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 should have full shares of the good things of life.  These two ideals inevitably combine into a third—­that all men should produce full shares of the good things of life.  But the plain fact is that they cannot—­that no amount of opportunity or appliances will enable the average day laborer to produce what Mr. Edison or Mr. Hill or even the average deviser of work and guide of labor does.  Then even ideal ethics cannot say in this actual world:  Let both have the same.  That would simply be Robin Hood ethics:  rob the man who produces much, and give the plunder to the man who produces little.  Hence comes the disguising of the schemes to do it, even so that they often deceive their own devisers.  What then do practical ethics say?  They can’t say anything more than:  Help the less capable to become capable, so that he may produce more.  But that is at least as slow a process as raising the servant beyond the stage of tips.  Meantime the socialists are unwilling to wait, and propose to rob the present owners of the means of production, and take the control of industry from the men who manage it now, and put it in the hands of the men who merely can influence votes.  These men certainly are no less selfish and dishonest than the captains of industry, and are vastly less able to select the profitable fields of industry, and organize and economize industry; whatever product they might squeeze out would be vastly less than now, and it would stick to their own fingers no less than does what the politicians handle now.  Dividing whatever might reach the people, without reference to those who produced it, could yield the average man no more than he gets now.  That’s very simple mathematics.  One of the saddest sights of the day is the number of good people to whom these facts are not self-evident.