e business it is to "hold up" returning
citizens perform their ungracious task ungraciously. Theirs is
rather the attitude of the detective dealing with suspected
criminals than the attitude of the public servant impersonally
obeying orders. It is true that even on the New York docks one may
encounter civility and kindness. There are people who assure us that
they have never encountered anything else; but then there are people
who would have us believe that always and under all circumstances
they meet with the most distinguished consideration. They intimate
that there is _that_ in their own demeanour which makes rudeness to
them an impossibility.

More candid souls find it hard to account for the crudity of our
intercourse, not with officials only, but with the vast world which
lies outside our narrow circle of associates. We have no human
relations where we have no social relations; we are awkward and
constrained in our recognition of the unfamiliar; and this
awkwardness encumbers us in the ordinary routine of life. A policeman
who has been long on one beat, and who has learned to know either
the householders or the business men of his locality, is wont to be
the most friendly of mortals. There is something almost pathetic in
the value he places upon human relationship, even of a very casual
order. A conductor on a local train who has grown familiar with scores
of passengers is no longer a ticket-punching, station-shouting
automaton. He bears himself in friendly fashion towards all
travellers, because he has established with some of them a rational
foothold of communication. But the official who sells tickets to a
hurrying crowd, or who snaps out a few tart words at a bureau of
information, or who guards a gate through which men and women are
pushing with senseless haste, is clad in an armour of incivility.
He is wantonly rude to foreigners, whose helplessness should make
some appeal to his humanity. I have seen a gatekeeper at Jersey City
take by the shoulders a poor German, whose ticket called for another
train, and shove him roughly out of the way, without a word of
explanation. The man, too bewildered for resentment, rejoined his
wife to whom he had said good-bye, and the two anxious, puzzled
creatures stood whispering together as the throng swept callously
past them. It was a painful spectacle, a lapse from the well-ordered
decencies of civilization.

For to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary