 personal service is indifferent from our point of
view. So is a doctor's. I should as soon expect our waiter to-day to look down
on me because I served him as a doctor, as think of looking down on him because
he serves me as a waiter.«
    After dinner my entertainers conducted me about the building, of which the
extent, the magnificent architecture and richness of embellishment, astonished
me. It seemed that it was not merely a dining-hall, but likewise a great
pleasure-house and social rendezvous of the quarter, and no appliance of
entertainment or recreation seemed lacking.
    »You find illustrated here,« said Dr. Leete, when I had expressed my
admiration, »what I said to you in our first conversation, when you were looking
out over the city, as to the splendor of our public and common life as compared
with the simplicity of our private and home life, and the contrast which, in
this respect, the twentieth bears to the nineteenth century. To save ourselves
useless burdens, we have as little gear about us at home as is consistent with
comfort, but the social side of our life is ornate and luxurious beyond anything
the world ever knew before. All the industrial and professional guilds have
club-houses as extensive as this, as well as country, mountain, and seaside
houses for sport and rest in vacations.«
 
NOTE. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it became a practice of needy
young men at some of the colleges of the country to earn a little money for
their term bills by serving as waiters on tables at hotels during the long
summer vacation. It was claimed, in reply to critics who expressed the
prejudices of the time in asserting that persons voluntarily following such an
occupation could not be gentlemen, that they were entitled to praise for
vindicating, by their example, the dignity of all honest and necessary labor.
The use of this argument illustrates a common confusion in thought on the part
of my former contemporaries. The business of waiting on tables was in no more
need of defense than most of the other ways of getting a living in that day, but
to talk of dignity attaching to labor of any sort under the system then
prevailing was absurd. There is no way in which selling labor for the highest
price it will fetch is more dignified than selling goods for what can be got.
Both were commercial transactions to be judged by the commercial standard. By
setting a price in money on his service, the worker accepted the money measure
for it, and renounced all clear claim to be judged
