The Express.
London, England, 1863-10-24 00:00:00

0 AY WALLET.

Tilts EvErnea, THE WOLF AND THE LOMB.—FINESSEI
or, SPY AND COUNTEMPY. Messrs. A-Wigan and Buck-
stone Morton. Wrs. A. Wigan, and Miss Anuel.—And
CHARLES XIL Messrs. Wigan end Endplate.

LITSUY..

01 SATURDAY, OCT. 3CBILBVIONIO, a rove Starr.
Meant. Pechter. Brougham, Imery, Limits, and Jordon ;
Moen Tom Lamm, sad ilswertlq, sad him Lee.

TEI ammo. THa 61S11(FITOCIS ay. Ws. 8. Lana.
—TIM GREAT GROdr EVFIECT. Hegira laimukla end coots :
Meadalnell Cranford and Yam:dd. —lllldinff by Rem Colin"
Hr. Randall, and lime. Pleon.—And ELY O'CONNOR.

HIGH SAT= AT LONDON ILIUDIM
TEO DAT —llsehs. Oh. 05... . Afirscos Oh. Om
ToAssaow Manatsg. Oh. 075... .Aftwass. Oh. Ms.

LONDON, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24.

THERE are times when it really looks as if the
Fates bad set themselves against the institution
of female domestic service. Our housewives it is
driving to aometbiug like despair. The reasons
of the prevalent badness of domestic service
are so grave that they cannot be too openly or
too seriously discussed, and the time has come
when mere petulant complaint and comparison
of old times with the present are worse than folly,
because the most energetic practical efforts are
necessary to remove the evil.
The .colonies are incessantly crying out to us to
send them domestic servants—young women who can
cook, and clean, and sew, and take care of young
children. At the Social Science Meeting Mr.
Kai Poarmi said that at Canterbury, New Zealand,
not less than a hundred female servants were
wanted, in a population of a thousand, and we
hear the same sort of thing from British Columbia,
and • score of other colonies. We propose to
superintend emigration here, and urge the estab-
lishment of a similar superiutondence at the other
end of the voyage ; and everything seems ready
for the accomplishment of a very good work, when
the question occurs—" Row can we send good
" servants to the colonies when they are
" not to be had at home ? We ourselves want
"them so much that if they could be found
"they would not need to emigrate, for they could
" obtain such wages at home as were never
" dreamed of in a former generation." There is
no difference of opinion, we believe, about the
reality and the severe pressure of the evil ; and
we have ourselves shown how far it is due t.
special changes in the industrial world of our time.
At Edinburgh last week there was more said
about employments for women of the middle
classes than about domestic service, because the
particular business of the speakers or readers was
with the case of poor ladies. But some good sugges-
tions were made. It was urged in a paper by one of
the ladies that training for domestic business should
be a part of the school education of girls of the
working class. The Rev. Mr. Wrisow advocated
the training of workhouse girls to domestic service,
and gave an account of some efforts in this
direction made at Edinburgh. The universal
difficulty was brought forward again—the reluct-
ance of girls to go into service, and of their
parents to send them ; and the pride which causes
an absolute rejection of the opportunity of learn-
ing, when an industrial department is opened in any
school for the purpose of training girls in house-
hold offices. Whatever be the causes of this pre-
ference of any other employment to that of boom.
hold service, and however absurd and grievous
may be the opposition of parents and children to
anything being taught in school which has not
more or less of a bookish character, these influences
are not all that are concerned in the case. Bat
for other and deeper evils there would bo still a
supply, greater or smaller according to circum-
stances, of the sound, and simple, and hearty, and
thorough service which made the homes of our fore-
fathers so comfortable; and the presence of such an
industrial element would render impossible the
silly and disagreeable uppishness of the clam bait
above, which makes girls who have none but
domestic prospects of a humble kind refuse to
qualify themselves for the most imperative duty
of their lives. If our villages sent forth the
healthy, tidy, hard-working girls who were once to
be found in rural cottages all over the land, our
streets of small shops would not send out thou-
sands of girls to school, who will spend six hours
a day over books and slates, but will stay at home
rather than stoop to learn any of the duties of
housekeepers. It seems a clear point that the
badness of servants, and the low quality of humble'
housekeeping, are closely connected, in whatever
proportion they may act upon each other.
And what further explanation do we need of
the absence of the main element of good domestic
service, than the recent disclosures of the economy
of our labourers' dwellings ? The first effort
needed when such statements as those from Nor-
folk (on several occasions lately, and especially in
our paper of Saturday last) are put before us is
to believe what we read, and then follows the dif-
ficulty of seeing how the children born in such
places can ever become fit for anything whatever.
The statement in our columns was extracted
from the Norfolk News, and its close agreement
with the report of Mr. CLARK; the Sanitary In-
spector, which we lately noticed, leaves no reseals
for doubting its substantial truth. Yet which of
us mould have credited or imagined such a state of
things if it had been possible to avoid it f The
hard selfishness which grows up under the Act
of Settlement is bad enough—the seffisbneas
which crowds twice or three times as many
inmates into a cottage as it will properly
hold, and which refuses to provide homes near
the field of work for the labourers who do the
work, lest a day should come when they clan week
no longer, but must be supported by the rates.
This is sufficiently disgusting and shameful ; but
it can be accounted for. The deeper horror of
the ruinous state of such cottages as there are is
altogether perplexing. It is impossible to conceive
of any advantage to anybody from letting cottages,
any more than other property, crumble into ruin;

