| Chapter 14
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| A heavy rainstorm came up during the day, and I had
concluded that the condition of the streets would be such that
my hosts would have to give up the idea of going out to dinner,
although the dining-hall I had understood to be quite near. I was
much surprised when at the dinner hour the ladies appeared
prepared to go out, but without either rubbers or umbrellas.
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| The mystery was explained when we found ourselves on the
street, for a continuous waterproof covering had been let down
so as to inclose the sidewalk and turn it into a well lighted and
perfectly dry corridor, which was filled with a stream of ladies
and gentlemen dressed for dinner. At the comers the entire open
space was similarly roofed in. Edith Leete, with whom I walked,
seemed much interested in learning what appeared to be entirely
new to her, that in the stormy weather the streets of the Boston
of my day had been impassable, except to persons protected by
umbrellas, boots, and heavy clothing. "Were sidewalk coverings
not used at all?" she asked. They were used, I explained, but in a
scattered and utterly unsystematic way, being private enterprises.
She said to me that at the present time all the streets were
provided against inclement weather in the manner I saw, the
apparatus being rolled out of the way when it was unnecessary.
She intimated that it would be considered an extraordinary
imbecility to permit the weather to have any effect on the social
movements of the people.
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| Dr. Leete, who was walking ahead, overhearing something of
our talk, turned to say that the difference between the age of
individualism and that of concert was well characterized by the
fact that, in the nineteenth century, when it rained, the people
of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as
many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one
umbrella over all the heads.
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| As we walked on, Edith said, "The private umbrella is father's
favorite figure to illustrate the old way when everybody lived for
himself and his family. There is a nineteenth century painting at
the Art Gallery representing a crowd of people in the rain, each
one holding his umbrella over himself and his wife, and giving
his neighbors the drippings, which he claims must have been
meant by the artist as a satire on his times."
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| We now entered a large building into which a stream of
people was pouring. I could not see the front, owing to the
awning, but, if in correspondence with the interior, which was
even finer than the store I visited the day before, it would have
been magnificent. My companion said that the sculptured group
over the entrance was especially admired. Going up a grand
staircase we walked some distance along a broad corridor with
many doors opening upon it. At one of these, which bore my
host's name, we turned in, and I found myself in an elegant
dining-room containing a table for four. Windows opened on a
courtyard where a fountain played to a great height and music
made the air electric.
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| "You seem at home here," I said, as we seated ourselves at
table, and Dr. Leete touched an annunciator.
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| "This is, in fact, a part of our house, slightly detached from
the rest," he replied. "Every family in the ward has a room set
apart in this great building for its permanent and exclusive use
for a small annual rental. For transient guests and individuals
there is accommodation on another floor. If we expect to dine
here, we put in our orders the night before, selecting anything in
market, according to the daily reports in the papers. The meal is
as expensive or as simple as we please, though of course everything
is vastly cheaper as well as better than it would be prepared
at home. There is actually nothing which our people take
more interest in than the perfection of the catering and cooking
done for them, and I admit that we are a little vain of the success
that has been attained by this branch of the service. Ah, my
dear Mr. West, though other aspects of your civilization were
more tragical, I can imagine that none could have been more
depressing than the poor dinners you had to eat, that is, all of
you who had not great wealth."
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| "You would have found none of us disposed to disagree with
you on that point," I said.
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| The waiter, a fine-looking young fellow, wearing a slightly
distinctive uniform, now made his appearance. I observed him
closely, as it was the first time I had been able to study
particularly the bearing of one of the enlisted members of the
industrial army. This young man, I knew from what I had been
told, must be highly educated, and the equal, socially and in all
respects, of those he served. But it was perfectly evident that to
neither side was the situation in the slightest degree embarrassing.
Dr. Leete addressed the young man in a tone devoid, of
course, as any gentleman's would be, of superciliousness, but at
the same time not in any way deprecatory, while the manner of
the young man was simply that of a person intent on discharging
correctly the task he was engaged in, equally without familiarity
or obsequiousness. It was, in fact, the manner of a soldier on
duty, but without the military stiffness. As the youth left the
room, I said, "I cannot get over my wonder at seeing a young
man like that serving so contentedly in a menial position."
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| "What is that word `menial'? I never heard it," said Edith.
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| "It is obsolete now," remarked her father. "If I understand it
rightly, it applied to persons who performed particularly disagreeable
and unpleasant tasks for others, and carried with it an
implication of contempt. Was it not so, Mr. West?"
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| "That is about it," I said. "Personal service, such as waiting on
tables, was considered menial, and held in such contempt, in my
day, that persons of culture and refinement would suffer hardship
before condescending to it."
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| "What a strangely artificial idea," exclaimed Mrs. Leete
wonderingly.
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| "And yet these services had to be rendered," said Edith.
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| "Of course," I replied. "But we imposed them on the poor,
and those who had no alternative but starvation."
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| "And increased the burden you imposed on them by adding
your contempt," remarked Dr. Leete.
