The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865

"But," added my wife, "on the other hand, she would be obliged to associate and be ranked with common Irish servants."

"Well," I answered, "is there any occupation, by which any of us gain our living, which has not its disagreeable side? Does not the lawyer spend all his days either in a dusty office or in the foul air of a court-room? Is he not brought into much disagreeable contact with the lowest class of society? Are not his labors dry and hard and exhausting? Does not the blacksmith spend half his life in soot and grime, that he may gain a competence for the other half? If this woman were to work in a factory, would she not often be brought into associations distasteful to her? Might it not be the same in any of the arts and trades in which a living is to be got? There must be unpleasant circumstances about earning a living in any way; only I maintain that those which a woman would be likely to meet with as a servant in a refined, well-bred, Christian family would be less than in almost any other calling. Are there no trials to a woman, I beg to know, in teaching a district school, where all the boys, big and little, of a neighborhood congregate? For my part, were it my daughter or sister who was in necessitous circumstances, I would choose for her a position such as I name, in a kind, intelligent, Christian family, before many of those to which women do devote themselves."

"Well," said Bob, "all this has a good sound enough, but it's quite impossible. It's true, I verily believe, that such a kind of servant in our family would really prolong Marianne's life years,—that it would improve her health, and be an unspeakable blessing to her, to me, and the children,—and I would almost go down on my knees to a really well-educated, good, American woman who would come into our family, and take that place; but I know it's perfectly vain and useless to expect it. You know we have tried the experiment two or three times of having a person in our family who should be on the footing of a friend, yet do the duties of a servant, and that we never could make it work well. These half-and-half people are so sensitive, so exacting in their demands, so hard to please, that we have come to the firm determination that we will have no sliding-scale in our family, and that whoever we are to depend on must come with bona-fide willingness to take the position of a servant, such as that position is in our house; and that, I suppose, your protégée would never do, even if she could thereby live easier, have less hard work, better health, and quite as much money as she could earn in any other way."

"She would consider it a personal degradation, I suppose," said my wife.

"And yet, if she only knew it," said Bob, "I should respect her far more profoundly for her willingness to take that position, when adverse fortune has shut other doors."

"Well, now," said I, "this woman is, as I understand, the daughter of a respectable stone-mason; and the domestic habits of her early life have probably been economical and simple. Like most of our mechanics' daughters, she has received in one of our high schools an education which has cultivated and developed her mind far beyond those of her parents and the associates of her childhood. This is a common fact in our American life. By our high schools the daughters of plain workingmen are raised to a state of intellectual culture which seems to make the disposition of them in any kind of industrial calling a difficult one. They all want to teach school,—and school-teaching, consequently, is an overcrowded profession,—and, failing that, there is only millinery and dress-making. Of late, it is true; efforts have been made in various directions to widen their sphere. Type-setting and book-keeping are in some instances beginning to be open to them.

"All this time there is lying, neglected and despised, a calling to which womanly talents and instincts are peculiarly fitted,—a calling full of opportunities of the most lasting usefulness,—a calling which insures a settled home, respectable protection, healthful exercise, good air, good food, and good wages,—a calling in which a woman may make real friends, and secure to herself warm affection: and yet this calling is the one always refused, shunned, contemned, left to the alien and the stranger, and that simply and solely because it bears the name of servant. A Christian woman, who holds the name of Christ in her heart in true devotion, would think it the greatest possible misfortune and degradation to become like him in taking upon her 'the form of a servant.' The founder of Christianity says, 'Whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat or he that serveth? But I am among you as he that serveth.' But notwithstanding these so plain declarations of Jesus, we find that scarce any one in a Christian land will accept real advantages of position and employment that come with that name and condition."

"I suppose," said my wife, "I could prevail upon this woman to do all the duties of the situation, if she could be, as they phrase it, 'treated as one of the family.'"

