The first requisite of a good servant is that he should
conspicuously know his place. It is not enough that he knows how
to effect certain desired mechanical results; he must above all,
know how to effect these results in due form. Domestic service
might be said to be a spiritual rather than a mechanical
function. Gradually there grows up an elaborate system of good
form, specifically regulating the manner in which this vicarious
leisure of the servant class is to be performed. Any departure
from these canons of form is to be depreciated, not so much
because it evinces a shortcoming in mechanical efficiency, or
even that it shows an absence of the servile attitude and
temperament, but because, in the last analysis, it shows the
absence of special training. Special training in personal service
costs time and effort, and where it is obviously present in a
high degree, it argues that the servant who possesses it, neither
is nor has been habitually engaged in any productive occupation.
It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure extending far
back in the past. So that trained service has utility, not only
as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and
skilful workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance
over those whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has
utility also as putting in evidence a much larger consumption of
human service than would be shown by the mere present conspicuous
leisure performed by an untrained person.
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