the truth. This is ideal ethics, which our very legislatures do much to prevent being practical. For instance; they ignore the fact that in the present state of morality, taxes on personal property can be collected from virtually nobody but widows and orphans who have no one to evade the taxes for them. So the legislatures continue the attempt to tax personal property, and a judge on the bench says that a man who lies about his personal taxes shall not on that account be held an unreliable witness in other matters.

Or to take an illustration less radical: it is not in legal testimony alone that ideal ethics require everybody to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—[pg 23]that the world should have as much truth as possible; and if the world were perfectly kind, perfectly honest and perfectly wise (which last involves the first two), that ideal could be realized. For instance, in our imperfect world a man telling people when he did not like them, would be constantly giving needless pain and making needless enemies, whereas in an ideal world—made up of perfect people, there would be nobody to dislike, or, pardon the Hibernicism, if there were, the whole truth could be told without causing pain or enmity. Or again, in a world where there are dishonest people, a man telling everything about his schemes, would have them run away with by others, though in an ideal world, where there were no dishonest people, he could speak freely. In fact, the necessity of reticence in this connection does not even depend on the existence of dishonesty: for in a world where people have to look out for themselves, instead of everybody looking out for everybody else, a man exposing his plans might hurry the execution of competing plans on the part of perfectly honest people.

Farther illustration may be sufficiently furnished by the topic in hand.

In the case of most poor folks other than servants, what to do about it has lately been pretty distinctly settled: the religion of pauperization is pretty generally set aside: almsgiving, the authorities on ethics now generally hold, should be restricted to deserving cases—to people incapacitated by constitution or circumstance from taking proper care of themselves.

Now is tipping almsgiving, and are servants among the deserving classes?

How many people have asked themselves these simple questions, and how many who are educated up to habitually refusing alms unless the last of the questions is affirmatively answered, just as habitually tip servants?

Is tipping almsgiving? Not in the same sense that alms are given without any show of anything in return: the [pg 24]servant does something for the tipper. Yes, but he is paid for it by his employer. True, but only sometimes: at other times he is only partly paid, depending for the rest on tips; and sometimes the tips are so valuable that the servant pays his alleged employer for the opportunity to get them. Yet I know one hotel in Germany, and probably there are others, there and elsewhere, where the menus and other stationery bear requests against tipping. But in that one hotel I know tipping to be as rife as in hotels generally: the customers are not educated up to the landlord’s standard. And here we come to the fundamental remedy for all questionable practices—the education of the people beyond them. But this is simply the ideal condition in which ideal ethics could prevail. Meanwhile we must determine the practical ethics of the actual world.

The servant’s position is different from that of most other wage-earners, in that he is in direct contact with the person who is to benefit from his work. The man who butchers your meat or grinds your flour, you probably never see; but the man who brushes your clothes or waits on your table, holds to you a personal relation, and he can do his work so as merely to meet a necessity, or so as to rise beyond mere necessity into comfort or luxury. Outside of home servants, the necessity is all that, in the present state of human nature, his regular stipend is apt to provide; the comfort or the luxury, the feeling of personal interest, the atmosphere of promptness and cheerfulness and ease, is apt to respond only to the tip. Only in the ideal world will it be spontaneous. In the real world it must be paid for.

And why should it not be—why is it not as legitimate to pay for having your wine well cooled or carefully tempered and decanted, as to pay for the wine itself? The objection apt to be first urged is that it degrades the servant. But does it? He is not an ideal man in an ideal world, already doing his best or paid to do his best. You are not degrading him from any such standard as that, [pg 25]into the lower one of requiring tips: you are simply taking him as he is. True, if he got no tips, he would not depend upon them; but without them he would not do all you want him to; before he will do that, he must be developed into a different man—he must become a creature of an ideal world. You may in the course of ages develop him into that, and as you do, he will work better and better, and tips may grow smaller and smaller, until he does his best spontaneously, and tips have dwindled to nothing. But to withdraw them now would simply make him sulky, and lead to his doing worse than now.

Another objection urged against tips is that they put the rich tipper at an advantage over the poor one. But the rich man is at an advantage in nearly everything else, why not here? The idea of depriving him of his advantages, is rank communism, which destroys the stimulus to energy and ingenuity that, in the present state of human nature, is needed to keep the world moving. In an ideal state of human nature, the man with ability to create wealth may find stimulus enough, as some do to a considerable extent now, in the delight of distributing wealth for the general good; but we are considering what is practicable in the present state of human nature.

Another aspect of the case, or at least a wider aspect, is the more sentimental one where the tip is prompted as reciprocation for spontaneous kindness.

But in the service of private families, as distinct from service to the general public or to visitors it is notorious that constant tipping is ruinous. Occasional holidays and treats and presents at Christmas and on special occasions are useful, as promoting the general feeling of reciprocation. But from visitors the tip is generally essential to ensuring the due meed of respect. Yet we can reasonably imagine a time when it may not be; and even now, for the casual service of holding a horse or brushing off the dust, a hearty “thank you” is perhaps on the whole better than a tip.

[pg 26]Considering the morality of the question all around—the practical ethics as well as the ideal, the underlying facts are that no man ought to be a servant in the servile sense, and indeed no man ought to be poor; and in an ideal world no man would be one or the other. Just how we are to get a world without servants or servile people, is perhaps a little more plain than how we are to get Mr. Bellamy’s world without poor people, which, however, amounts to nearly the same thing. At least we will get a less servile world, as machinery and organization make service less and less personal. Bread has long been to a great extent made away from home; much of the washing is also done away in great laundries, and organizations have lately been started to call for men’s outer clothes, and keep them cleaned, repaired and pressed. There is a noticeable rise, too, in the dignity of personal service: witness the college students at the summer hotels, and the self-respecting Jap in the private family. These influences are making for the ideal world in relation to service, and when we get it, no man will take tips, and nobody will offer them.

But in our stage of evolution,