Servant (social class)

“ He who employs laborers, with the right to command, is a master, and he who lets himself to work, with an obligation to obey, a servant. Thus there are house, or domestic servants, farm servants, shop servants, and various other servants ”

“ The characteristic and pervasive human relation in such a culture is that of master and servant, and the social (domestic and civil) structure is an organisation of graded servitude, in which no one is his own master but the overlord, even nominally. ”

“ There were some indentured servants who willingly entered upon their temporary bondage, poor persons who agreed to serve for a fixed term in return for transportation to America, but they were not numerous. The third class of domestic servants were the free help, the only real wage-workers in this occupation, and it is they with whom we have to concern ourselves. ”

“ The second is industrial, and arises from the fact that she must offer in exchange for wages no particular services, but her entire time, to be disposed of as her employer sees fit. The third, which arises from her intimate personal relation to her employer, is social, and results in the determination of her position in society, not by her worth nor by her qualifications for social intercourse, but by her position as a member of the serving class. ”

“ There were few servants, in the European sense of the word; there was a society of educated workers, where all were practically equal, and where, if there was a deficiency in one family and an excess in another, a helper, not a servant in the European sense, was hired. ”

“ I said, "the poor as a class were in the economic service of the rich, or, as we used to say, labor was dependent on capital for employment, but this service and employment had become in the nineteenth century an entirely voluntary relation on the part of the servant or employee. The rich had no power to compel the poor to be their servants. ”

“ I think no one, not radically averse to the whole system of domestic servitude, would have treated servants, of whatever class, with such uniform and thoughtful consideration,—a regard which wholly merged their factitious condition in their antecedent and permanent humanity. ”

“ In the same way the private shopkeeper, as I have already explained, would be replaced by the department managers and buyers of the public stores, the rent collector, the estate bailiff—one might make long lists of social types who would undergo a parallel transformation.
But suppose now you are a servant, I mean a well-trained, expert, prosperous servant; would the world have no equivalent of you under the new order? I think probably it would. With a difference, there will be room for a vast body of servants in the Socialist State. ”

“ As to the terms of social intercourse, it seems somehow to be settled in the minds of many employers that their servants owe them and their family more respect than they and the family owe to the servants. But do they? What is the relation of servant to employer in a democratic country? Precisely that of a person who for money performs any kind of service for you. The carpenter comes into your house to put up a set of shelves,—the cook comes into your kitchen to cook your dinner. ”

“ There is still a helplessness in many of the servant class, and a disposition to look for largess as well as wages, which are the traits naturally resulting from a state of voluntary submission to others. ”

“ Servants, for one example, are treated with extraordinary consideration and kindliness; when the feast is over the mistress of the household is apt as not to dance with the man who feeds her pigs, or the head of the family to take the arm of the girl who has been waiting on his guests. The truth is that this impression of equality is false; there are not many places in the world where a more rigid social order exists—not of caste, but of classes. ”

“ The supposition that hired servants were the highest class, takes from the parable an element of winning beauty and pathos. It is manifest to every careful student of the Bible, that one class of servants, was on terms of equality with the children and other members of the family. ”

“ It should be shown to them, that, in this Country, labor has ceased to be degrading, in any class; that, in all classes, different grades of subordination must exist; and that it is no more degrading, for a domestic to regard the heads of a family as superiors in station, and treat them with becoming respect, than it is for children to do the same, or for men to treat their rulers with respect and deference. ”

“ The dues in kind and services are commuted for money payments. The labourer, who was a serf, becomes now either a free peasant or a free servant and day-wage worker who is no longer astricted to the soil, but can leave his employer whenever he likes and seek such work as most agrees with his capacity and inclination. ”

“ An ill service was done to the working class by utterances on marriage and the family, which gave the ruling classes who keep the workers out of their rights the plea that they were maintaining the fundamental principles of social order. ”

“ To sum up, then, our case: if we require a comfortable house we must take our servants young and train them ourselves, or we must be very sure that the servant is what she claims to be, and that the character she is provided with is a good one; and, finally, we must endeavour to refill{204} the ranks of upper and better-class servants from the overstocked ones of nursery governesses and unoccupied girls, whose parents have not provided for them, and who are unable to do a single thing by which they can in any measure help themselves. ”

“ In the legislation in regard to service and servants, it is impossible always to discriminate between the general class of either bound or life servants and the particular class of domestic employees. But the smaller class was comprised in the larger, and household servants had the benefit of all legislation affecting servants as a whole. ”

“ We shall find the best and simplest illustration of the relations of master and operative in the position of domestic servants.
We will suppose that the master of a household desires only to get as much work out of his servants as he can, at the rate of wages he gives. He never allows them to be idle; feeds them as poorly and lodges them as ill as they will endure, and in all things pushes his requirements to the exact point beyond which he cannot go without forcing the servant to leave him. In doing this, there is no violation on his part of what is commonly called "justice." ”

“ None but the lowest class of the people engaged as hired servants, and the kinds of labor assigned to them required little knowledge and skill. No persons seem to have become hired servants except such as were forced to it from extreme poverty. The hired servant is called "poor and needy," and the reason assigned by God why he should be paid as soon as he had finished his work is, "For he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it." Deut. ”

