“One of the subjects on which the minds of men and women in the United States seem to be unanimously made up, is the admitted deficiency of _help_.... Disguise it as we may, under all the specious forms of reasoning, there is something in the mind of every man which tells him he is humiliated in doing personal service to another.... The servile nature of domestic duties in Europe, and more particularly in England, is much more likely to make servants liable to the discontent which mars their merits, than the common understanding in America, which makes the compact between ‘employer’ and ‘help’ a mere matter of business, entailing no mean submission on the one hand, and giving no right to any undue assumption of power on the other.... Domestic service is not considered so disgraceful in the United States, as it is felt to be in the United Kingdom.”[165] Grattan’s observations lead him to believe that the democratic spirit is not always to be deplored. “An American youth or ‘young lady’ will go to service willingly, if they can be better paid for it than for teaching in a village school, or working on a farm or in a factory.... They satisfy themselves that they are _helps_, not servants,—that they are going to work with (not for) Mr. so and so, not going to service,—they call him and his wife their _employers_, not their master and mistress.”[166] But like all Europeans, he never ceases to be surprised by this spirit, particularly by those manifestations of it that led to active work on the part of the mistress of a home and to the use of the word “help.” “There are no housekeepers,” he writes, “or ladies’ maids. The lady herself does all the duties of the former.... Servants are thus really justified in giving to themselves the favorite designation of ‘helps.’”[167] But he closes a long and interesting chapter on the subject with the prophecy, “They (employers) will, by degrees, give up the employment of native servants who will be in future less likely than even now to submit to their pretensions, and confine themselves to the fast increasing tribes of Irish immigrants.”[168]