Feb, 23.
Wues the Council comes to take its decision regarding registration of servants, it will certainly have no cause to complain of want of advisers. Rather may its complaint be the other way. Among the numerous letters we have received we may specially draw attention to that from ''An American Housekeeper'' to-day, not because she says pretty things about our recent leading article (for which, however, we would make her our best bow) but because she admits frankly that she was led into signing the petition without enough reflexion and now sorry that she did so. We wonder whether some other signatories may not be finding themselves in the same boat. On the other, the pro-registration, side, "Experto Credite" is in deadly earnest and having, since his first letter, become more temperate in his expressions comes the nearer to convincing. But he does not convince, partly because he ignores the main weakness of and objection to registration; partly because he is illogical. For if he objects to foreigners, who have been fortunate in their boys, forming a good opinion of them as a class, we may well object to his forming a bad opinion because he has been unfortunate. Also there is no analogy between foreigners registering at their consulates and Chinese servants with the police. For the foreigner registers voluntarily to get the benefit of his flag; but the Chinese is to be compelled to do so for the (supposed) benefit of others and that in a manner traditionally associated only with criminals.
There are, to our way of thinking, two great objections to registration as at present suggested. Tt will not guarantee a servant's ability, unless a training school be attached to it; and, by the way, if that were added, registration would be unnecessary as the training school's certificate should be passport enough. It would be a very doubtful protection against the much dreaded ''squeeze'', or small commissions, which belong to a vastly older tradition than any Western innovation can easily break. And it certainly would not safeguard employers from being boycotted. In the second place, whereas servants in China are now only a class in name, knit together merely by such bonds of sentiment as are encountered from time to time in dealing with all Chinese, or for that matter any people of common race, registration would inevitably tend to coalesce them into an organized mass, and employers would then find that, instead of having to deal with their own households they were being dictated to by a trade union. There is trouble enough in the Labour world to-day without deliberately fomenting more, by putting an indignity, or what they would un-; questionably regard as such, upon a class of men who, despite the faults to which they in common with all flesh are heir, are surely most tractable and uncomplaining, extraordinarily kind and sweet-tempered with children, and, many of us would add, givers of good service and purveyors of much ease and creature comfort.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.