ess
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