If we follow anybody, it is going to be a person that commands our respect, whose greatness and goodness compel our admiration, and who did not try to win men by tricks. We regard Jesus, as he is painted in the four gospels, as a character below the ideal of this age, a character that, to imitate, would dwarf the noblest man. If Jesus were alive it would be his duty to-day to follow others, rather than to command others to follow him.
We recently overheard a remark which made us query if we cannot get along without servants? A lady was commenting on the character of the "help," which one was obliged to employ to-day, and expressed the opinion that, if our public schools continued to fill the heads of children with the notion that one person was as good as another, it would not be long before it would be impossible to get help at all.
There seems to be an idea abroad in this land as well as in others, that a certain class of people are for the purpose of producing servants for another class of people, and that this servant-producing class has no right to give their children an education that is calculated to elevate them above the position of their parents. We are not in sympathy with this idea. If there is one person on this earth that is of less account than another it is the person who is helpless, who is dependent upon others for everything that makes life possible or endurable. We must confess that there are too many people in this country who are of this kind, who must have someone to do for them what they ought to do for themselves.
Why should one person be expected to wait upon another? Why should a man or woman look upon a fellow-being as fit only to be a servant? Is one born to serve and the other to be waited upon?
Such notions have no right on our democratic soil. In this country there must be no caste, no division of society into classes.
We rejoice that such a criticism of the character of the "help" employed in the houses of the rich as we overheard, is true, for it reveals a condition of things that may lead to what is much needed to-day, viz.: a simpler mode of living on the part of a great many of our American people. Is it necessary to live in such a way that a dozen or more servants are required in a home to keep it in order?