In the I.C.C. hotels we have a government steward who draws a good salary and wears a nice white collar.  But though he is sometimes a bit different, and succeeds in making his hotel so, it is only in degree.  He is not a great frequenter of the dining-room; at times one wonders just what his activities are.  Certainly it is not the planning of meals, for the I.C.C. menu is as fixed and automatic as if it had been taken from a stone slab in the pyramids.  A poor meal neither turns his hair white nor cuts down his income.  Frequently, especially if he is English and certainly if he has been a ship’s steward, the negro waiters seem to run his establishment without interference.  Dinner hours, for example, are from 11 to 1.  But beware the glare of the waiter at whose table you sit down at 12:50.  He slams cold rubbish at you from the discard and snatches it away again before you have time to find you can’t eat it.  You have your choice of enduring this maltreatment or of unostentatiously slipping him a coin and a hint to go cook you the best he can himself.  For you know that as the closing hour approaches the cooks will not have their private plans interfered with by accepting your order.  Here again is where the fat German or the French madame is needed—­with an ox-goad.

In other words the tip system invented by Pharaoh and vitiated by quick-rich Americans rages as fiercely in government hotels on the Zone as in any “lobster palace” bordering Broadway—­worse, for here the non-tipper has no living being to advocate his cause.  All food is government property.  Yet I have sat down opposite a man who gave the government at the door a work-coupon identical with mine, but who furthermore dropped into the waiter’s hand “35 cents spig”—­which is half as bad as to do it in U.S. currency—­and while I was gazing tearfully at a misshapen lump of vacunal gristle there was set before him, steaming hot from the government kitchen, a porterhouse steak which a dollar bill would not have brought him within scenting distance of in New York.  Do not blame the waiter.  If he does not slip an occasional coin to the cook he will invariably draw the gristle, and even occasional coins do not grow on his waist band.  It would be as absurd to charge it to the cook.  He probably has a large family to support, as he would have under socialism.  There runs this story on the Zone, vouched for by several: 

A “Zoner” called an I.C.C. steward and complained that his waiter did not serve him reasonably: 

“Well,” sneered the steward, “I guess you didn’t come across?”

“Come across!  Why, damn you, I suppose you’re getting your rake-off too?”

“I certainly am,” replied the steward; “What do you think I’m down here for, me health?”

Surely we can’t blame it all to the steward, or to any other individual.  Lay it rather to human nature, that stumbling-block of so many varnished and upholstered systems.