“ Instead of a number of classes in society, especially instead of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, there must be but one class, which works directly or indirectly for the state, and receives as wages what the state decides to give to them. ”

“ In the organization of the Knights of Labor the common or the unskilled laborer finds a home, a retreat where he can do that for himself which the skilled laborer does for himself in his organization. If the labor organization confers benefits, and none doubt the fact who know anything of their operations, why should not the common laborer, the unskilled workingman, participate in such blessings? Why should not the home of the common laborer be made bright and beautiful? Why should not the wife and children of the common laborer be surrounded with the comforts of life? ”

“ All English literature of the world describes domestic service in the old feudal spirit and with the old feudal language, which regarded the master as belonging to a privileged class and the servant to an inferior one. ”

“ They who would seek in their foolish pride to establish the pomp of liveried servants in America are doing that which is simply absurd. A servant can never in our country be the mere appendage to another man, to be marked like a sheep with the color of his owner; he must be a fellow-citizen, with an established position of his own, free to make contracts, free to come and go, and having in his sphere titles to consideration and respect just as definite as those of any trade or profession whatever. ”

“ Servants constitute an isolated class. By an unwritten social law they are cut off from intimacy with their superiors, and consequently fail to reap the advantages which follow a community of interests with those above them. ”

“ Does society owe assistance only to those who are incapable of working, or does it owe it also to those who are capable but are exceptionally out of work, and thereby reduced to a condition of extreme misery—to a kind of temporary servitude and minority? ”

“ Now, while I recognize that there must be for convenience's sake, a division of labor, I want to radiate the feeling and belief that there is no higher, no lower, in this call of personal service. It is just as honorable to be a street sweeper or a scavenger of the meanest kind (so-called) , to be a farm laborer, to be a kitchen drudge, to be a factory hand, as it is to be a minister of a church that pays a salary of $20,000 a year. ”

“ Far behind his class come the rank and file of commonplace drudges, who work in a rut and submit to being led like sheep. They may be clerks, domestic servants, trade union operatives, pensioners, or small investors. They form the large, undistinguished, but useful mass of humanity. ”

“ The industrial classes emerge from slavery and serfdom into a wage system, which in turn is modified in the direction of fair wages, short hours, and security of employment—fundamental conditions for personal development. ”

“ One can easily see how ties of good-fellowship and sympathy would arise between masters and servants, how a community [303] of interest would exist, so that the good of the master and his family would be the condition for the good of the servant and his family. In America, where the relation between servant and employer is usually a simple business arrangement, each giving certain specified considerations and nothing more, the relation of servant to master is shorn of all sentiment and affection ”

“ Then they have considered their servants as mere machines, from which labor must be extorted by all available means.
"A man servant is rarely grateful, and seldom attached. He is generally incapable of appreciating those advantages which, with your cultivated judgment, you [233] know to be the most conducive to his welfare. Do you accord to him regular hours, a stated allowance of work; do you refrain from sending him out because it is wet and he is unwell; do you serve yourself rather than ring for him at dinner time ”

“ The apostle addresses himself here to two classes of servants, with instructions to each respectively appropriate. Both the one class and the other, in Professor Stuart's eye, were slaves. This he assumes, and thus begs the very question in dispute. The term servant is generic, as used by the sacred writers. It comprehends all the various offices which men discharge for the benefit of each other, however honorable, or however menial ”

“ The conditions of master and servant are those of co-relatives, and when they are properly understood they form additional ties to the charities and happiness of life. It is an unhappy effect of the unformed habits of society in this country, and of domestic slavery, that we are so much wanting in this beautiful feature in domestic economy. ”

“ But the working class, gentlemen, the lower classes of the community in general, through the helpless condition in which its members find themselves placed as individuals, have always acquired the deep instinct, that this is and must be the duty of the State, to help the individual by means of the union of all to such a development as he would be incapable of attaining as an individual. ”

“ Not only are less than a fifth of our workers servants today, but the character of their service has been changed. The million menial workers among us include 300,000 upper servants,—skilled men and women of character, like hotel waiters, Pullman porters, janitors, and cooks, who, had they been white, could have called on the great labor movement to lift their work out of slavery, to standardize their hours, to define their duties, and to substitute a living, regular wage for personal largess in the shape of tips, old clothes, and cold leavings of food. ”

“ Even the domestic servant system at its worst has at least one merit—that it prevents us from ever being able to shut our eyes to the great deficiencies in the education of the working classes. Dismiss our servants to the restaurant kitchen or the bedroom cleaners’ supply [Pg 130] associations, and who knows what sham admiration of the working classes, and real apathy with regard to their welfare, may be developed? ”

“ Servants are a part of our social system, but our social system is being constantly changed and uplifted, and servants rise 235 with it. I remember a time in England when servants who did not fulfil their year’s contract were subject to legal punishment; when a certain quality of dress was worn by them, and those who over-dressed did so at the expense of their good name; when they seldom moved to any situation beyond walking distance from their birthplace; when, in fact, they were more slaves than servants. ”

“ The condition of servants in their masters' families, the privileges which they shared in common with the children, and their recognition as equals by the highest officers of the government—make the doctrine that they were mere COMMODITIES, an absurdity. ”