Or to take an illustration less radical: it is not in legal testimony alone that ideal ethics require everybody to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--that the world should have as much truth as possible; and if the world were perfectly kind, perfectly honest and perfectly wise (which last involves the first two), that ideal could be realized. For instance, in our imperfect world a man telling people when he did not like them, would be constantly giving needless pain and making needless enemies, whereas in an ideal world--made up of perfect people, there would be nobody to dislike, or, pardon the Hibernicism, if there were, the whole truth could be told without causing pain or enmity. Or again, in a world where there are dishonest people, a man telling everything about his schemes, would have them run away with by others, though in an ideal world, where there were no dishonest people, he could speak freely. In fact, the necessity of reticence in this connection does not even depend on the existence of dishonesty: for in a world where people have to look out for themselves, instead of everybody looking out for everybody else, a man exposing his plans might hurry the execution of competing plans on the part of perfectly honest people. Farther illustration may be sufficiently furnished by the topic in hand. In the case of most poor folks other than servants, what to do about it has lately been pretty distinctly settled: the religion of pauperization is pretty generally set aside: almsgiving, the authorities on ethics now generally hold, should be restricted to deserving cases--to people incapacitated by constitution or circumstance from taking proper care of themselves. Now is tipping almsgiving, and are servants among the deserving classes? How many people have asked themselves these simple questions, and how many who are educated up to habitually refusing alms unless the last of the questions is affirmatively answered, just as habitually tip servants? Is tipping almsgiving? Not in the same sense that alms are given without any show of anything in return: the servant does something for the tipper. Yes, but he is paid for it by his employer. True, but only sometimes: at other times he is only partly paid, depending for the rest on tips; and sometimes the tips are so valuable that the servant pays his alleged employer for the opportunity to get them. Yet I know one hotel in Germany, and probably there are others, there and elsewhere, where the menus and other stationery bear requests against tipping. But in that one hotel I know tipping to be as rife as in hotels generally: the customers are not educated up to the landlord's standard. And here we come to the fundamental remedy for all questionable practices--the education of the people beyond them. But this is simply the ideal condition in which ideal ethics could prevail. Meanwhile we must determine the practical ethics of the actual world.