these three classes of government employees is paid well for
the service he renders. Yet there are mail carriers who will lose a
courteous, friendly bearing toward those who fail to "remember" them at
Christmas, or at more frequent intervals, or who will actually curtail
the service they are paid to render.

MISGUIDED GENEROSITY

There seems to be something about the continual contact of a person
serving and a person served that makes the one think the other owes him
something on the side. A mail carrier will bring your mail once, twice
or several times a day for a period and then enters the feeling that he
is entitled to some substantial token of appreciation of his faithful,
cheerful service, other than the compensation paid by the government.
Often the person being served feels a generous appreciation of good
service and bestows a token of it without the person serving having
expected or wanted it. The tipping custom is not wholly the outgrowth of
greed. It is frequently misguided generosity. Where the error creeps in
is in expressing appreciation in terms of money. Self-respect is
satisfied with verbal appreciation.

As an employer the government, of all employers, should set an example
of true democracy, should practice sound economics and ethics in the
relations it permits between its employees and the public. There is no
justification from any viewpoint for giving gratuities to public
servants. If garbage collectors render slipshod service to citizens who
fail to tip them--and they do this regularly--a complaint should bring
immediate relief. It does not now because the higher officials are under
the same illusion about tipping that envelopes the subordinates.

An inspector of street cleaning in Philadelphia was investigating a
complaint against a street sweeper in a residence district. The sweeper
told him that he felt the complaint must be ill-founded and that the
people in the neighborhood must be satisfied with his sweeping, because
he had recently received from residents in one block twenty-one dollars
in Christmas tips.

How many public servants in your own neighborhood did you tip last
Christmas?

It should not be assumed that the indictment here read is against all
mail carriers or garbage collectors, or policemen. With tipping, as with
many other abuses "there are more than seven thousand who have not bowed
the knee to Baal."

THE GOLDEN RULE

At Christmas the spirit of generosity finds man