The conditions of home industry as practised by either housewife or housemaid are hopelessly restrictive. They are, as we have seen, the low standard of average capacity; the element of sex-tendency; the isolation and the unspecialised nature of the work. In two of these conditions the housemaid gains on the housewife. She is partly out of the sex-tendency status and partly into the contract relation; hence the patient, submissive, conservative influence is lightened. In families of greater affluence there is some specialisation; we have varieties in housemaid; cookmaid, scullerymaid, nursemaid, chambermaid, parlourmaid,--as many as we can afford; and in such families we find such elevation of home-industry as is possible; marred, however, by serious limitations.
Household industry is a world question; and in no way to be answered by a solution only possible of application to one family in a thousand. It is a question of our time and the future, and not met by a solution which consists in maintaining an elaborate archaism. The proper feeding of the world to-day is no more to be guaranteed by one millionaire's French cook, than was the health of the Roman world by one patrician's Greek doctor.
Human needs, in remote low stages of social development, were met by privately owned labourers. As late as the Middle Ages the great lord had in his_menie_ every kind of functionary to minister to his wants; not only his private servants of the modern kind, with butlers and sutlers and pantlers in every degree; but his armourer, his tailor, his minstrel, and his fool.
The feudal lord kept a fool to amuse him, whereas we go to the theatre. He kept a cook to feed him--and we do it yet. He kept a poet to celebrate his deeds and touch his emotions. We have made poetry the highest class in literature, and literature the world's widest art--by setting the poet free.
To work for the world at large is necessary to the development of the work. A private poet is necessarily ignoble. So is a private cook. The iron limitations of household service are immutable--world service has none. To cater to the whims of one master lowers both parties concerned. To study the needs of humanity and minister to them is the line of social progress.