No wages could induce a son or daughter of New-England to take
the condition of a servant on terms which they thought applicable to
that of a slave. The slightest hint of a separate table was resented
as an insult; not to enter the front door, and not to sit in the front
parlor on state occasions, was bitterly commented on as a personal
indignity.
The well-taught, self-respecting daughters of farmers, the class most
valuable in domestic service, gradually retired from it. They preferred
any other employment, however laborious. Beyond all doubt, the labors
of a well-regulated family are more healthy, more cheerful, more,
interesting, because less monotonous, than the mechanical toils of a
factory; yet the girls of New-England, with one consent, preferred the
factory, and left the whole business of domestic service to a foreign
population; and they did it mainly because they would not take positions
in families as an inferior laboring-class by the side of others of
their own age who assumed as their prerogative to live without labor.
"I can't let you have one of my daughters," said an energetic matron
to her neighbor from the city, who was seeking for a servant in her
summer vacation; "if you hadn't daughters of your own, may be I would;
but my girls are not going to work so that your girls may live in
idleness.
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