and there are other evils to landlords than expo-I
sure from the decay and destruction of that class
of property. We try in vain to imagine a squire
or nobleman (whoever he may be), the owner of •
park which has four lodges, and of 2,000 acres of
land, who never repairs the cottages of his tenants,
and makes them pay 3/. 10s. • year for two rooms,
the floor of which is mere damp earth, with holes of
15 inchesdeep, and the threshold so rotted away that
there was no deficiency of air, though the window
was not made to open. It is scarcely possible to
imagine the rich man and his.wife being actually
in this hovel, seeing the state of it, doing nothing
to mend it, in answer to piteous petitions ; paying
the tenant nine shillings • week as wages, and
demanding 31. 10s. rent out of it ; counting
the children, and giving notice to quit, on account
of their number, well knowing that there was no
other dwelling to be had in the neighbourhood.
Considering that there are three other lodges in
the same park in much the same condition as to
damp, stagnation, crowding, and bad repair, and
that the owner must have many more labourers
living on his property in co:tages not likely to be
better cared for than his park lodges, we see at
once who is answerable for the cutting off of the
supply of decent and respectable labour which
used to issue from the rural cottage.
The main part of the domestic service of the
kingdom has always been derived from the country.
The cottage housewife used to send out her girls,
tidy, healthy, and more than willing to go into a
place where they could be further trained. What
can we expect now, in districts where children are
brought up as in these Norfolk cottages 1 Stifled
in their sleep, crowded in their beds, boys and
girls together, with vermin and mouldy thatch
dropping upon their faces ; in the day shuffling
barefoot over a damp clay floor, or rotting boards ;
half naked, and not thinking of being ashamed ;
cooking nothing, because the food is dry bread ;
washing nothing, because the nearest water is a
mile off ; learning nothing, because there is no-1
thing to be done ;—is this the preparatory school
to which any of us would go for our domestic
servants f Mr. Mzuni not long since repro-
bated the employment of women in agri-1
culture, which is the practice in parts of the
north of England ; and some of the ladies
at Edinburgh expressed the same disapproval ;
but if they had seen what the condition of the
labourer's wife and daughters is at home, in such
cottages as too many of them live in, the most
kindly observers would consider them better off
under the open sky, engaged in wholesome weed-
ing, picking, binding, gathering, or haymaking,
than rotting in such holes and hovels as their
landlords put them into, and make them pay for.
There must surely be some way of reaching
such men as this owner of "a fine park with four
" entrances," to punish him for injuries to his
tenants, or to compel him to make his lodges and
cottages properly habitable. We must reraembe-
that he is but one in a district of landholders and
cottage owners. Their intolerable tsetse and
offences mast be put an end to by laws which
exist or must be created. Meantime, upon them
is chargeable the destruction of the true old English
custom—the good and happy custom by which
the rural labouring clam supplied the domestic
service of the country. Every cottage owner of
tills intolerable sort introduces discomfort, dis-
credit, and waste into the homes of citizens whom
he has never thought or heard of ; and when this
becomes more and more clearly understood, from
the increasing embarruament about Domestic
Service, such landlords, callous thus far, may set
about doing their duty to their labourers at last.
What no consideration of justice or humanity
obtains from them now, they will sooner or later
yield from impulses of shame and fear.