A Picture Every Month: The Ticket-Taker

To this day he is still wondering about her odd behavior... He may well have reckoned her mad, and that was the end of it!.. But if his thinking did not go that far, here is the answer to his wondering!.

He is an inspector — and for her the word was the "bogeyman" that frightens small children.. She remembers it from the days of her childhood, when the teacher would use the word to sow terror in the hearts of the schoolgirls; but today, on hearing it, she feels a sensation she does not know how to explain.. perhaps a mixture of pity and disgust...

Let us return to the story of our friend, who is another breed of inspector: he works on a transport car; I mean that he is a man filling a post which it is a disgrace for a country claiming civilization and progress to create.

He came up to her and asked her to produce the ticket. She said: I threw it away!.. He bristled, he foamed and frothed — what contempt for his person, and for the profession!..

She almost smiled — had she not seen before her the long, broad reality of a nation of whose very marrow she is!..

Has any one of us thought, as he takes the little paper ticket from the hand of the tram or "autobus" employee.. has he thought, as he raises his hand in a mechanical motion, what this scrap of paper means?..

A people not responsible for itself, for its duty, for its conscience — the loftiest thing in man; other persons are set over that self and that conscience!.. So they punch him a ticket, which he must keep until the turn comes of those who stand above the ticket-takers "in humanity."

I mean the inspectors — not of tickets, but of the consciences of the employees.. and of the people!

I long for a day when the machinery of the state gives up the office of inspection.. and the presses can rest from printing tickets!..