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Page 9
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 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, 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.
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