Those who have
ever tried the experiment of late years of employing a native
American as a servant, have, we believe, before it was over,
generally come to look on Bridget as the personification of
repose, if not of comfort; and those who have to call on native
Americans, even occasionally, for services of a quasi-personal
character, such as those of expressmen, hotel clerks, plumbers,
we believe are anxious to make their intercourse with these
gentlemen as brief as possible. Most expressmen are natives, and
are freemen of intelligence and capacity, but they carry your
trunk into your hall with the air of convicts doing forced labor
for a tyrannical jailer. If the spirit in which they discharge
their duties--and they are specimens of a large class--were to
make its way into our kitchens, society would go to pieces.
In short, Bridget is the legitimate product of our economical,
political, and moral condition. We have called her, in our
extremity, to do duties for which she is not trained, and having
got her here have surrounded her with influences and ideas which
American society has busied itself for fifty years in fostering
and spreading, and which, taking hold of persons in her stage of
development, work mental and moral ruin.
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