The business career in its public relations

by Albert Shaw

The architect, the civil or mechanical or electrical engineer, and the chemist, as well as the professional teacher, the trained librarian, or the journalist who carries on his work with due sense of its almost unequaled public duties and responsibilities,—all these are now admitted by dicta of our foremost authorities to a place equal with the law, medicine, and the ministry in the list of the professions; that is to say, in the group of callings which, under my definition, are distinguished especially by their public character. And in this group, of course, should be included politicians, legislators, and public administrators in so far as they serve the public interests reputably and in a professional spirit. Nor should we forget such special classes of public servants as the officers of the army and navy; while nobody will deny public character and professional rank to men of letters, artists, musicians and actors.

In all these callings it is demanded not merely that men shall be subject to the private rules of conduct,—that they must not cheat, or lie, or steal, or bear false witness, or be bad neighbors or undesirable citizens,—but in addition and in the most important sense that they shall be subject to positive ethical standards that relate to the welfare of the whole community, and that require of them the exercise of a true public spirit.

The man of public spirit is he who is able at a given moment, under certain conditions, to set the public welfare before his own. Furthermore, he is a man who is trained and habituated to that point of view, so that he is not aware of any pangs of martyrdom or even of any exercise of self-denial when he is concerning himself about the public good even to his own momentary inconvenience or disadvantage. Public spirit is that state or habit of mind which leads a man to care greatly for the general welfare. It is this ethical quality that to my mind should be the great aim and object of training.

On its best side, what we term the professional spirit is, then, very closely related to this commendable quality in men of a right intellectual and moral development that we call public spirit. The chief difference lies in this: that whereas all professional men may be public-spirited in a general sense, each professional man should, in addition, manifest a special and technical sort of public spirit that pertains to the nature of his calling. The lawyer should have a particularly keen regard for the equitable administration of justice. The doctor should truly care for the physical wholesomeness and well-being of the community. The clergyman should be alive to those things that concern the rectitude and purity of life. The journalist should be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of the enlightenment of public opinion; and so on. Without either the general or the technical manifestations of public spirit, in short, the so-called professional man is a reproach to his guild and a failure in his neighborhood.

Now, what has all this to do with the moral standards that belong to the business career as distinguished from the professional life? My answer must be very clear and very direct if I am to justify so long an analysis of the ethical characteristics of the professions themselves. I have merely used the time-honored method of trying to lead you by way of familiar, admitted points of view to certain points of view that, if not wholly new, are at least less familiar and less widely recognized. The whole thesis that I wish to develop is simply this: that however it may have been in business life in times past and gone, there has been such a tremendous change in the organization and methods of the business world and also in the relative importance of the functions of the business man in the community, that the distinctions which have hitherto set apart the professional classes have become obsolete for all practical purposes in many branches and departments of the business world.

At least, the work of the responsible leaders is no longer to be regarded as essentially a thing of private concern and free from public responsibility. If the business world is not characterized, first, by public spirit and a sense of public duty in general, and, second, by the special and technical sense of public obligation that pertains to particular kinds or departments of business activity, then it is falling short of its best opportunities and evading its providential tasks. It is for the modern business world to recognize the conditions that have in the fulness of time given it so great a power and so dominant a position; and it must not shirk the responsibilities that belong to it as fully and truly as they belong to any of the professions.

I hold, then, that the young man of education and opportunity who proposes to go into a business career enters it not merely with a low and unworthy standard if his sole motive and object be to acquire wealth, but he also enters it in disregard of the ideas that fill the minds of the best modern business leaders. He shows a pitiable lack of appreciation of the elements that are to constitute real business success in the period within which his own career must fall.

Let us consider, briefly, the evolution of our present-day economic or business life, and then take note of the necessary place that particular classes of business men must hold in the structure of our society. I, for my part, look upon this last century of economic progress,—under the sway of what is often called "capitalism" as a term of reproach,—as an immeasurable boon to mankind. It began with the practical utilization of several great inventions, notably that of steam power, which broke up the old household and village industries, gave us the modern factory system, and along with the development of railroads gave us the modern industrial city. This new and revolutionizing system of industry and business forced its way into a world of poverty, of disease, of depraved public life, of low morals in the main pervading the community,—a world for the most part of class distinctions in which the lot even of the privileged few was not a very noble or enviable one, while the state of the vast majority was little better than that of serfs.

Many writers have sought to throw a charm and a glamour over that old condition of economic life and society that followed the break-up of feudalism and that preceded the creation of our new political and industrial institutions. But with some mitigations it was for most people a period, as I have said, of squalor, disease, and degradation. The fundamental trouble could be summed up in the one word, poverty. The mission of the new industrial system, for the most part unconscious and unrecognized, was to transform the world by abolishing the reign of poverty. Doubtless it would be desirable if the improvement of conditions, material and spiritual, could make progress with exactly even pace on some perfectly symmetrical plan. But history shows us that the forward social movement has proceeded first in one aspect, then in another, on lines so tangential, often so zigzag, that it is difficult until one gets distance enough for perspective, to see that any true progress has been made at all.

Thus, the modern industrial system, which found the conditions of poverty, disease, and hardship prevalent, seemed for quite a long time, in its rude breaking up of old relations and its ruthless adherence to certain newly proclaimed principles, to have brought matters from bad to worse. The squalor and poverty of the village of hand-loom weavers seemed only intensified in the new industrial towns to which the weavers flocked from their deserted hamlets. Manufacturers were doing business under the fiercest and most unregulated competition. Economists were demonstrating their "law of supply and demand" and their "iron law of wages" as capable in themselves of regulating all the conditions and relations of business life. Epidemics raged and depravity prevailed in the new factory centers.