To escape vulgar associates, the children of the house avoid the
elementary schools--the schools called in America public schools--where
there are trained, efficient teachers, good apparatus, and an
atmosphere of industry, and go to one of those wretched dens of
disorderly imposture, a middle-class school, where an absolute failure
to train or educate is seasoned with religious cant, lessons in piano-
playing, lessons in French "made in England," mortarboard caps for the
boys, and a high social tone. And to emphasize the fact of its social
position, this bookless, bathless family tips! The plumber touches his
hat for a tip, the man who moves the furniture, the butcher-boy at
Christmas, the dustman; these things also, the respect and the tip, at
their minimum dimensions. Everything is at its minimum dimensions, it
is the last chipped, dwarfed, enfeebled state of a tradition that has,
in its time, played a fine part in the world. This much of honour still
clings to it, it will endure no tip, no charity, no upper-class control
of its privacy. This is the sort of home in which the minds of
thousands of young Englishmen and Englishwomen receive their first
indelible impressions. Can one expect them to escape the contagion of
its cramped pretentiousness, its dingy narrowness, its shy privacy of
social degradation, its essential sordidness and inefficiency?

Our skilled operative, on the other hand, will pocket his tip. He is on
the other side of the boundary. He presents a rising element coming
from the servile mass. Probably his net income equals or exceeds the
shopman's, but there is no servant, no black coat and silk hat, no
middle-class school in his scheme of things. He calls the shopman
"Sir," and makes no struggle against his native accent. In his heart he
despises the middle class, the mean tip-givers, and he is inclined to
overrate the gentry or big tippers. He is much more sociable, much
noisier, relatively shameless, more intelligent, more capable, less