"That is to say," said Bob, "if she could sit with us at the same table, be introduced to our friends, and be in all respects as one of us. Now as to this, I am free to say that I have no false aristocratic scruples. I consider every well-educated woman as fully my equal, not to say my superior; but it does not follow from this that she would be one whom I should wish to make a third party with me and my wife at mealtimes. Our meals are often our seasons of privacy,—the times when we wish in perfect unreserve to speak of matters that concern ourselves and our family alone. Even invited guests and family friends would not be always welcome, however agreeable at times. Now a woman may be perfectly worthy of respect, and we may be perfectly respectful to her, whom nevertheless we do not wish to take into the circle of intimate friendship. I regard the position of a woman who comes to perform domestic service as I do any other business relation. We have a very respectable young lady in our employ who does legal copying for us, and all is perfectly pleasant and agreeable in our mutual relations; but the case would be far otherwise, were she to take it into her head that we treated her with contempt, because my wife did not call on her, and because she was not occasionally invited to tea. Besides, I apprehend that a woman of quick sensibilities, employed in domestic service, and who was so far treated as a member of the family as to share our table, would find her position even more painful and embarrassing than if she took once for all the position of a servant. We could not control the feelings of our friends; we could not always insure that they would be free from aristocratic prejudice, even were we so ourselves. We could not force her upon their acquaintance, and she might feel far more slighted than she would in a position where no attentions of any kind were to be expected. Besides which, I have always noticed that persons standing in this uncertain position are objects of peculiar antipathy to the servants in full; that they are the cause of constant and secret cabals and discontents; and that a family where the two orders exist has always raked up in it the smouldering embers of a quarrel ready at any time to burst out into open feud."

"Well," said I, "here lies the problem of American life. Half our women, like Marianne, are being faded and made old before their time by exhausting endeavors to lead a life of high civilization and refinement with only such untrained help as is washed up on our shores by the tide of emigration. Our houses are built upon a plan that precludes the necessity of much hard labor, but requires rather careful and nice handling. A well-trained, intelligent woman, who had vitalized her finger-ends by means of a well-developed brain, could do all the work of such a house with comparatively little physical fatigue. So stands the case as regards our houses. Now over against the women that are perishing in them from too much care, there is another class of American women that are wandering up and down, perishing for lack of some remunerative employment. That class of women, whose developed brains and less developed muscles mark them as peculiarly fitted for the performance of the labors of a high civilization, stand utterly aloof from paid domestic service. Sooner beg, sooner starve, sooner marry for money, sooner hang on as dependents in families where they know they are not wanted, than accept of a quiet home, easy, healthful work, and certain wages, in these refined and pleasant modern dwellings of ours."

"What is the reason of this?" said Bob.

"The reason is, that we have not yet come to the full development of Christian democracy. The taint of old aristocracies is yet pervading all parts of our society. We have not yet realized fully the true dignity of labor, and the surpassing dignity of domestic labor. And I must say that the valuable and courageous women who have agitated the doctrines of Woman's Rights among us have not in all things seen their way clear in this matter."

"Don't talk to me of those creatures," said Bob, "those men-women, those anomalies, neither flesh nor fish, with their conventions, and their cracked woman-voices strained in what they call public speaking, but which I call public squeaking! No man reverences true women more than I do. I hold a real, true, thoroughly good woman, whether in my parlor or my kitchen, as my superior. She can always teach me something that I need to know. She has always in her somewhat of the divine gift of prophecy; but in order to keep it, she must remain a woman. When she crops her hair, puts on pantaloons, and strides about in conventions, she is an abortion, and not a woman."

"Come! come!" said I, "after all, speak with deference. We that choose to wear soft clothing and dwell in kings' houses must respect the Baptists, who wear leathern girdles and eat locusts and wild honey. They are the voices crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for a coming good. They go down on their knees in the mire of life to lift up and brighten and restore a neglected truth; and we that have not the energy to share their struggle should at least refrain from criticizing their soiled garments and ungraceful action. There have been excrescences, eccentricities, peculiarities about the camp of these reformers; but the body of them have been true and noble women, and worthy of all the reverence due to such. They have already in many of our States reformed the laws relating to woman's position, and placed her on a more just and Christian basis. It is through their movements that in many of our States a woman can hold the fruits of her own earnings, if it be her ill luck to have a worthless, drunken spendthrift for a husband. It is owing to their exertions that new trades and professions are opening to woman; and all that I have to say of them is, that in the suddenness of their zeal for opening new paths for her feet, they have not sufficiently considered the propriety of straightening, widening, and mending the one broad, good old path of domestic labor, established by God Himself. It does appear to me, that, if at least a portion of their zeal could be spent in removing the stones out of this highway of domestic life, and making it pleasant and honorable, they would effect even more. I would not have them leave undone what they are doing; but I would, were I worthy to be considered, humbly suggest to their prophetic wisdom and enthusiasm, whether, in this new future of woman which they wish to introduce, woman's natural, God-given employment of domestic service is not to receive a new character and rise in a new form.

