From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

"I would so, if there was any way I could get my living there."

I suppose that is the way it is with the most of us. We have it fixed somehow in our minds that a living is easier got anywhere than at home. Perhaps it is. Yet surely apples might be sold in Ireland with as good a hope of profit as in Illinois or Tennessee. Baskets are cheap at home, and a basket is the sole outfit required for that trade. The apples themselves are as easy to come by in the one place as in the other. But possibly there are better openings in America. The profession may be overcrowded at home. Many professions are, medicine, for instance, and the law. Apple selling may be in the like case. At all events, here was an Irishman, doing fairly well by his own account in the middle west of America yet with a sincere desire to go back again to Ireland if only he could get a living there.

There was another man whom we met and talked to with great pleasure. Our train lingered, as trains sometimes will, for an hour or more at a junction. It was waiting for another train which ought to have met ours, but did not. We sat on the platform of the observation car, and gazed at the blinking signal lights, for the darkness had come. Suddenly a man climbed over the rail of the car and sat down beside us. He had, as we could see, a very dirty face, and very dirty hands. He wore clothes like those of an engine stoker. He was, I think, employed in shunting trains. He apologized for startling us and expressed the hope that we had not mistaken him for a murderous red Indian. He was a humorist, and he had seen at a glance that we were innocent strangers, the sort of people who might expect an American train to be held up by red Indians with scalping knives. He told us a long story about a lady who was walking from coach to coach of a train while he was engaged in shunting it about and was detaching some coaches from it. She was crossing the bridge between two coaches at an unlucky moment and found herself suddenly on the line between two portions of the train. The expression of her face had greatly amused our friend. His account of the incident greatly amused us. But the most interesting thing about this man, the most interesting thing to us, was his unaffected friendliness. In England a signal man or a shunter would not climb into a train, sit down beside a passenger and chat to him. A miserable consciousness of class distinction would render this kind of intercourse as impossible on the one side as on the other. Neither the passenger nor the shunter would be comfortable, not even if the passenger were a Liberal politician, or a newly made Liberal peer. In America this sense of class distinction does not seem to exist. I have heard English people complain that Americans are disrespectful. I should rather use the word unrespectful, if such a word existed. For disrespectful seems to imply that respect is somehow due, and I do not see why it should be. I am quite prepared to sign my assent to the democratic creed that one man is as good as another. I even go further than most Democrats and say that one man is generally better than the other, whenever it happen that I am the other. I see no reason why a railway signal man should not talk to me or to anyone else in the friendly tones of an equal, provided of course that he does not turn out to be a bore. It is a glory and not a shame of American society that it refuses to recognize class distinction.

My only complaint is that America has not gone far enough in the path of democratic equality. There are Americans who take tips. Now men neither take tips from nor give tips to their equals. If a friend were to slip sixpence into my hand when saying good-by I should resent it bitterly. Unless I were quite sure that he was either drunk or mad, I should feel that he was deliberately treating me as his inferior. I should admit that I was his inferior if I pocketed the tip. I should feel bound to touch my hat to him and say "Thank you, Sir," or "Much obliged to your honor." No man is in any way degraded by taking wages for the work he does, whatever that work may be, cleaning boots or lecturing in a University. But a man does lower himself when, in addition to his wages, he accepts gifts of money from strangers. He is being paid then not for courtesy or civility, which he ought to show in any case, but for servility; and that no one can render except to a recognized superior. The tip in a country where class distinctions are a regular part of the social order is right enough. It is at all events a natural outcome of the theory that some men by reason of their station in life are superior to others. In a social order which is based upon the principle of equality among men the tip has no proper place.

The distinction between tips and wages is a real one, although it is sometimes obscured by the fact that the wages of some kinds of work are paid entirely or almost entirely in the form of tips. A waiter in a restaurant or an hotel lives, I believe, mainly on tips. Tips are his wages. Nevertheless he places himself in a position of inferiority by allowing himself to be paid in this way. It is plain that this is so. There is a sharp line which divides those who are tipped from those who are not. It may, for instance, be the misfortune of anyone to require the services of a hospital nurse; but we do not tip her however kind and attentive she may be. She gets her wages, her salary, a fixed sum. It would be insulting to offer her, in addition, five shillings for herself. Hers is a profession which neither involves nor is supposed to involve any loss of self respect. On the other hand the chambermaid who makes the beds in an hotel is tipped. She expects it. And her profession, in the popular estimation at least, does involve a certain loss of self respect. The best class of young women are unwilling to be domestic servants, but are not unwilling to be hospital nurses. Yet the hospital nurse works as hard as, if not harder than, a housemaid. She does the same kind of work. There is no real difference between making the bed of a man who is sick and making the bed of a man who is well. In either case it is a matter of handling sheets and blankets. But a suggestion of inferiority clings to the profession of a housemaid and none to that of a hospital nurse. The reason is that the one woman belongs to the class which takes tips, while the other belongs to the class which does not.