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| "I don't think I clearly understand," said Edith. "Do you
mean that you permitted people to do things for you which you
despised them for doing, or that you accepted services from
them which you would have been unwilling to render them?
You can't surely mean that, Mr. West?"
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| I was obliged to tell her that the fact was just as she had
stated. Dr. Leete, however, came to my relief.
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| "To understand why Edith is surprised," he said, "you must
know that nowadays it is an axiom of ethics that to accept a
service from another which we would be unwilling to return in
kind, if need were, is like borrowing with the intention of not
repaying, while to enforce such a service by taking advantage of
the poverty or necessity of a person would be an outrage like
forcible robbery. It is the worst thing about any system which
divides men, or allows them to be divided, into classes and
castes, that it weakens the sense of a common humanity.
Unequal distribution of wealth, and, still more effectually,
unequal opportunities of education and culture, divided society
in your day into classes which in many respects regarded each
other as distinct races. There is not, after all, such a difference as
might appear between our ways of looking at this question of
service. Ladies and gentlemen of the cultured class in your day
would no more have permitted persons of their own class to
render them services they would scorn to return than we would
permit anybody to do so. The poor and the uncultured, however,
they looked upon as of another kind from themselves. The equal
wealth and equal opportunities of culture which all persons now
enjoy have simply made us all members of one class, which
corresponds to the most fortunate class with you. Until this
equality of condition had come to pass, the idea of the solidarity
of humanity, the brotherhood of all men, could never have
become the real conviction and practical principle of action it is
nowadays. In your day the same phrases were indeed used, but
they were phrases merely."
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| "Do the waiters, also, volunteer?"
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| "No," replied Dr. Leete. "The waiters are young men in the
unclassified grade of the industrial army who are assignable to all
sorts of miscellaneous occupations not requiring special skill.
Waiting on table is one of these, and every young recruit is given
a taste of it. I myself served as a waiter for several months in this
very dining-house some forty years ago. Once more you must
remember that there is recognized no sort of difference between
the dignity of the different sorts of work required by the nation.
The individual is never regarded, nor regards himself, as
the servant of those he serves, nor is he in any way dependent
upon them. It is always the nation which he is serving. No
difference is recognized between a waiter's functions and those
of any other worker. The fact that his is a personal service is
indifferent from our point of view. So is a doctor's. I should as
soon expect our waiter today to look down on me because I
served him as a doctor, as think of looking down on him because
he serves me as a waiter."
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| After dinner my entertainers conducted me about the building,
of which the extent, the magnificent architecture and
richness of embellishment, astonished me. It seemed that it was
not merely a dining-hall, but likewise a great pleasure-house and
social rendezvous of the quarter, and no appliance of entertainment
or recreation seemed lacking.
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| "You find illustrated here," said Dr. Leete, when I had
expressed my admiration, "what I said to you in our first
conversation, when you were looking out over the city, as to the
splendor of our public and common life as compared with the
simplicity of our private and home life, and the contrast which,
in this respect, the twentieth bears to the nineteenth century. To
save ourselves useless burdens, we have as little gear about us at
home as is consistent with comfort, but the social side of our life
is ornate and luxurious beyond anything the world ever knew
before. All the industrial and professional guilds have clubhouses
as extensive as this, as well as country, mountain, and seaside
houses for sport and rest in vacations."
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| NOTE. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it became a
practice of needy young men at some of the colleges of the country
to earn a little money for their term bills by serving as waiters on
tables at hotels during the long summer vacation. It was claimed,
in reply to critics who expressed the prejudices of the time in
asserting that persons voluntarily following such an occupation could
not be gentlemen, that they were entitled to praise for vindicating,
by their example, the dignity of all honest and necessary labor.
The use of this argument illustrates a common confusion in thought
on the part of my former contemporaries. The business of waiting
on tables was in no more need of defense than most of the other
ways of getting a living in that day, but to talk of dignity attaching
to labor of any sort under the system then prevailing was absurd.
There is no way in which selling labor for the highest price
it will fetch is more dignified than selling goods for what can be got.
Both were commercial transactions to be judged by the commercial
standard. By setting a price in money on his service, the worker
accepted the money measure for it, and renounced all clear claim
to be judged by any other. The sordid taint which this necessity
imparted to the noblest and the highest sorts of service was
bitterly resented by generous souls, but there was no evading it.
There was no exemption, however transcendent the quality of
one's service, from the necessity of haggling for its price in the
market-place. The physician must sell his healing and the apostle
his preaching like the rest. The prophet, who had guessed the
meaning of God, must dicker for the price of the revelation, and the
poet hawk his visions in printers' row. If I were asked to name the
most distinguishing felicity of this age, as compared to that in which
I first saw the light, I should say that to me it seems to consist in
the dignity you have given to labor by refusing to set a price upon
it and abolishing the market-place forever. By requiring of every
man his best you have made God his task-master, and by making
honor the sole reward of achievement you have imparted to all
service the distinction peculiar in my day to the soldier's.
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