"'To love and serve' is a motto worn with pride on some aristocratic family shields in England. It ought to be graven on the Christian shield. Servant is the name which Christ gives to the Christian; and in speaking of his kingdom as distinguished from earthly kingdoms, he distinctly said, that rank there should be conditioned, not upon desire to command, but on willingness to serve.

"'Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.'

"Why is it, that this name of servant, which Christ says is the highest in the kingdom of heaven, is so dishonored among us professing Christians, that good women will beg or starve, will suffer almost any extreme of poverty and privation, rather than accept home, competence, security, with this honored name?"

"The fault with many of our friends of the Woman's Rights order," said my wife, "is the depreciatory tone in which they have spoken of the domestic labors of a family as being altogether below the scope of the faculties of woman. 'Domestic drudgery' they call it: an expression that has done more harm than any two words that ever were put together.

"Think of a woman's calling clear-starching and ironing domestic drudgery, and to better the matter turning to type-setting in a grimy printing-office! Call the care of china and silver, the sweeping of carpets, the arrangement of parlors and sitting rooms, drudgery; and go into a factory and spend the day amid the whir and clatter and thunder of machinery, inhaling an atmosphere loaded with wool and machine-grease, and keeping on the feet for twelve hours, nearly continuously! Think of its being called drudgery to take care of a clean, light, airy nursery, to wash and dress and care for two or three children, to mend their clothes, tell them stories, make them playthings, take them out walking or driving; and rather than this, to wear out the whole livelong day, extending often deep into the night, in endless sewing, in a close room of a dressmaking establishment! Is it any less drudgery to stand all day behind a counter, serving customers, than to tend a door-bell and wait on a table? For my part," said my wife, "I have often thought the matter over, and concluded, that, if I were left in straitened circumstances, as many are in a great city, I would seek a position as a servant in one of our good families."

"I envy the family that you even think of in that connection," said I. "I fancy the amazement which would take possession of them as you began to develop among them."

"I have always held," said my wife, "that family work, in many of its branches, can be better performed by an educated woman than an uneducated one. Just as an army where even the bayonets think is superior to one of mere brute force and mechanical training, so, I have heard it said, some of our distinguished modern female reformers show an equal superiority in the domestic sphere,—and I do not doubt it. Family work was never meant to be the special province of untaught brains, I have sometimes thought I should like to show what I could do as a servant."

"Well," said Bob, "to return from all this to the question, What's to be done with her? Are you going to my distressed woman? If you are, suppose you take your distressed woman along, and ask her to try it. I can promise her a pleasant house, a quiet room by herself, healthful and not too hard work, a kind friend, and some leisure for reading, writing, or whatever other pursuit of her own she may choose for her recreation. We are always quite willing to lend books to any who appreciate them. Our house is surrounded by pleasant grounds, which are open to our servants as to ourselves. So, let her come and try us. I am quite sure that country air, quiet security, and moderate exercise in a good home will bring up her health; and if she is willing to take the one or two disagreeables which may come with all this, let her try us."

"Well," said I, "so be it; and would that all the women seeking homes and employment could thus fall in with women who have homes and are perishing in them for want of educated helpers!"

On this question of woman's work I have yet more to say, but must defer it to another month.

JEREMY BENTHAM

When I first knew this great and good man, he was in his seventy-ninth year, and quite as remarkable for strength of constitution, (though he had been always ailing up to the age of threescore,) and for cheerfulness of temper, as for the oddities which made him a laughing-stock for Professor Wilson and the reprobates of "Blackwood," a prodigious myth for the "Edinburgh" and "Quarterly," and a sort of Cocklane ghost for Sydney Smith, Hazlitt, Captain Parry, Tom Moore, and Lord Byron.

