The Itching Palm Part 3

as for the person serving to decline a tip. The reason is that he feels the rebuke implied in the refusal and knows in his conscience that the practice is wrong. We always grow more indignant at a just accusation than at an unjust one!

CONSCIENCE IS STIRRING

The constant re-appearance of laws to regulate tipping, in every section of the country, proves that the conscience of the people is stirring.

The daily and periodical press now and then condemn the practice editorially in unmeasured terms and persons prominent in the public eye occasionally flare-up at some particularly flagrant manifestation of the itching palm. Governor Whitman, of New York, in an address to the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, said (as District Attorney then):

"It is a brave thing, a womanly thing and a courageous thing for you to band together to combat an evil. And I hope you will stand pat. We are all growing to tolerate a kind of petty grafting that is not right, that is un-American. I object to having a man take my hat and hang it up for me and then accept a coin. I am strong and big enough to hang up my own hat. And I also prefer to carry my own bag to having a boy half my size carry a bag that is half his size and be paid with a coin. If he honestly earns the money he should have it as an earning, not as a gratuity. It is this giving of gratuities that is unlike us, it is a custom copied from a foreign country where conditions are different from ours."

Where one person has the courage to speak out against this deep-rooted social convention, unnumbered thousands feel dumbly the same opposition to it. Harry Lauder, the Scotch comedian, a citizen of a monarchy, on one of his tours in America, was reported by the newspapers as being disgusted with the development of so aristocratic a custom as tipping in America, the cradle of democracy. The press will yield many such evidences of condemnation for the practice in high places. They are cited to prove that opposition to tipping is not a mere distaste among persons of limited means who cannot afford to tip generously.

The cost of following the custom is an important item; but those who consider it morally wrong gladly would pay any increase in charges that might follow the abolition of the custom. If the Pullman company should agree to abolish tipping if each patron would pay a quarter more for his berth it would be a long step in advance--though the custom should be abolished without additional charges to the public.

HUSH MONEY

The United States went through a period of muck-raking against graft among politicians and big business men. It was found that the idea of "honest graft" was shockingly prevalent. The especially odious manifestations were dealt with, but the little springs and rivulets that combine to make the main stream were allowed to trickle along, unite, and become a torrent! Tipping is the training school of graft.

Will a messenger boy who thinks that the public owes him gratuities develop into a man with sound morals? Will the bell-boy who works for tips grow up to be a policeman who accepts hush-money from the corner saloon-keeper? What is the difference between a tip to a bell-boy for doing what the hotel pays him to do and the hush-money to a policeman for overlooking the offence he is paid to detect?

The tipping practice has created an atmosphere of petty graft, the constant breathing of which breeds all other forms of dishonesty. It is small wonder that with so much avarice in low places that we have been shocked by graft in high places. The tipping custom is educating the grafting spirit much faster than the prosecuting arm of the government can destroy it.

There is a direct connection between corruption in elections and the custom of tipping. The man who lives upon tips will not see the dishonesty of selling his vote, so readily as if he discerned the immorality of gratuities. Of course, not all tip-takers sell their votes; but the moral laxity in one direction predisposes toward laxity in other directions.

SPLITTING COMMISSIONS

When a gratuity gets above a small amount, it is known as splitting commissions, or plain graft. Salesmen in their anxiety to sell goods will divide their commissions with the buyers. Frequently buyers or purchasing agents will demand this concession when it has not been offered. One New York department store found that its piano buyer was accepting money for placing all orders with a particular manufacturer.

This store discharged its buyer, and yet the proprietor of the store doubtless tipped the waiter at lunch the same day he so acted! He failed to see that a waiter (paid to serve patrons) who accepts tips, is precisely on the same level as a buyer (paid to purchase in the whole market), who concentrates his orders with one house for a fee.

A clipping from The New York _Times_ shows the att.i.tude that employers are taking toward split commissions:

"Several wholesalers in this market received a letter yesterday from a prominent dry goods retailer in the middle West saying that their buyers would be in this city to-day and that each one had signified her acceptance of a rule against taking petty 'graft.' The retailer asked that the salesmen try not to make this rule difficult to observe. The rule follows: 'You must not accept entertainment of any kind, even luncheon or dinner, from any one in New York. We will make an allowance, sufficient to cover all expenses, including entertainment.'"

This retail merchant had discovered that a free theater ticket or dinner could create such a sense of obligation that his buyers would not be able to exercise the freedom of choice that was necessary. The New York salesmen offered the tickets and dinners in the form of gracious hospitality, but knew all the while that their real intent was to bind the buyers to them through a sense of obligation without regard to the merits of the goods.

