DOMESTIC SERVICE.

Waikato Times, Volume 113, Issue 18849, 20 January 1933, Page 6

DOMESTIC SERVICE.

“Is not the occupation of a domestic ‘servant an honourable one and a useful calling?’’ was an inquiry put by the Lord Chief Justice of Britain ■to a special jury, and the jury decided that it was. Their decision meant that a woman plaintiff could not succeed in an action for libel based on an assumption that she had been described as a “domestic -servant ’ when she was really “a book-keeping clerk. But whatever the plaintiff may .have ihought about tho relative merits of the two callings the opinion of the majority will he with Lord Hewart and the jury. It will be a dark day for the household arts when “domestic servant” is admitted as a recognised term of reproach. "A comfortable house is a great source of happiness, wrote Sydney Smith. "It ranks immediately after health and a good c'ons'cienoe.” If that is so, domestic service must be one of the prime foundations of felicity, for no house was ever comfortable unless somebody took a good deal of trouble to make it so. It would be a singularly poor return for the -services of those who shoulder so much of the responsibility for the comfortable house to make the very name of their calling an occasion for damages in a court of law. There was a time when the calling itself was none too well rewarded, when the servant in the small household might be expected to sleep iu -something not much larger than a cupboard and to work fourteen ho l l r.■> a day for less than <a penny an hour. The "poor little Marchioness of “The Old Curiosity Shop” supplies the classical instance of servitude of that sort, and it is probable that any -supposed flavour of ignominy that still attaches to domestic service has its root in such old and unhappy traditions. But even in -the days of the Marchioness her plight was far from being the whole truth about conditions -of service in English homes, and it has long since ceased to be representative of domestic service. In -the realm of popular humour -the jest is not the household as tyrant but the maid as dictator, which suggests a fairly large alteration in the balance of power. But -the real need is to give honour where honour is due—and on that point Lord Hewart and the jury were plainly in the right,