His "Benthamee" was believed to be a language he had invented for himself, and quite incapable of being understood, or even deciphered, by any but a thorough-going disciple, such as Dr., now Sir John, Bowring, James Mill, the author of "British India," John Stuart Mill, the two Austins, or George Grote, the banker and historian of Greece.

"Ah," said Mrs. Wheeler, a strong-minded, clever woman, the Mary Wollstonecraft of her day, on hearing that I had been asked to the "Hermitage" of Queen-Square Place by Mr. Bentham,—"Ah, you have no idea of what is before you! I wonder you are not afraid."

"Afraid, my dear Madam! Of what should I be afraid?"

"Afraid of being left alone with him after dinner. He cannot bear contradiction. The queerest old man alive. One of his most intimate friends told me that he was undoubtedly deranged, mad as a March hare upon some subjects, and a monomaniac upon others. Do you know that he keeps a relay of young men, thoroughly trained for the work, to follow him round all day and pick up his droppings,—or what his followers call 'sibylline leaves,'—bits of paper, that is, written all over with cabalistic signs, which no mortal could ever hope to decipher without a long apprenticeship? These 'leaves' he scatters round him right and left, while on the trot through his large, beautiful garden, or, if in the house, while taking his 'post-prandial' vibration,—the after-dinner walk through a narrow passageway running between a raised platform in what he calls his 'workshop,' and the outer partition. Here he labors day after day, and year after year, at codification, without stopping to draw a long breath, or even to look up, so afraid is he of what may happen to the world, if he should be taken away before it is all finished. And here, on this platform, the table for one guest, two secretaries, and himself is always set, and he never has more than one guest at a time."

Extravagant and laughable as all this appeared to me at the time, I found truth enough at the bottom, before six months were over, to justify many of the drollest caricatures.

That Mr. Bentham's minutes were drops of gold about this time, and his half-hours ingots, in the estimation of others, I had reason to know,—of others, too, among the foremost celebrities of the age. Hence, though he gave capital dinners, it was one of the rarest things in the world for a stranger to be seen at his table. The curious and the inquisitive stood no chance; and men of the highest rank were constantly refused the introductions they sought.

"Anne, if the Duke of Sussex calls, I am not at home," said he one day to his housekeeper: nobody ever knew why.

And there were hundreds of distinguished men, otherwise well-informed, who believed in Jeremy Bentham, afar off, somewhat as others do in the heroes of Ossian, or in their great Scandinavian prototypes, Woden and Thor. If to be met with at all, it was only along the tops of mountains, where "mist and moonlight mingle fitfully."

For myself, I can truly say, that, of those I met with, who talked most freely about him, and who wrote as if well acquainted, not only with his works, but with the man himself, there was not one in fifty who had ever set eyes on him or knew where to look for the "Hermitage," while the fiftieth could not tell me whether he was an Englishman or Frenchman by birth, (most of his writings on jurisprudence being written by him in French,) nor whether he was living or dead.

Nevertheless, they were full of anecdotes. They went with the scoffers, and quoted Sydney Smith and "Blackwood," while "the world's dread laugh" made them shy of committing themselves to any decided opinion. But if Bentham was a myth, surely Dumont was not, and the shadow might well be allowed to prove the substance; and yet they persisted in believing the most extravagant inventions, and the drollest, without investigation or misgiving.

And even I,—I, myself,—though familiar with his works, both in French and English, was so much influenced by the mystery about him, and by the stories I heard of him, and by the flings I saw in the leading journals, that I was betrayed into writing as follows in "Blackwood," about a year before I first met Mr. Bentham, notwithstanding my profound convictions of his worth and greatness, and my fixed belief that he was cruelly misunderstood and shamefully misrepresented, and that his "Morals and Legislation" and his "Theory of Rewards and Punishments" would change the jurisprudence of the world, as they certainly have done:—

"Setting aside John Locke's Constitution for North Carolina, and Jeremy Bentham's conundrums on Legislation, to speak reverently of what we cannot speak irreverently of, a truly great and incomprehensible mind, whose thoughts are problems, and whose words—when they are English—miracles," etc.

