Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Another great feature in the system of our English training, is the
severe separation of children from servants. Many are the families of
mere English gentry, totally removed from the nobility, who never permit
their children to enter the servants' hall nor the kitchen. And the
probable remark upon so rigorous a separation, which an inconsiderate
person will make, that it is founded upon aristocratic arrogance,
happens to be in the very teeth of the truth. We shall content ourselves
with saying, that the comfort as well as benefit of both parties were
promoted by such an arrangement; whilst, so far from arguing hauteur, it
was the high civil condition of the English servant, which, by forcing
respect from his master, first widened the interval between the two
ranks, and founded a wholesome repulsion between them. In our own times,
we have read descriptions of West India planters admitting the infant
children of their slaves to play and sprawl about their saloons: but
now, since the slave has acquired the station of a free man, and (from
the fact of not having won this station meritoriously, but passively
received it as a boon) is too generally disposed to use it in a spirit
of defiance, does any man expect such scenes for the future? Through the
prevalence of habit, old cases of that nature may happen to survive
locally: but in the coming generation, every vestige of these indulgent
relations will have disappeared in the gloomy atmosphere of jealous
independence. That infant, who had been treated with exemplary kindness
as a creature entirely at the mercy of his master, and the living
monument of his forbearance, will be thrown sternly upon his legal
rights when he has the power of enforcing those rights in so many
instances against his patron. This case, from its abruptness, involves
unamiable features: but the English case had developed itself too
gradually and naturally to be otherwise than purely dignified for both
parties. In the age of Beaumont and Fletcher, (say 1610-1635,) gentlemen
kicked and caned their servants: the power to do so, was a privilege
growing out of the awful distance attached to rank: and in Ireland, at
the opening of the present century, such a privilege was still matter of
prescriptive usage, and too frequently furnished the matter for a
menace. But the stealthy growth of civilization and of civil liberty in
England, moved onwards so surely, under the stimulation of manufacturing
industry, (making menial service a secondary object for the poor,) that
before 1750, a gentleman, forgetting himself so far as to strike a
servant, would have been recalled to better thoughts by an action for
assault. On the Continent, for the very reason that no such rights had
been matured for servants, it was possible to treat them with much more
indulgence: because the relations between the two parties were less
honourable, allowing to the servant nothing in the way of absolute
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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