Their general error lies
in expecting that any servant ever will do as well for them as they
will do for themselves, and that an untrained, undisciplined human
being ever _can_ do house-work, or any other work, with the neatness and
perfection, that a person of trained intelligence can.
It has been remarked in our armies that the men of cultivation, though
bred in delicate and refined spheres, can bear up under the hardships
of camp-life better and longer than rough laborers. The reason is,
that an educated mind knows how to use and save its body, to work it
and spare it, as an uneducated mind can not; and so the college-bred
youth brings himself safely through fatigues which kill the unreflective
laborer.
Cultivated, intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of
their own families, are labor-saving institutions. They make the head
save the wear of the muscles. By forethought, contrivance, system, and
arrangement they lessen the amount to be done, and do it with less
expense of time and strength than others. The old New-England motto,
_Get your work done up in the forenoon_, applied to an amount of
work which would keep a common Irish servant toiling from daylight to
sunset.
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