Actors, it would seem, have enough contact with the itching palm among stage hands to make them ardent advocates of reform, to say nothing of their contact with it in hotels. On the vaudeville stage especially the carpenter, the electrician, the property man and their co-workers must be "seen" with regular and generous donations to insure a smooth act. In many theaters the stage hands have a definite scale of tips for regular duties that they perform--and for which the management also pays them. X THE EMPLOYEE VIEWPOINT From a waiter, or a porter, or a janitor's point of view, tipping is wrong only when it is meager. They regard this form of compensation as not only just but usually too sparingly bestowed. Unquestionably, with any reform in the manner of compensation to persons engaged in domestic or other serving capacities, must go a reform in the attitude of the public toward servitors. The patron who abuses his privileges, who exacts of employees far more than he has the right to ask, who treats them as automatons without sensibilities or self-respect--such a patron must be handled simultaneously with the change in manner of compensation. Employers, particularly in hotels and like public places, will have to give more attention to seeing that employees are not mistreated by the swaggering, blatant, selfish type of patron. This type abounds and has been developed largely by the tipping custom, that is, the extremely servile attitude assumed by servitors in order to stimulate tipping has brought out the opposite quality of domineering pride in the patron. THE SORE SPOT No feeling so rankles in the mind as the sense of uncompensated labor. The thought that patrons have gotten something for nothing leaves a sore spot in the thought of servitors. And if they are employed in places where the only compensation they receive is from the gratuities of patrons, this soreness is incurable. The next time the patron appears he will be made to feel the displeasure of the employee. Thus, in one sense, it is the system that is wrong, a system which does an injustice to both employee and patron. Every employee has a fairly clear idea of his duties. Most employees scrupulously refrain from doing more than the duties for which they are paid expressly. Hence, when an employee over-steps this boundary he has fixed in his own mind, he has the sense of uncompensated labor. He feels a grudge either against the employer or the patron. He looks to one or the other to supply the extra remuneration for the extra service. As a consequence, personal service workers are nursing a grievance much of the time. Their conversation and thoughts are about some patron who has failed to compensate them, or has, in their judgment, inadequately compensated them. They devote little time to thinking of a reform in the system that would give them an adequate compensation from the employer and do away entirely with the patron-to-employee form of compensation.