The rule is not, of course, absolute, and there are many really good servants who enter a family and stay in it a number of years. But the tendency of the period is nomadic. In some quarters, there is a disposition to account for the perpetual changing of servants on the ground that servants love change. This is not altogether accurate. Many dislike nothing so much as fresh faces and fresh work, and are by no means eager to enter upon the duties of their new home. Others, however, leave one situation with the express hope that they may never enter another, and if employment of a different kind offers, eagerly avail themselves of it, albeit generally to their own disadvantage. Thousands of young men and women in every way qualified for service are swamping many callings. Milliners, dressmakers, clerks, shop-assistants—what a host might be found in the ranks of these who would constitute first-class recruits for private service! It is a fact, that whilst their numbers are on the increase, the numbers of domestics are almost stationary. During the decade 1871 to 1881, the census proved that indoor servants had increased by only one per cent., and consequently, proportionately to the increase of population, were scarcer in 1881 than ten years before. On the other hand, clerks had doubled; milliners had increased by nearly nineteen per cent.; dressmakers, by nearly eight per cent.; and seamstresses, by over five per cent. These figures afford food for reflection. A large proportion of the young men and women to whom they refer are earning barely enough to keep body and soul together. In most cases they are a load upon the shoulders of their friends. For some months of the year the majority are without work. When they are in work, their money will never more than cover immediate wants. Would they not be better off beneath the gentleman’s roof with regular food and regular money? No one who knows anything at all about them will hesitate for a moment to reply in the affirmative. ‘Why, then,’ it will be, and often is asked, ‘do they not go into service?’ It would be found that if they applied for a situation in the household to-morrow, they would want to become ladies’-maids or valets. This disposition is to be explained on two grounds. First, exceptional privileges attach to the personal attendant; secondly, the lower grades of the domestic calling are still regarded with the feelings to which George Eliot gave expression in her dissertation on servants’ logic. The ordinary servant is too frequently and often unjustly branded with the mark of servility and ignorance not only among the upper classes, but to some extent among the industrial classes. To be ‘only a servant’ is, in the society in which the artisan or the clerk moves, to be entitled to less consideration than is given to those who follow a more independent calling. Just as it is the genius of the stage who alone is recognised in the best society, so it