natural effect of their comparative scarcity. Excepting those families who happen to have had oldfashioned servants in their employ for a score or so of years, there can be few readers whose experience does not furnish them with abundant illustrations of what we have said.

General servants are, of course, the most scarce of all, and for several years past the competition has been wholly on the part of the mistresses. Here in London these servants are advertised for chiefly in the Clerkenwell News, each issue of which contains two or three columns of such advertisements, and the following experience was recently gained as to the state of the market:-Three advertisements were inserted for a general servant to do plain cooking in a small family living within three miles of Charing Cross, and offering 10l. wages. We are not concerned to show whether the place was a good or a bad one; it is enough for us to state the advertiser's experience of the number of unemployed poor who came to enquire upon this point at a time when the choice of a score of young governesses could be had for the offer of the same remuneration, and when a single advertisement for a clerk brings applications by hundreds. To the three advertisements there was one response; a middleaged woman called and made the kind statement that she would not mind coming to the family for a week, to oblige them. Three more insertions shortly afterwards; again a single application, by a young woman who did not know whether her late mistress would give her a character, and who called the next day to say that she found she would not. Three insertions more a week after that; again a solitary applicant, a highly-dressed woman, who had been at her last place two days, and for two months previously at a public-house, the landlady of which

would not give her a second character.

In stating this impressive result of the nine advertisements, we do not wish to imply that the advertiser had any ground for complaint; nor can we excuse his ignorance of those rudimentary ideas about supply and demand which are at the root of political economy. Having failed in obtaining a servant after three times offering 10l. wages, he should have offered 157. in the next three advertisements; and if he had also failed then, he should have offered zol. For this he might have obtained what he wanted; and if he did not choose or could not afford to pay zol., he should have abandoned the idea of keeping a servant, and his wife, who he says has been entire cook and half housemaid for some years past, should have done whatever other work there might happen to be. Nothing could be more simple; in common phrasepointedly appropriate any child in a charity school could have told him that. Still, in the worst of cases there is something to be said in palliation. It seems that the advertiser relied upon his personal experience that twenty or five-and-twenty years ago a general servant, who actually knew her work, could be had readily for 10l. a year, and that the food, which is paid for by the employer, is now as dear, or dearer; whilst dress, which is paid for by the servant herself, has become so cheap, that it is not easy for men to distinguish on Sundays an average servant from an average mistress. And he thought there was an unsatisfactory discordance between this scarcity of even professing servants and the widespread destitution of the masses. We have, by the way, heard scores of sermons on behalf, not so much of those born poor, and for whom poor-rates are the inevitable relief, as for those who have sunk for a time, or permanently, into distress; and we have heard one

sermon-just one-in which people have been told to try to provide against these calamities by taking out life-policies, and availing themselves in other ways of that system of assurance-so widely and so diversely applicable-in which modern science has, we think, most beautifully adapted to the things of this life the words of Saint Paulthat men should bear each other's burdens, and yet that each should bear his own.

By church and chapel collections and subscription books, by advertisements, by circulars, by pastorals, by children's collecting-cards, by district visitors, by privately certified cases, we are, on the one hand, adjured to give far more largely and more willingly to the support of the poor and the education of their children. Yet we have before us a letter from the vicar of an East-end parish 'overwhelmed with destitution,' in which he confesses that girls need not leave the kingdom to obtain high wages in domestic service, the only servant he can recommend being, however, a widow with seven children, who must all be taken in; and a lady professionally begging for parish schools owns that servants are scarcely to be had, but continues, with a complacency passing comedy, that we must expect this as a necessary consequence of education. The effect of the present poor-schools, too dissociated as they are, even in boardingschools, from manual labour, seems then to be broadly this: the industrious children are tempted to press into the ranks above them, and the rest are brought up just to the level of the penny illustrated serials, good or bad, and there are left. It is not soothing to know, on the one hand, young women who consistently with their birth have been brought up as daily governesses, and are yet driven to do the menial work inside, and even outside, their homes, on account of the scantiness

VOL. III.-NO. XVIII. NEW SERIES.

to which excessive competition has reduced their pay; and to know, on the other hand, young people taught in the parochial schools who are physically constituted for that rough work, but are not set to do it, nor have a notion of how it is to be done, and who will tell you that they were not 'brought up' to housework, or will explain that they have only left home in a tiff or for a change, or will frankly twit you with the relief their families can obtain from the parish and from private charity.

Our last hope is that the Charity Organisation Society may induce other societies to distrust themselves just sufficiently to make use of it; and that in the book education of the poor there may be dealt out more of the wholesome advice that was given not long ago by a Lord Rector to some Scotch students: that they should learn, above all learning, how to honestly win their bread.

