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.