The great
danger of all this, and of the evils that come from it, is, that
society, by and by, will turn as blindly against female intellectual
culture as it now advocates it, and having worked disproportionately
one way, will work disproportionately in the opposite direction.
Domestic service is the great problem of life herein America; the
happiness of families, their thrift, well-being, and comfort, are more
affected by this than by any one thing else. The modern girls, as they
have been brought up, can not perform the labor of their own families
as in those simpler, old-fashioned days; and what is worse, they have
no practical skill with which to instruct servants, who come to us,
as a class, raw and untrained. In the present state of prices, the
board of a domestic costs double her wages, and the waste she makes
is a more serious matter still.
Many of the domestic evils in America originate, in the fact that,
while society here is professedly based on new principles which ought
to make social life in every respect different from the life of the
Old World, yet these principles have never been so thought out and
applied as to give consistency and harmony to our daily relations.
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