MANNERS FOR THE MASSES
Manners for the Masses
"Manners Makyth Man."
How often in our eager youth was that hoary old maxim quoted to us with stern insistence, what time we had seized the last piece of cake on the plate, or were absorbing our soup with a noise like that of a punctured vacuum cleaner. Manners makyth man, perhaps; but in those days manners made us tired.
Now that we have attained manhood's estate, however, and grey hair and a nice discrimination in Scotch, when there is any to practice on, we realize the need of more manners—manners for the masses. People in general are not so polite as they used to be and ought to be. Street-car conductors, for instance, do not treat us at all times with the consideration we feel to be our due.
We do not object so bitterly to being told to "step lively there," or having the conductor jab the end of the fare-box into our diaphragm. Such little crudities of manner are perhaps inseparable from his rather trying profession. But the other day we handed a conductor by mistake a quarter of suspicious antecedents—metallurgically speaking, of course. Money we can't pass is the only sort of tainted money we recognize. We fear this particular coin contained more than the usual amount of alloy. As a matter of fact, we hadn't intended giving it to him at all. We had laid it aside for a church collection, or a tag-day, or the first pretty Salvation Army lass we should see with a "self-denial-week" box at a street corner. But it got into the wrong pocket.
We handed it to the conductor and said, "Blue, please!"—alluding to the cerulean hue of the tickets. He turned it over two or three times in his hand, glared at us, walked down to the rear platform to see it in the better light there, asked two or three men what they thought of it, and then carried it back to us between the thumb and index finger of the right hand as though he were holding something dead by the tail. The whole car watched him drop it with a thud into our grey-suede palm.
"The Company don't let us take nothin' but silver quarters," he remarked in a loud voice and with quite undue emphasis on the "silver."
We had to hunt through our pockets for a five-cent piece to put in the box. It was a very painful moment, and naturally the only nickle we owned hid itself amid a mass of coppers—we had enough of them to bust our suspenders. And while we hunted, the conductor stood there and shook the box belligerently under our nose.