Thus the spirit of "honest graft" is spreading out in America. It grows with what it feeds upon. It is a moral miasma, the fumes of which are permeating all strata of society.

THE BIBLE AGAINST TIPS

Following are only a few of the many citations in the Bible against tipping, gifts, gratuities, greed and like practices and impulses:

Exodus 23:8. And thou shalt take no gift; for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.

Ecclesiastes 7:7. Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad; and a gift destroyeth the heart.

Proverbs 15:27. He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house; but he that hateth gifts shall live.

I Samuel 12:3. Behold here I am: witness against me before the Lord, and before his anointed: whose ox have I taken? or whose a.s.s have I taken? or whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand have I received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith? and I will restore it you.

Isaiah 33:14-15. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?... He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly ...

that shaketh his hands from holding bribes.... He shall dwell on high....

Job 15:34. For the congregation of hypocrites shall be desolate, and fire shall consume the tabernacles of bribery.

Luke 12:15. And he said unto them, Take heed and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

VII

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIPPING

Why the custom of tipping should be followed so generally when it is palpably a bad economic practice and ethically indefensible is a psychological study with the same aspects that the slavery issue presented before the Civil War.

The Puritan conscience allowed that inst.i.tution to grow to formidable proportions before arousing itself decisively, and it has allowed this equally undemocratic custom to attain national ramifications.

CASTE AND CLa.s.s

In its broadest statement, the psychology of tipping presents the two antipodal qualities of pride and pusillanimity. The caste system is not based upon the superiority of one cla.s.s over another, but upon the _pride_ that one stage of human development feels over another stage of human development.

A democracy cannot do away with different stages of development in the human mind. But it does do away with the belief of one stage of development that it is worthy of homage from another stage of development. Democracy does not concede that one man working with his brain is superior to another man working with his brawn. Democracy looks beyond the accident of occupation, or the stage of human development, and sees every man as originating in the same divine source. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that _all_ men are created equal."

In a monarchy, the craving of the human mind for approbation--the quality of pride--is cultivated into the cla.s.s or caste system. Those citizens who have attained a larger measure of culture than their fellow-men allow the false sense of pride in that culture to creep into their ideals and actions. They seek for some method of visualizing this a.s.sumed superiority, of obtaining the acknowledgment of it from their fellow-men. With an unerring instinct of human nature they play upon the cupidity of those whom they desire to place in a servile relation. A gift of money wins the social distinction they covet.

Thus the tipping custom has its origin in pride, and it necessarily involves humility as a correlative condition. If all men are created equal, as we aver in our basic political creed, they cannot become unequal except artificially, except by an agreement of one set of citizens to play the role of servitors for a consideration from another set of citizens. One set of citizens will become abased--that is, they will surrender their birthright of equality--in order that another set may strut around in a belief of superiority and indulge a sense of pride.

NO SUPERIOR CLa.s.s

In a democracy, the gradations of culture exist, but it is not permissible for one cla.s.s of workers to a.s.sume a superiority over another cla.s.s. That they do a.s.sume it is evident, and that for all practical social purposes we live and move and have our being on that a.s.sumption is evident, but in granting manhood suffrage, in allowing the proud and the humble to have an equal voice in government, we declare the social system a fungus growth.

At the moment of the highest power of the inst.i.tution of slavery it was not less wrong than at the moment the first s.h.i.+p-load of slaves was landed. No mere acc.u.mulation of material property can vitiate a principle of right. Hence, the very widespread acceptance of the tipping custom lends no authority to it. If 95,000,000 Americans are engaged in tipping 5,000,000 Americans, and if both the givers and the receivers apparently concur in the rightness of the custom, it does not thereby become right. We must go back to first principles to find the answer.

TIPPING AND SLAVERY

The American democracy could not live in the face of a lie such as slavery presented, and it cannot live in the face of a lie such as tipping presents. The aim of American statesmans.h.i.+p should be to keep fresh and strong the original concepts of democracy and to beat back the efforts of base human qualities to override these concepts.

The relation of a man giving a tip and a man accepting it is as undemocratic as the relation of master and slave. A citizen in a republic ought to stand shoulder to shoulder with every other citizen, with no thought of cringing, without an a.s.sumption of superiority or an acknowledgment of inferiority. This is elementary preaching and yet the distance we have strayed from primary principles makes it necessary to prove the case against tipping.

The psychology of tipping may be stated more in detail in the following formula:

To one-quarter part of generosity add two parts of pride and one part of fear.