The good servant was one
who, from childhood, had learned "to order himself lowly and reverently
to all his betters." When New-England brought to these shores the
theory of democracy, she brought, in the persons of the first pilgrims,
the habits of thought and of action formed in aristocratic communities.
Winthrop's Journal, and all the old records of the earlier colonists,
show households where masters and mistresses stood on the "right divine"
of the privileged classes, howsoever they might have risen up against
authorities themselves.
The first consequence of this state of things was a universal rejection
of domestic service in all classes of American-born society. For a
generation or two there was, indeed, a sort of interchange of family
strength,--sons and daughters engaging in the service of neighboring
families, in default of a sufficient working-force of their own, but
always on conditions of strict equality. The assistant was to share
the table, the family sitting-room, and every honor and attention that
might be claimed by son or daughter. When families increased in
refinement and education so as to make these conditions of close
intimacy with more uncultured neighbors disagreeable, they had to
choose between such intimacies and the performance of their own domestic
toil.
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