As a class, they are much what they have ever been; their characters varying with the authority placed over them. If ignorant, they are bigoted; if educated, presumptuous; they regard their superiors as their natural enemies, and not one in fifty of them is to be entirely trusted. They no longer look upon the house they enter as their home; they think of it more as a boarding house which they can vacate at their convenience, and themselves as birds of passage, here to-day and gone to-morrow. To deal with and to control such minds effectually, it needs to show them that ours is infinitely the superior. If we let them perceive that we have no means of keeping watch over them except we do it personally, we lower ourselves to their level, and fail to gain their respect. Make your servants admire you; make them wonder at the clearness of your perception, the quickness of your calculations, and the retentiveness of your memory, and inwardly they will acknowledge themselves the inferior, and be afraid to disobey. You will always hear servants speak with admiration of a mistress who has (to quote their own phraseology) “eyes in her back;” the fact being that it requires a mind not only educated in the popular sense of the word, but sharpened by friction with the world, to enable one to _perceive_ without _seeing_; and that is a state to which the lumpish minds of the mass never attain, and which consequently commands their wonder and respect. The “excellent housekeeper” who trots round her kitchen every morning as a rule, opening each dresser-drawer, and uncovering the soup-tureen and vegetable-dishes, to see that no “perquisites” are concealed therein, may occasionally light on a piece of unhallowed fat, but she loses a hundredfold what she gains. While she imagines she has made a great discovery, her servants are laughing in their sleeves at her simplicity; for they have a hundred opportunities of concealing to her one of finding, and are doubtless as cunning as herself. And for such a mistress--for one who is for ever prying and trying to find out something--the lower classes have the greatest contempt; they will neither obey nor save for her; they will even go the length of wasting in order to annoy. But, by this, I have not the least notion of maintaining that the members of that community, of whom I said, but a page before, that not one in fifty is to be trusted, are to be left to do the housekeeping by themselves. A lady of my acquaintance, married to an extremely obstinate man, was asked how she managed to influence him as she did. “Because I never let him know I do it,” was the reply. “I always have my own way, but I make him think my way is his.” Something of the same sort of management is necessary with servants. Have your own way, but make them imagine that your way is theirs. They are truly but “children of a larger growth.” But, in order to do this, you must prove yourself cleverer than they are.