Sacramento daily record-union., 1890-07-19
PUBLIC MANNERS.
Offenders Against Decency iu Pubn'
Places.

Ohenders Against Decency In Public
Places.
From the New York Tribune.l
1t ought to be pleasure to every re.
spectacle citizen, not only to note the fact
that crusade has been begun against of.
tenders against deeency in public places,
but also to assume share of the task ol
exterminating them. 1t may be assumed,
We think, without much risk of refutation,
that the great American expectorator has
become slowly less numerous and intoler-
able since Dickens first made him immor-
tally infamous. And yet it does undoubt-
! edly require large measure of philosophi-
cal impartiality to recognize the dawning
of a new era. The species is still abund-
ant and prolific, and the multiplication of
| transportation facilities and of popular
resorts makes its existence universally
burdensome.
With some prevalent complaints against
the owners and management of public con-
| veyances we are not in the most thorough
sympathy, realizing that for the present
they are futile, and that patrons are quite
as much to blame as purveyors. We are
entirely confident, for example, that the
street-car company which should make
and enforce a rule forbidding the admis-
sion to a car of more persons than it could
comfortably seat, would forthwith become
the object of bitter maledictions. The
average inhabitant of the United States,
man, woman and child, claims an inalien-
able right to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness; and of all particulars in
cluded under the last specification, few
are more precious than the right to a place
in the first conveyance that comes along,
without reference to its previous condition
of surplusage. When new transit systems
shall have doubled our present facilities,
this national characteristic viii become
less intense, and slow process of educa.
tion will set in
But for other miseries of urban travel
there is no excuse, and no explanation
except in the beastly instincts of a mi
nority. An official mandate has been
issued in Philadelphia against the vile
and selfish habit of splitting, which de-
serves to be initiated in every city, town
and hamlet which maintains public con-
veyance. The unhappy fact is that this
disgusting vice is intrenched in the per-
sonal proclivities of multitude of men
who are in most respects inofensive, but
from whom an uncomfortable dulness or
obliquity of perception conceals its real
enormity. That man who will cheer
fully surrender his seat to a woman, de-
liberately preferring her comfort to his
own, should be willing to appear as if he
were revenging the sacrifice upon her feet
and skirts is an inexplicable phenomenon
Allied to these offenders but less odious,
are those who refuse to relinquish partly
consumed cigars at car-steps and station
platforms, and thus exalt economy as a
greater virtue than regard for others
rights. They do not generally defy the
letter of the universal rule against smok-
ing in public conyeyances, though fur
tive inhalation by way of tanning a hidden
fire is not uncommon; but they one ard all
ignore its spirit, for, as every uncorrupted
nostril knows full well, a cigar that has
gone out is more offensive than cigar
that is burning. Extinction is infinitely
worse than combustion.
But more detestable than these violators
of the law of love are the unspeakable
wretches who take advantage of their sur
roundings to aggravate the unavoid-
able annoyance of propinquity
into the gratuitous ofiense of unnecessary
contact-who find an odious qualification
in swaying and pressing against their
neighbors, in the certainty that they can
invent a plausible excuse, and charge their
baseness to the crowd and the motion of
the car. Persons who insist on going
where there is not room for them un-
douttedly court discontinue, but they do
not ON that account merit insult. The
correction of these and kindred abuses
must be slow, and the beginning of a re-
formation has been delayed too long. The
transportation companies and theater man.
ayers can initiate the process by stern
discrimination against patrons who spit or
swear or talk obscenely, or diffuse the
fumes and commit the various trespasses of
intoyicstiop