In this country, our democratic institutions have removed the
superincumbent pressure which in the Old World confines the servants
to a regular orbit. They come here feeling that this is somehow a land
of liberty, and with very dim and confused notions of what liberty is.
They are very extensively the raw, untrained Irish peasantry, and the
wonder is, that, with all the unreasoning heats and prejudices of the
Celtic blood, all the necessary ignorance and rawness, there should
be the measure of comfort and success there is in our domestic
arrangements.
But, as long as things are so, there will be constant changes and
interruptions in every domestic establishment, and constantly recurring
interregnums when the mistress must put her own hand to the work,
whether the hand be a trained or an untrained one. As matters now are,
the young housekeeper takes life at the hardest. She has very little
strength,--no experience to teach her how to save her strength. She
knows nothing experimentally of the simplest processes necessary to
keep her family comfortably fed and clothed; and she has a way of
looking at all these things which makes them particularly hard and
distasteful to her.
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