Even in some or

phan asylums it would surely be well if we heard less of the piano and of French, and more of the everyday work of woman's life. At all events, for the poor let us have more schools (following, or, if possible, combined with the present schools), where some of the untaught girls in towns, strong enough as we see to carry children nearly half their size, may in turn acquire a knowledge of the simplest elements of household work. Only don't let them be the 'model' establishments, with all-powerful stoves and patent improvements, but be provided with just such utensils as the girls will meet with in actual service. Let these be taught simple cooking at ordinary grates with every-day pots and pans; plain washing at the oldfashioned tubs, and general cleaning up; learning to do properly just that commonplace work which would be of the most use to them when wives and mothers, and being

3 D

disciplined as far as possible to keep themselves clean and their clothes mended. If we were a gutterchild' we would rather be thus trained and started in service in England, with its many safeguards against cruelty, than be consigned to so scattered a population as the Canadian.

Now that a sufficient number of primary schools will be ensured by law, we venture to hope that clergymen here and there will give to such working-schools as are here advocated a real sanction, and even divert to them some of the numerous collections hitherto made for parochial schools, of which there are often two, and sometimes even three, distinct and complete sets attached to a single church. It might be expected that, if once fairly started, such places would be self-support ing, for there must be thousands of housekeepers who would find it real economy to subscribe a guinea or two a year to secure the choice of effective servants taught there, and allowed to register their names when out of work. Wherever such a work-school could be set up as a distinct establishment, so much the better; but the start on a small scale need nowhere be costly. The various parts of the existing school buildings and their furniture present weekly or daily opportunities for teaching poor children (whether attending the day-school or not) how to do properly a little of the scrubbing and polishing which is desirable for their own homes also. Mending, or even washing their clothes, and cleaning the boots and the cooking utensils they might bring, could be practised in the precincts of the school without appearing very scandalous after a time or two. The whole course of this technical education' might culminate on Saturday evenings in some kind and clever housewives teaching the girls how to cook (probably in a neighbouring room) skilfully and inexpensively a

We

supper for the parents of one or other of them in turn, the food being for the most part furnished by the parents themselves. almost fear to have been profane in laying down so materialistic a programme, terminating in the attraction of the tasty cooking of perhaps indifferent meat; we must plead in extenuation the composite nature of every one of us, and can point out that at the annual clerical banquet at the Mansion House they drink to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and that the most beneficent will have their charity dinners, and the most spiritually-minded their teas. Besides, as with their gatherings so with these, the gustation might be followed by a meeting of an hour or so; this should be strictly limited to the parents or friends of the children under training, and the time might be occupied with a little pleasant reading on general subjects, or on some social difficulty which may have been previously named, or with useful chat about their homes, their prospects, their sav ings, their recreations, their troubles, and even, at times, on graver and higher subjects.

We know, indeed, that there are already a number of small schools for servants, such as those con. nected with the National Central Office,' but these seem mostly to be houses in which selected girls are trained for those distinct departments of domestic service which are needed in the establishments of the wealthy by whom the schools are naturally patronised. We are concerned with only the houses of ordinary folks; and our purpose being therefore lower, is wider, and it may be less perfect. We do not contemplate the bringing of a comparatively few to that standard of excellence which is possibly attainable in a semi-conventual home, but the making of a great many people a little better and a little wiser than

they may happen to be; and if the girls must go backwards and forwards to their homes, people ought surely to have sufficient faith in the leaven to let it come into contact with the lump. Even if it could be argued that such a plan would produce no more general servants than there are now, still to introduce the girls to the plain work of that position would be no little good. It would give them just the ability that would be of the most use to themselves in after-life; it would be of some immediate service to their parents' homes, where the introduction of ever so little method in house work would economise time and save discomfort; and it would draw some parents from a still lower stratum of life than is known in many churches and schools. It would be to take hold of these people-these home heathen, as they are called by some— just in the same way that the Jesuits and other successful missionaries have always influenced the heathen abroad; for it would be to deal first with something that is

attractive to them as meeting those every-day wants which, to so many and with so much reason, are, in every sense of the word, their life.

There are many good persons who bewail the absence of the forms of Christianity among the poor, but whose idea of curing the evil seems to be that of at once dragging these people to the worship of this or that relic of the wars of phrases which have so often ravaged Christendom and thrust real Christianity out of sight. It were surely more hopeful for religion to be introduced to them with practical pious wisdom like that of the great Baptist, who told each man to go on in his own walk of life and to devote himself to the continual struggle of eschewing the particular evil that may attend it. The worst which can be said against the educational course here recommended is its being one so little transcendental as to propose teaching poor girls how to get their own living and do their duty in the state of life to which it has pleased God to call them.