Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-02-15
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In & paper in Scribner's Magazine Robert Grant touches on vital ques- ton in American social life. It is whether in the matter of servants the United States is going to follow dead in the wake of the old European coun- tries, with their rigid social caste sys- tenn. He declares, what is plain to all, that the American woman of means and standing is doing at present all she possibly can to work this country oyer on the European social system. If she succeeds, we shall have in 25 years ''anI enormous duoking and soraping, fee seeking, livery wearing servant class, y and we shall have no social equality at all. If that is what the American mis- tress is aiming at, it would have been better if our ancestors had never come to America at all It was not worth while The European social system was much better in Europe than it ever can be in America.
 In 25 years MT. Grant thinks we shall have a reproduction of the typical serv- ant class of Europe, or else i've must change the conditions of domestic sery- ioe-change them so that oondesoension and seryility vanish and the contract of service becomes like the other contracts of employment between man and man and man and woman.
 There will probably be a way out which does not seem to have occurred to Mir Grant. The discovery of new machines and methods, the application of electricity to household tasks, the growth of cooperative housekeeping, will revelutionize domestic work so ef- feotually that the servant girl as now known will no longer be needed. Half the labor that used to be performed in the home has already been relegated to the factory. Nobody is ashamed to work in factory or in place where work is done by wholesale away from home. It is the thought of being in some meas ure slavish body servant that is dis tasteful, and no freeborn American woman can be blamed for oherishing such aversion. But the housekeeping of the future will do away with domestic slavery, send most of the tasks out of the house to be performed, and make what remains so light, dainty and es- thetio that it will be a pleasure to per form it even for the daughters of the house.
 1t is agreeable to know that MT. Grant does not blame the freeborn American woman for this dislike of do- nestle service But what he thinks in his heart of large and increasing class of young women in this country is set forth in vigorous words. If, after read ing the following, 100, 900 girl clerks do not fly into the authors hair, if he has any. then they are better tempered than they impress the average customer at dry goods store as being-that's all:
 Even that shrfli voiced. banged. bangled. impertinent. slangy, vulgar product of our mammoth retail dry goods system, who seems to believe herself 8 pattern of ladylike be- haVior, Is aware in her heart that she does not know how to behave and yearns to resemble the we'll bred woman whom she daily insults. But the happiness of her life, and it's main spring, too, lies in the consciousness that she Is free to become the first lady tD the land, and that she herself is to be her sole critic and detractor. Why is she not right in refusing to sacrifice her independenceY Why should she sell her birthright for mess of pottage9