The term indicates social conditions which no longer exist and represents ideas which no longer have real life--we have but to consider how the radical Defoe published, in 1724, “The Great Law of Subordination consider’d; or, the Insolence and Unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into,” to be convinced of our vast advance in human sympathy--and a revival of our American spirit toward the word would be a wholesome course. In the mouths of many who use it to excess--those mainly at fault are innocently imitative, unthinking, or pretentious women--it sounds ungracious, if not vulgar, and distinctly untrue to those who made the country for us and desirable for us to live in; and untrue also to the best social feeling of to-day. It is still for a genuine American rather hard to imagine a person such as the word “servant” connotes--a lackey, a receiver of tips of any sort--with an election ballot in hand and voting thinkingly, knowingly, intelligently for the guidance of our great government. It would not have been so difficult for the old δοῦλοι of Athens to vote upon the Pnyx as for such a man to vote aright for us. And not infrequently, in the ups and downs of speculation and the mushroom growth and life of fortunes among us, the “servant,” to use the old biblical phrase, is sometimes greater in moral, intellectual, and social graces than his “lord.” The term belongs to times, and the temperamental condition of times when traces of slavery were common, and when employers believed, and acted upon the faith, that they hired not a person’s labor but the person himself--or herself--who was subject to a sort of ownership and control. Let us remand the word to the days of Dean Swift and such conditions as the tremendous satire of his “Directions to Servants” exhibited, in which--except perhaps in Swift’s great heart--there was neither the humanity of our times, nor the courtesy of our times, nor the sure knowledge of our times--which endeavor to create, and, in truth, are gradually making trained and skilful workers in every department, and demand in return for service with perfectness as its aim, independence of the person, dignified treatment and genuine respect from the employer.