The Unpopular Review | Page 9

the form of rewards for personal effort.
But this is an altogether different matter from the crushing of one
private property interest after another, in the name of the social welfare
or the social morality. Such detailed attacks upon property interests are,
in the end, to the injury of both social classes. Frequently they amount
to little more than a large loss to one property interest, and a small gain
to another. They increase the element of insecurity in all forms of
property; for who shall say which form is immune from attack? Now it
is the slum tenement, obvious corollary of our social inequalities; next
it may be the marble mansion or gilded hotel, equally obvious
corollaries of the same institutional situation. Now it is the storage of
meat that is under attack; it may next be the storage of flour. The fact is,
our mass of income yielding possessions is essentially an organic
whole. The irreproachable incomes are not exactly what they would be
if those subject to reproach did not exist. If some property incomes are
dirty, all property incomes become turbid.
The cleansing of property incomes, therefore, is a first obligation of the
institution of property as a whole. The compensation principle throws
the cost of the cleansing upon the whole mass, since, in the last analysis,
any considerable burden of taxation will distribute itself over the mass.

The principle is therefore consonant with justice. What is not less
important, the principle, systematically developed, would go far toward
freeing the legislature from the graceless function of arbitrating
between selfish interests, and the administration from the necessity of
putting down powerful interests outlawed by legislative act. It would
give us a State working smoothly, and therefore an efficient instrument
for social ends. Most important of all, it would promote that security of
economic interests which is essential to social progress.

A STUBBORN RELIC OF FEUDALISM
There is a persistent question regarding the distribution of property
which is of peculiar interest in the season of automobile tours and
summer hotels. Most thinking people acknowledge a good deal of
perplexity over this question, while on most parallel ones they are
generally cock-sure--on whichever is the side of their personal interests.
But in this question the bias of personal interest is not very large, and
therefore it may be considered with more chance of agreement than can
the larger questions of the same class which parade under various
disguises.
The little question is that of tipping. After we have squeezed out of it
such antitoxic serum as we can, we will briefly indicate the application
of it to larger questions.
Tipping is plainly a survival of the feudal relation, long before the
humbler men had risen from the condition of status to that of contract,
when fixed pay in the ordinary sense was unknown, and where the
relation between servant and master was one of ostensible voluntary
service and voluntary support, was for life, and in its best aspect was a
relation of mutual dependence and kindness. Then the spasmodic
payment was, as tips are now, essential to the upper man's dignity, and
very especially to the dignity of his visitor. This feudal relation
survives in England today to such an extent that poor men refrain from
visiting their rich relations because of the tips. In the great
country-houses the tips are expected to be in gold, at least so I was told
some years ago. And in England and out of it, Don Cesar's bestowal of
his last shilling on the man who had served him, still thrills the
audience, at least the tipped portion of it.
Europe being on the whole less removed from feudal institutions than

we are, tipping is not only more firmly established there, but more
systematized. It is more nearly the rule that servants' places in hotels
are paid for, and they are apt to be dependent entirely upon tips. The
greater wealth of America, on the other hand, and the extravagance of
the nouveaux riches, has led in some institutions to more extravagant
tipping than is dreamed of in Europe, and consequently has scattered
through the community a number of servants from Europe who, when
here, receive with gratitude from a foreigner, a tip which they would
scorn from an American.
In the midst of general relations of contract--of agreed pay for agreed
service, tipping is an anomaly and a constant puzzle.
It would seem strange, if it were not true of the greater questions of the
same kind, that in the chronic discussion of this one, so little attention,
if any, has been paid to what may be the fundamental line of division
between the two sides--namely, the distinction between ideal ethics and
practical ethics.
An illustration or two will help explain that