Note 364 — Chapter XVII · DOMESTIC SERVICE IN EUROPE

Mr. William Clarke, in The Social Future of England, sums up the character of domestic service in England in saying: “It is true that English middle-class service is bad, and even growing worse, and this will continue so long as factory labor is preferred to domestic service. But there is probably no country where the wealthy can secure such efficient and fairly honest service in the butler, valet, lady’s maid, and housekeeper lines as in England.”—The Contemporary Review, December, 1900.

The historical question whether the character of the service has ever been any better than it is at present must also remain unanswered for the same reason. Pandolfini in Il Governo della Famiglia finds the philosophical explanation of poor service in Italy during the fifteenth century in the tendency of servants to seek their own interests rather than those of their masters—an explanation limited by neither time nor place. All literature goes to show that our own age is not alone in finding it difficult to secure those who will “carry the message to Garcia.”