For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am
afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I
am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try
to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment,
or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise,
it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not
groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of
mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday,
thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's `History of Trade
Unionism' the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It
would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One
would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The
mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked
wonders. There has been no servants' campaign, no strategy, nothing
but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in
isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are
not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they
glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other
forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic
service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing
itself.
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