The Sun.
London, England, 1861-09-20 00:00:00

OUR FEMALE SERVANTS.

The complaint of the scarcity of good female
servants is a topic that naturally crops out now
and then in the reports and evidence collected and
published by the Education Commission. We are
reminded that, if servants are demoralized, some
of the same causes have been at work among
their superiors also. Intellectual have taken the
place of domestic pursuits, and the upper and
middle classes no longer exercise that constant
supervision over their household affairs which
they used to do. It is regarded as beneath
their dignity, and they are incompetent for it ; for
the highest ambition of a young woman is that
which she least of all qualifies herself for—namely,
to become a wife. Many influences have ope-
rated to change the character of domestic servants.
There is the asserted growing insubordination and
love of independence on the part of the rising gene-
ration ; the larger demand for women in other
employments as well as in this ; the love of change
and locomotion generated by the increased facility
of communication ; and the multiplied temptations
to gaiety which prove so attractive to the young.
But the school itself, it is said, by a too ambitious
course of instruction, often tends to raise girls above
domestic service while imperfectly fitting them for
it. The Rev. G. W. Proctor, of Devonport, in a
communication made by him, refers at some length
to the pupil-teacher system, acknowledging it to
be a great improvement on the monitorial, but
strongly objecting to the tempting and stimu-
lating girls in humble life to endeavour to attain
the power of answering such difficult questions as
have been proposed at the examinations for Queen's
scholarships ; he says it furnishes them with an
excuse for shirking common-sense every day do-
mestic duties, and fosters the idea of becoming the
lady in the family. He states. that respectable
Christian mothers of humble life, who would have
their daughters live a modest, virtuous, useful life of
indsstry, complain that the present system of female
education is placing new and unlooked-for difficul-
ties in their way. It makes young girls impatient
and dissatisfied with home restraints and home cir-
cumstances, more attractive to the seducer of higher
social position, and more susceptible of the influence
of his refinement of manner and tastes, and so more
easily his victims.

MISCELLANEOUS STATISTICS.—A volume bearing
this title is issued by the Board of Trade in every alternate
year. It has just made its appearance. It contains a mul-
titudinous host of statistical tables, collected chiefly from
the various returns made to Parliament from time to time,
arranged and classified as they relate to different subjects—
population, pauperism, crime, revenue and expenditure,
prices and wages, banks, railways, and other matters.
Opening the book at random we learn that there were
10,780 miles of electric telegraphs open in the United King-
dom in 1860, with 51,221 miles of wires, and that they sent
1,789,257 messages for the general public, besides a much
larger number sent for the railway companies, public offices,
and newspapers. In the course of the year nearly 3,000,000
people visited the national museums, the palaces, the
Tower, Greenwich Hospital, and Kew Gardens. , Seventy-
six persons lost their lives in the year by accidents in facto-
ries under inspection, 45 travellers by railway accidents,
536 persons by wreaks on our coasts. But it would be vain
to try by selections to give any idea of such a collection as
this. Unfortunately it shows, the imperfection of many of
our statistical returns. The causes tried at Guildhall re-
turned year after year under the head of "Causes tried at
Westminster ;" a return of the number of patients at " the
principal London hospitals," taking no notice of University
and King's College.hospitals; an annual return of the pro-
ceedings of the Divorce Court, giving such trivial particu-
lars as the number of motions and summonses, but never
stating the number of divorces decreed—these are instances
of defects that mightpurely be remedied.