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Page 10
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, 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 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 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.
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