The business of being a waiter in New York is no joke. Last week one member of the profession was precipitated from the ninth story of a hotel by a group of jovial actors singing "Out the window he must go"; and now comes the still more painful report that sixty others were held up in a cafe and despoiled of $12,000 in tips, a pint of whiskey, and a pair of new shoelaces.

One suspects that these crimes are not mere sporadic instances of barbarity, but that a single insidious motive underlies them both. Nor would it be far wrong to consider them a part of the propaganda being disseminated by the Cafeteria Trust, which is seeking, and alas acquiring, a strangle hold upon the gullet of the American people. Even those of us who submit most tamely to the ignominy of self-service feel vaguely alarmed at the increasingly rapid disappearance of the waiter from our modern times. Obviously something must be done about it; and as we slop coffee over an ill-balanced tray we wonder what.