It is easy to see that in a country like America into which immigrants are continually flowing from Europe there is sure to be a large number of people—Italian waiters for instance, and Swedish and Irish domestic servants—who have not yet grasped the American theory of social equality. They have grown up in countries where the theory does not prevail. They naturally and inevitably expect and take tips, the largesse of their recognized superiors. No one accustomed to European life grudges them their tips. But there are, unfortunately, many American citizens, born and bred in America, with the American theory of equality in their minds, who also take tips and are very much aggrieved if they do not get them. Yet they, by word and manner, are continually asserting their position of equality with those who tip them. This is where the American theory of equality between man and man breaks down. The driver of a taxicab for instance can have it one way or the other. He cannot have it both. He may, like a doctor, a lawyer, or a plumber, take his regular fee, the sum marked down on the dial of his cab, and treat his passenger as an equal. Or he may take, as a tip, an extra twenty cents, in which case he sacrifices his equality and proclaims himself the inferior of the man who tips him, a member of a tippable class. There ought to be no tippable class of American citizens. The English complaint of the disrespectfulness of Americans is, in my opinion, a foolish one, unless the American expects and takes tips. Then the complaint is well founded and just. The tipper pays for respectfulness when he gives a tip and what he pays for he ought to get.

It is, I think, quite possible that the custom of tipping has something to do with the difficulty, so acute in America, of getting domestic servants. It is widely felt that domestic service in some way degrades the man or woman who engages in it. There is no real reason why it should. It is not in itself degrading to do things for other people, even to render intimate personal service to other people. The dentist who fills a tooth for me does something for me, renders me a special kind of personal service. He loses no self respect by supplying me with a sound instrument for chewing food. Why should the person who cooks the food which that tooth will chew lose self respect by doing so? There is no real distinction between these two kinds of service. Nor is there anything in the contention that the domestic servant is degraded by abrogating her own will and taking orders from someone else. Nine men out of ten take orders from somebody. From the soldier on the battlefield, the most honorable of men, to the clerk in a bank, we are almost all of us obeying orders, doing not what we ourselves think best or pleasantest but what someone in authority thinks right. What is the difference between obeying when you are told to clean a gun and obeying when you are told to wash a jug? The real reason why a suggestion of inferiority clings to the profession of domestic service is that domestic servants belong to the tippable class. Society can, if it likes, raise domestic service to a place among the honorable professions, by ceasing to tip and paying wages which do not require to be supplemented by tips. If this were done there would be far less difficulty in keeping up the supply of domestic servants.

I find myself on much more difficult ground when I pass on to discuss the impression made on me by the claim of America to be, in some special way, a free country.

"To the West! to the West! to the land of the free." So my farmer friend sang to me twenty years ago. The tradition survives. The American citizen believes that a man is freer in America than he is for instance in England. If freedom means the power of the individual to do what he likes without being interfered with by laws then no man can ever be quite free anywhere except on a desert island. I, as an individual, may earnestly desire to go out into a crowded thoroughfare and shoot at the street cars with a revolver. I am not free to do this in any civilized country in the world. For people with desires of that kind there is no such thing as liberty. The freedom of the individual is everywhere a compromise between his personal inclination and the general sense of the community. Men are more free where the community makes fewer laws, less free where the community makes more. In England I can, if I like, buy, and drink at dinner, a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of any train which has a restaurant car, in any part of the country. In certain states in America I cannot buy a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of the train. There is a law which stops me. It may be a very good law. The infringement of my liberty which it entails may be for my good and the good of society in general; but where that law exists I am certainly less free than where it does not exist.

The tendency of modern democratic states is to make more and more laws and thereby to confine within ever narrower limits the freedom of the individual man. A few years ago an Englishman could send his child to school or keep his child at home without any education just as he chose. Now he must send his child to school. The law insists on it. The Irishman, in most parts of Ireland, can still, if he likes, allow his child to grow up without ever going to school. There is no law to interfere with him. In that particular respect Ireland is freer than England, for England has gone further along the path of curtailing individual liberty. In the matter of buying beer England is freer than America, because you can buy beer anywhere in England if you go to a house licensed to sell beer. In some parts of America there are no houses licensed to sell beer and you cannot buy it. America has, in this particular respect, gone further than England along the path of curtailing individual liberty.