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Updated: June 14, 2025
In certain other walks of life the habit of tipping is carried to more extremes in New York than in any European city I know of. One barber with whom I talked on the subject openly avowed that he considered himself wronged if he did not get his fee, and recounted the various devices he and his fellows practised to extract gratuities from the unwilling.
Deeming it important to open the campaign by putting a good taste in the mouths of his friends the Indians, he began by distributing a few gratuities to them some coloured beads to the women, and a few lines, fish-hooks, and tobacco to the men.
Dear, indeed, the dead must have been in their lifetime if relative or friend will go with them so far as the cemetery in this Paris, where every one would fain have twenty-five hours in the day. But with the coachmen it is different; they lose their tips if they do not make the journey; so, empty or full, the mourning coaches go to the church and cemetery and return to the house for gratuities.
About this time a return was called for by Congress of all the moneys paid by the government, on account of the army, to the lines between New York and Washington. Whether or no it was ever furnished I did not hear; but it was openly stated that the colonels of regiments received large gratuities from certain railway companies for the regiments passing over their lines.
Moreover, besides gratuities and a fixed salary, there are the gratifications and perquisites belonging to the office. In the Commune, and on the revolutionary-committees, every extortion can be, and is, practiced. "I know," says Quevremont, "two citizens who have been put in prison, without being told why, and, at the end of three weeks or a month, let out and do you know how?
To make the best of a prolonged misfortune does absolutely lessen sympathy, by diminishing the interest of the situation; and even the good Doctor himself was the less concerned at any hindrance to his visits to Portland, as he uniformly found his prisoner cheerful, approved by officials, and always making some small advance in the scale of his own world, and not, as his friends without expected of him, showing that he felt himself injured instead of elated by such rewards as improved diet, or increased gratuities to be set to his account against the time when, after eight years, he might hope for exportation with a ticket of leave to Western Australia.
In their eyes he was not the great artist, whose achievement was to go ringing down the ages; he was simply a crank or madman, who did not know his own mind half the time, from whom abuse was as likely to be predicated as gratuities, who could be ridiculed, neglected, circumvented with impunity.
Then an old chief the same who had officiated at the feast described in a former chapter rose, and standing forth into the middle of the room, made a long and grave oration, in which, besides a great deal that was bombastic, much that was irrelevant, and more that was utterly fabulous and nonsensical, he recounted the sorrows of himself and his tribe, concluding with a request that the great chief would take these things into consideration the principal "things" being that they did not get anything in the shape of gratuities, while it was notorious that the Indians in other districts did, and that they did not get enough of goods in advance, on credit of their future hunts.
Relief from contracts made with the Government is too easily accorded in favor of the citizen; the failure to support claims against the Government by proof is often supplied by no better consideration than the wealth of the Government and the poverty of the claimant; gratuities in the form of pensions are granted upon no other real ground than the needy condition of the applicant, or for reasons less valid; and large sums are expended for public buildings and other improvements upon representations scarcely claimed to be related to public needs and necessities.
Half a dozen times in the course of the next three hours people hailed him from sidewalks and restaurants; he took them up, carried them to their several destinations, received payment, and acknowledged their gratuities with perfunctory thanks thoroughly in character but all with little conscious thought.
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