The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-03-03
THE ''HERALD' AND THE SERVANT
GIRLS .......
Fro1n the N. Y. World,

From the NJ Y. World.
The Herald has just been guilty of piece
of base ingratitude. Notoriously that sheet
was put upon its legs, and is now, in some-
what rickety manner it is true, kept there,
by the advertisements and subscriptions of
the class ''servant girl" Many of these
deluded creatures continue to advertise in
the Herald, since their benighted ignorance
does not give them to understand that the
day of the Herald's destiny is over and the
star of its fate hath declined. Its contents
are carefully written down to what the au-
thors of them consider the "servant-gal'
leeel, on the principle upon which one some-
times hears a stupid person talking broken
English to a foreigner, that the worse Eng
lish their notions are couched in the better
people who do not understand good English
will understand them. Yet the Herald on
Tuesday turned and bit the loving hand that
fed it, with the statement that the servant
girls who serve by standing and waiting
at intelligence offices ''are women hardened
in crime," ''girls lost to shame," and
''paramours and assistants of thieves and
burglars" Prostitutes tired Of the mono
tonous work of the street, according to this
luminary, resort to service through intelli-
gence offices. Twaddle. The fact is that, as
has been amply demonstrated in connection
| with the subject of official regulation of
prostitution, the first need and care of an
| inveterate prostitute is absence of restraint.
| And the rigid restraint of domestic service is
| abhorrent beyond all else to woman of such
character. ''The police state" that their
''efforts to ferret out and detect crime are de-
| feated by the paramours and assistants of
burglars and thieves who are employed in
private houses" The fact is that such
''efforts" are foiled by the incompetency or
| Incidence of the police themselves, and that
an astute detective would require no better
clue to crime than the presence in the scene
| of its commission of an accomplice in it. OF
course, there may be isolated instances of
this kind. But to say that servant girls in
| general, or to any considerable extent, are of
| this character is to promulgate self-refuting
absurdity, and to perpetrate shameful SLAM
| der upon class whose reputation is their
main reliance for support. All this prepos-
ferrous proposition the Herald erects upon
the credible and not at all wonderful state
ment that a servant in Brooklyn has stolen
several hundred dollars werth of property
from her employer, and the further and alto
eether incredible statement by the police"
that she has stolen $4,000 within the past
six months.
1 But, though the statements of the Herald
are thus absurd, it is easy to see its motive for
making them. Intelligence offices, y We are
informed in the chaste English of the Herald,
''are run by parties who are in with
thieves" and obviously intelligence Offices
are rivals of the HeraId for the patronage Of
servant girls. Accordingly, it was Through
the agency of intelligence offices" that this
singular servant girl in Brooklyn ''obtained
places" and that all vile persons obtain
places On the contrary, the inference is,
servant girls who are pure and just and
lovely and of good report rely upon the
Herald. We cannot object to the HerGIdi
making frantic efforts to retain the precarioui
: patronage of the class which keeps it alive
But we do object to its carrying those efforts
SO far as to slander such members OF tina
class as have enough intelligence to avoid ad
vertisng in it. o