits; and I presume that the negroes will
eventually be travelling the same road as the Irish, and from the same
influences.
"When people see all these things, and feel all the inconveniences of
them, I don't wonder that they are tempted not to like democracy, and to
feel as if aristocratic institutions made a more agreeable state of
society. It is not such a blank, bald, downright piece of brutal
selfishness as Mr. Theophilus there seems to suppose, for us to wish
there were some quiet, submissive, laborious lower class, who would be
content to work for kind treatment and moderate wages."
"But, my little dear," said I, "the matter is not left to our choice.
Wish it or not wish it, it's what we evidently can't have. The day for
that thing is past. The power is passing out of the hands of the
cultivated few into those of the strong, laborious many. _Numbers_ is
the king of our era; and he will reign over us, whether we will hear or
whether we will forbear. The sighers for an obedient lower class and the
mourners for slavery may get ready their crape, and have their
pocket-handkerchiefs bordered with black; for they have much weeping to
do, and for many years to come. The good old feudal times, when two
thirds of the population thought themselves born only for the honor,
glory, and profit of the other third, are gone, with all their beautiful
devotions, all their trappings of song and story. In the land where such
institutions were most deeply rooted and most firmly established, they
are assailed every day by hard hands and stout hearts; and their
position resembles that of some of the picturesque ruins of Italy, which
are constantly being torn away to build prosaic modern shops and houses.