the tip, like the larger prizes, is part of the general stimulus to the best exertion and the best feeling, and is therefore legitimate; but it, like every other stimulus, should not be applied in excess, and the tendency should be to abolish it. The rich man often is led by good taste and good morals to restrain his expenditure in many directions, and there are few directions, if any, in which good taste and good morals more commend the happy medium than in tips. Excess in them, however, is not always prompted by good nature and generosity and reciprocation of spontaneous kindness, but often by desire for comfort, and even by ostentation. But all such promptings require regulation for the same reason that, it is now becoming generally recognized, the promptings of even charity itself require regulation.

The head of one of the leading Fifth Avenue restaurants [pg 27]once said to the writer, substantially: “We don’t like tips: they demoralize our men. But what can we do about it? We can’t stop it, or even keep it within bounds. Our customers will give them, and people who have too much money or too little sense, give not only dollar bills or five dollar bills, but fifty dollar bills and even hundred dollar bills. We have tried to stave off customers who do such things: we believe that in the long run it would pay us to; but we can’t.”

When all the promptings of liberality or selfishness or ostentation are well regulated, we will be in the ideal world. Until then, in the actual world, it is the part of wisdom to regulate ideal ethics by practical ethics—and tip, but tip temperately.

And now to apply our principles to a wider field.

The ideal is that all men should have what they produce. The ideal is also that all men should have full shares of the good things of life. These two ideals inevitably combine into a third—that all men should produce full shares of the good things of life. But the plain fact is that they cannot—that no amount of opportunity or appliances will enable the average day laborer to produce what Mr. Edison or Mr. Hill or even the average deviser of work and guide of labor does. Then even ideal ethics cannot say in this actual world: Let both have the same. That would simply be Robin Hood ethics: rob the man who produces much, and give the plunder to the man who produces little. Hence comes the disguising of the schemes to do it, even so that they often deceive their own devisers. What then do practical ethics say? They can’t say anything more than: Help the less capable to become capable, so that he may produce more. But that is at least as slow a process as raising the servant beyond the stage of tips. Meantime the socialists are unwilling to wait, and propose to rob the present owners of the means of production, and take the control of industry from the [pg 28]men who manage it now, and put it in the hands of the men who merely can influence votes. These men certainly are no less selfish and dishonest than the captains of industry, and are vastly less able to select the profitable fields of industry, and organize and economize industry; whatever product they might squeeze out would be vastly less than now, and it would stick to their own fingers no less than does what the politicians handle now. Dividing whatever might reach the people, without reference to those who produced it, could yield the average man no more than he gets now. That’s very simple mathematics. One of the saddest sights of the day is the number of good people to whom these facts are not self-evident.

In no state of human nature that any persons now living, or the grandchild of any person now living, will witness, could such conditions be permanent. Their temporary realization might be accomplished; but if it were, the able men would not be satisfied with either the low grade of civilization inevitable unless they worked, or with being robbed of the large share of production that must result from their work. The more intelligent of the rank and file, too, would rebel against the conditions inevitably lowering the general prosperity, and they would soon realize the difference in industrial leadership between “political generals” and natural generals. Insurrection would follow, and then anarchy, after which things would start again on their present basis, but some generations behind.

But I for one do not expect these experiences, especially in America: for here probably enough men have already become property holders to make a sufficient balance of power for the preservation of property. If not, the first step toward ensuring civilization, is helping enough men to develop into property holders, and continue property holders, which general experience declares that they will not unless they develop their property themselves.

[pg 29]

An Experiment in Syndicalism

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During the last twenty years New Zealand has tried many social and economic experiments; these experiments have been made by her own Legislature, and her own people; and as a rule they have been remarkably successful: during the last few months she has had the experience of a new one conducted by strangers, and made at her expense. Fortunately there is reason to believe that this one will be found to have resulted in benefit to New Zealand and its people, while it may prove of service to older and larger countries. It is probable that the most widely known of New Zealand’s experiments is that which aimed at doing justice to employers and employees alike by the substitution for the Industrial strike of a Court of Arbitration, fairly constituted, on which both Workers and Employers were equally represented. This law has been branded by the supporters of the usual Strike policy with the name of “Compulsory Arbitration,” the object being to discredit it in the eyes of the workers, as an infringement of their liberty. The title is unfair and misleading. Unlike most laws, it never has been of universal application either to Workers or Employers, but only to those among them that chose to form themselves into industrial Unions, and to register those Unions as subject to the provisions of the Statute. The purpose of the Statute was an appeal to the common sense of the people, by offering them an alternative method of settling disputes and securing that fair-play for both parties which experience had shown could seldom be secured by the strike. The law, which was first introduced in 1894, had gradually appealed both to workers and employers, as worth trying, and before the close of the last century it [pg 30]had rendered the country prosperous, and had attracted the attention of thoughtful people in many other parts of the world to the “Country Without Strikes.” Efforts were made in several countries to introduce the principle of the New Zealand Statute, but with very little success, as it was generally opposed both by workers and employers:—the workers feeling confident they could obtain greater concessions by the forceful methods of the strike, and the employers suspecting that any Court of Arbitration would be likely to give the workers more than, without arbitration, they could compel the employers to surrender.

In the mean time the statutory substitute for the strike continued to succeed in New Zealand. Nearly every class of town workers, and some in the country, had formed Unions, and registered them under the arbitration law. With a single trifling exception, that was speedily put an end to by the punishment of the Union with the alternative of heavy fine or imprisonment, the country was literally as well as nominally a country without a