The great mass of these imported servants, excepting those who come here for the chance to become men and women and to shake off servitude, are a worthless lot, weedings from those perfect English gardens of menialdom. And a hard time their American masters have with them. Insolence, shiftlessness, drunkenness, petty thieving are tolerated to and beyond the most asinine patience; then, one furious day, the housekeeper, under orders from an outraged master or mistress, ejects the whole crew and gets in an entirely new lot. But this revolt of the downtrodden “upper classes” is rare and dangerous and often disastrous. For this servile aristocracy is a close corporation, very limited in numbers and fully awake to its own power over the plutocrats who must at any cost in money, manhood and discomfort have servility and an imitation of the English way of living. Woe, woe, woe unto the plutocrat who gets himself on the imported servants’ black-list! He may have actually to close in whole or in part his vast houses, and to cease from inviting in his hordes of rich friends to see how much more gaudily he is showing off than they are. He may have to call in colored or plain Irish or Swedish servants, mostly women, to save him and his family from the horrors of waiting on themselves. But one shrinks from pushing inquiry in so harrowing a direction. How long will it be before we have a home-grown menial aristocracy to bolster up and make strong our fashionable aristocracy? It may be longer than one might imagine. The educated people, the lawyers, superintendents, merchants, social, political and financial hangers-on, who serve the plutocracy, fall easily into servile habits. The big corporation lawyer and his family, the fifty thousand dollars a year dummy railway president and his family, eagerly pay court to the great plutocrat, bow and scrape and mould themselves to his and his family’s humors. But the “lower classes” here remain obstinately insolent. They go into plutocratic domestic service only under stress; they act in a manner that exasperates their servility-seeking employers; they leave as soon as they can get any sort of job anywhere. Also, they rouse the soundly sleeping or stunned manhood and womanhood of the imported aristocracy-adoring servants, and so compel the constant recruiting of the ranks of the menial aristocracy by fresh importations.