The sooner this is understood and appreciated, the better for the peace and stability of households. It is an invariable rule that the most contented homes are those in which the servant is treated with the greatest respect. Servants must be servants. No one but a lunatic would suggest that they had any right to enter the drawing-room or the dining-room on a footing of equality with its owner. But not less idiotic is it to imagine that they will much longer consent to be regarded as only one degree removed from the beast of burden. Their opportunities for acquiring knowledge are so manifold that it would be wonderful if this were not the case. Ladies and gentlemen sitting round their table are apt to forget that the man or maid waiting upon them has ears, and that their comments on life and the way the world is wagging, cannot fail to excite attention on the part of the domestic. Topics thrashed out in the dining-room or drawing-room are frequently carried below-stairs, and there subjected to a similar process, though it may be on very different lines. The result, equally with that of love as defined by Kenelm Chillingly, must inevitably be ‘a disturbance of the mental equilibrium.’ The unrest which characterises society itself characterises every section of the community. To ‘better’ themselves is the lifelong aim of servants in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Good servants are already at a premium. The complaint is constantly made that whilst domestics are more independent than of yore, their work is less carefully attended to. Those who understand the forces at work in our midst have no difficulty in recognising that, as time goes on, first-class servants will become rarer still. Preposterous as it may seem, this phenomenon is only another phase of the ‘social status’ question. There is, quite without reason, attaching to service a certain disposition on the part of many of our domestics to resent the washing-up of dishes or the cleaning of a floor.