This paragraph occurs incidentally. I durst not go farther at the time; for Bentham had never been mentioned but with a sneer in that journal. I was writing a review of another "British Traveller in America," whose blundering misrepresentations had greatly disturbed me. The book was entitled, "A Summary View of America … By an Englishman." My review was the longest paper, I believe, that ever appeared in "Blackwood." It was the leader for December, 1824; and on the back of the title-page is a note by Christopher North himself, (Professor Wilson,) from which I extract the following rather significant passages.

"Our readers will perceive that this number opens with an article much longer than any that ever appeared in our journal before. As a general rule, we hate and detest articles of anything like this length; but we found, on perusing this, (and so will our readers, when they follow our example,) that in reality every paragraph of it is an article by itself; in fact, that the paper is not an article, but a collection of many articles upon subjects, all full of interest, and most of them not less important than interesting."

"In short, this review of a single book on America contains more new facts, more new reasonings, more new speculations of and concerning the United States of America, than have as yet appeared in any ten books (by themselves, books) upon that subject. This is enough for us, and this will be enough for our readers.

"We do not know personally the author of this article; nor do we pledge ourselves for the justice of many of his views. From internal evidence we believe that he says nothing but what he believes to be true."

On the whole, perhaps, I had better add another paragraph from Christopher North's note. It may serve to disabuse not a few of my countrymen who have hitherto misunderstood the purpose of my "mission" abroad, and especially the nature of my connection with the "Blackwood" freebooters.

"It is certain that he does know America well," continues the Professor; "and it is equally certain that we fully participate in his feelings, as to the folly or knavery of every writer, English or American, who libels either of these countries for the amusement of the other; and we have not the smallest doubt that the appearance of such a writer as we have had the good fortune to introduce will henceforth operate as a salutary check both on the chatterers of the 'Westminster Review' and the growlers of the 'Quarterly.'"

Entertaining the opinions I have stated with regard to Mr. Bentham and his labors, and being well aware that his early writings in English (the "Fragment on Government," for example, wherein, at the age of twenty-eight, he enters the lists with Blackstone so successfully, and the "Defence of Usury," an argument not only unanswered, but unanswerable, to this day) were such models of clearness, strength, and precision, and so remarkable for a transparent beauty of style, that the first was attributed to Lord Mansfield, and the last to others of like reputation; while some of his earlier pamphlets (like that which is entitled "Emancipate your Colonies," being an address to the National Assembly of France, whose predecessors had made him a French citizen, or the "Draught of a Code for the Organization of the Judicial Establishment of France," written at the age of two-and-forty) were quite as remarkable for genius, warmth, manly strength, and a lofty eloquence, as the earlier writings mentioned were for clearness and logical precision,—how could I be guilty of such irreverence, not to say impertinence?

My answer is, that the believers in "Blackwood," having been pampered so long on highly seasoned, fiery pap, to which the lines of M. G. Lewis might often be applied,—

"And this juice of hell,
Wherever it fell,
To a cinder burned the floor,"—

were not ready for the whole truth, for the strong meat, much less for the lion's meat I should have been delighted to serve them with; and so, as in the case of Leigh Hunt and some others eminently obnoxious to that journal, I slipped in the few words I have quoted incidentally, as a sort of entering wedge: and the result in both cases, I must acknowledge, fully justified my expectations; for neither Mr. Bentham nor Leigh Hunt was ever unhandsomely treated or in any way disparaged by that journal from that time forward, so far as I know.

Let me add, that I did this for the same reason that I began writing about our country, and about the institutions, the people, the literature, and the fine arts of America, as if I were an Englishman,—for otherwise what hope had I of being admitted into the "Field of the Cloth of Gold," or of being allowed to break a lance in the tournament which was always open there?—and that I continued writing as an Englishman long after it was known by Blackwood himself, and by Wilson, that I was not only an American, but a Yankee, and a Yankee to the backbone, and that the signature I had adopted—"Carter Holmes"—was not so much a nom de plume as a nom de guerre, till I had got possession of the enemy's battery, and turned the guns upon his camp.