In her stimulating book The Animal Estate, Harriet Ritvo notes the frequent interchange of terms for describing domestic servants and domestic animals in nineteenth-century discourse, and she emphasizes the especially distinguished role played by horses in the establishment of this rhetoric (18–19). Philip Hamerton, for example, writing in 1874, announced that “if there is any thing in the world of nature that seems clear, morally, it is that man has an authentic right to demand reasonable service from the horse” (qtd. in Ritvo 20), and the Rev. J. G. Wood, in 1885, decreed that “in return for its means of existence, the horse is bound to give to man the benefit of its labour” (Wood xviii). This anthropomorphic shift, moreover, is fully reversible: an article in Chambers's Journal for 1855 describes how Mrs. Robinson's slack governance of her household has resulted in anarchy — because she has “long let the reins go,” Heaven only knows “where her household will drive to” (“Kitchen and Parlour” 98). A manual on domestic management quoted by Pamela Horn advises that “the greatest ‘kindness’ we can exercise towards” our employees “is to endeavour, by a mild rein, to keep them in the path of duty” (112–13).