English servants do not, as a rule, like to come to this country. Few of the best class, as yet, will consent to give up the splendor and assured aristocracy of England and go to live among a lot of vulgarians, hard though those vulgarians are striving to be worthy of the support of an aristocratic menialdom. Those few of the best who do condescend to exile themselves wear sad faces and show that they keenly feel the humiliation. For they cannot blind themselves to the truth that their masters and mistresses, striving hard to please and to delude, are still not really “ladies” and “gentlemen,” but just Americans. Have they titles? No. Do the common people doff the hat to them? No. Have they “ancestry”? They pretend to have, but the genealogical trees look about as much like real trees as the papier-mâché palm looks like the genuine thing; and Burke’s peerage and the Almanach de Gotha know them not. No, they are not aristocrats, and it pains the aristocratic servants to serve them much as it would pain a first gentleman of the bedchamber to King Edward to get on his knees to some “big nigger” who called himself Emperor of Ashanteeland. The commiseration of all sympathizers with sensitive souls belongs of right to these aristocrats of menialdom in exile.
The great mass of these imported servants, excepting those who come here for the chance to become men and women and to shake off servitude, are a worthless lot, weedings from those perfect English gardens of menialdom. And a hard time their American masters have with them. Insolence, shiftlessness, drunkenness, petty thieving are tolerated to and beyond the most asinine patience; then, one furious day, the housekeeper, under orders from an outraged master or mistress, ejects the whole crew and gets in an entirely new lot. But this revolt of the downtrodden “upper classes” is rare and dangerous and often disastrous. For this servile aristocracy is a close corporation, very limited in numbers and fully awake to its own power over the plutocrats who must at any cost in money, manhood and discomfort have servility and an imitation of the English way of living. Woe, woe, woe unto the plutocrat who gets himself on the imported servants’ black-list! He may have actually to close in whole or in part his vast houses, and to cease from inviting in his hordes of rich friends to see how much more gaudily he is showing off than they are. He may have to call in colored or plain Irish or Swedish servants, mostly women, to save him and his family from the horrors of waiting on themselves. But one shrinks from pushing inquiry in so harrowing a direction.