The relations of employer and employed in private life and in public are in a state of transition. The foundations of society itself are undergoing drastic modifications, which will either sap or enhance its strength. The air is charged with reform in every department of social life. The very conditions of existence are more or less in the crucible. The connection between man and man, between woman and man, between man and the State, or woman and the State, are every one of them passing through an ordeal of stringent examination. In no direction is the old order of things vanishing more rapidly than in the household. The relations of mistress and maid are not to-day what they were yesterday, or what they will be to-morrow. A hundred years ago, servants were more part and parcel of the establishment than they are now. They entered a family, in the majority of cases, whilst they were young, and marriage or death was the only cause of separation in general. It never occurred to the domestic of the past to ‘give notice,’ any more than it occurred to the mistress to dismiss her servants, on the slightest provocation. We need not travel far to ascertain what are the agencies which have wrought the change. The same influences which are every day giving the working classes increased power have affected in at least an equally pronounced degree the domestic employee. In 1886, the footman or the housemaid, the butler or the cook, is perhaps as well educated as were many heads of households in 1786. If the upper classes are now more cultured than they were in the olden days, so are the lower classes. Advertising mediums, cheapness and ease of locomotion, and the ever-spreading education of the masses, were boons undreamed of by the ‘Jeames’ whom Thackeray portrayed. Before these results of our progress were realised, the sphere within which the energies of servants found play was exceedingly limited. Beyond the locality in which they lived and the immediate circle of their master’s acquaintances, the world was to them little more than a blank and a mystery. To-day, they are nearly as familiar with the world as are their masters.