ution, is bad. An experienced
dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent house
which I had visited and sampled: "We pay six hundred dollars for two
poor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week for
board, whether we eat or not. The food is very bad. It is all kept hot
for about an hour, on steam, so that every dish tastes of laundry.
Everything is an extra. Telephone--lights--tips--especially tips. I tip
everybody. I even tip the _chef_. I tip the _chef_ so that, when I am
utterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere chop or a steak, he will
choose me an eatable chop or steak. And that's how things go on!"

My true and candid friend, the experienced dweller in apartment-houses,
was, I have good reason to believe, an honorable man. And it is
therefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence of
apartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social
immorality of his act in tipping the _chef_. Clearly it was an act
calculated to undermine the _chef's_ virtue. If all the other
experienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing no
good effect at all. But if only a few of them did it, then it was an act
which resulted in the remainder of the victims being deprived of their
full, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks. My friend's
proper course was obviously to have kicked up a row, and to have kicked
up a row in a fashion so clever that the management would not put him
into the street. He ought to have organized a committee of protest, he
ought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public opinion, he
ought to have persevered day after day and evening after evening, until
the management had been forced to exclude uneatable chops and steaks
utterly from their palatial premises and to exact the honest performance
of duty from each and all of the staff. In the end it would have dawned
upon the management that inedible food was just as much out of place in
the restaurant as counterfeit bills and coins at the cash-desk. The
proper course would have been difficult and tiresome. The proper course
often is. My friend took the easy, wicked course. That is to say, he
exhibited a complete lack of public spirit.

* * * * *

An apartment-house is only an apartment-house; whereas the republic is
the republic. And yet I permit myself to think that the one may
conceivably be the mirror of the other. And I do p