The social disadvantages of domestic service show themselves under the same guise as in America, though often in a much more exaggerated form. In England the existence of a tax on men-servants puts at once a social chasm between the master who pays a tax on luxuries and the servant who is an outward manifestation of that luxury, while the servility of manner that an American finds so exasperating in an English servant is encouraged and even demanded as the birthright inheritance of a well-born Englishman.[373] The servants in their turn enforce among themselves similar social distinctions and the recognition by their fellows of the various grades of social superiority or inferiority[374]—a condition that has its origin partly in a desire to imitate the customs and manners of those above them in the social scale,[375] and partly in the extreme specialization of every form of household work and the resulting inflexibility of all parts of it.[376] It follows that in England “domestic service provides no general bond—perhaps, indeed, rather accentuates class indifferences,” and that, as an occupation, for this and other reasons, “domestic service, though lucrative and in many ways luxurious, is not popular.”[377] In France, while the relations between employer and employee are much more democratic than in England, the social stigma is put on the household servant, in part because of the traditional character given servants in French literature, in part because the construction of the French apartment house places the rooms of all the servants in the mansard story and thus draws a line of social demarkation between those served and those serving, in part because of the bureaucratic character of society. In Italy, domestic servants have apparently no social life whatever. This is partially explained by the long hours of work that leave them no opportunity for it; it is in part because women servants never go out in the evening, receive no callers, and are, as it is often explained, “really servants,” in the sense of having no social ambitions; and it is also because manual work in every form is considered degrading, and those who engage in it are under the social ban—a condition that is apparently accepted without outward protest. Yet much is done to mitigate some of the hard features in the lot of the domestic servant. One of the interesting features in the condition of domestic service in Germany is the large number of benefactions organized for the benefit of domestic employees. There are everywhere homes for aged servants,[378] homes for servants out of work,[379] unions for providing servants with recreation,[380] and schools and homes where they are taught household employments.[381]