The households of the soberer and more sensible members of the craft are also open to grave animadversion. The ladies are too fine; they treat their friends with wine or punch or fine ale, and have their parlors set off with the tea-table and the chocolate-pot, and the silver coffee-pot, and oftentimes an ostentation of plate into the bargain, and they keep “three or four maid servants, nay, sometimes five,” and some a footman besides, “for ’tis an ordinary thing to see the tradesmen and shopkeepers of London keep footmen, as well as the gentlemen. Witness the infinite number of blue liveries which are so common now that they are called the tradesmens’ liveries, and few gentlemen care to give blue to their servants for that very reason.” Of the maids themselves, who ask “six, seven, nay eight pounds per annum” for their services, a terrible account is given in a pamphlet published about 1725, where there is a humorous description in the first person of a young woman who comes to apply for the place of housemaid, evidently maid of all work to the speaker, who lives with his sister, with a man and maid for their household. She is so fine that Defoe himself shows her into the parlor and keeps her company till his sister is ready, thinking her a gentlewoman come to pay a visit. Perhaps it is not Defoe, but, with his usual skill, he makes us think so. All these details bring before us the London of his time. The mercers had their shops in Paternoster Row, “where the spacious shops, back warehouses, skylights, and other conveniences, made on purpose for their trade, are still to be seen,” where “they all grew rich and very seldom any failed or miscarried,” and also in Cornhill, where Defoe’s own establishment was, though there, apparently, business was carried on wholesale. It appears to him that trade is going downhill fast when this order is changed, when Paul’s Churchyard is filled with cane-chair makers, and Cornhill with the meanest of trades, even Cheapside itself, “how is it now filled up with shoemakers, toy shops, and pastry cooks?” Everything is going to destruction, the old trader thinks, shaking his head as he goes through the well-known streets, where once the fine ladies came in their fine coaches standing in two rows; he cannot think but that trade itself is coming to an end when such changes can come to pass. Trade, he says, like vice, has come to a height, and as things decline when they are at their extremes, so trade not only must decline, but does already sensibly decline. It ought to be a comfort to the many timid persons who have lived and prophesied evil since then to hear that Defoe a hundred and fifty years ago had come to this sad conclusion.