“The glimpse, what was that?”
“Well, I can’t exactly define it or locate where it first began, but I do recall that one day, in the classroom—it was in Sociology—the professor set me thinking on a line I had never considered before. I can’t tell what it was that he said explicitly, but he implicitly suggested to my mind that there are such things as dividends-not-of-money. Of course having been used to the other sort of dividends all my life, I was attracted to the idea that there were other dividends. I kept thinking about it and one thing led to another. The president spoke one day, in chapel, of the educated man’s duty to his generation. I linked that to ‘dividends-not-of-money’ and worked it out to my satisfaction that there was for me, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, a place of usefulness and service in the world.”
“You had a call to the ministry, then, Thurber?” I demanded.
“Gracious, no: not that!” he exclaimed, in a tone that implied I had proposed something too extravagant for fancy. “I a clergyman! I respect the cloth, Priddy, and I am glad that you are making it your profession, but really, that’s not my line. Perhaps I’m not cut out for it. I know I’m not.”
“You planned to go into settlement or Y.M.C.A. work, probably,” I hinted, “so many college fellows give themselves to that form of service in these days, Thurber.”
“I know they do, Priddy, but I didn’t work it out in those directions, either, but in a more vital way: one that has aroused every bit of latent enthusiasm for service and helpfulness that might have been hidden away in so pampered a body as mine. It’s what I call the glimpse, Priddy. Want me to explain it?”
“Certainly I do.”
“Well, I really was put in a fix by so much talk in the classrooms from the faculty and in the chapel by the President about ‘moral leadership’ and all that, and really thought at first that they were asking me to go into definite self-sacrificing avocations like settlement work and the other forms of social service, and I had no hankering for that, either. I hated to leave father alone in his old age and wanted, eventually, to succeed him in the ownership and direction of his mills. I imagined myself a callow materialist, opposed to spiritual forms of influence, but I did not want to give up the business. You can probably imagine how heathenish I felt when I contrasted father’s industrial policy with the call to be a social servant. I began to think back to what father’s self-education had done for him and had done for his employees. I faced the truth for the first time: how his narrow-minded policy had brought him great wealth at the expense of his self-respect and the happiness of so many of the people who worked for him. For years and years and years, he had been just paying wages for work done: that was all. He had paid no attention to the moral or social welfare of his people: the hundreds of families under his control. He did not go to their church, attend their lodges, go into their homes, or ever make it his policy to inquire about their welfare. He was just simply using them as tools towards the securing of a fortune—for me, that was all. I saw it all, how he had been creating in his little corner of our American industry, labor hostility, unsanitary conditions, poor types of ignorant, drunken, loafing citizens until the tenements belonging to his firm formed a perfect slum. But he had not the eyes to see, nor has he yet; but he goes on in the darkness and in the groove of his own selfishness, intensifying the disloyalty of his employees and incidentally hurting his own reputation. Yet I could not bring myself to give up desiring to take on that industry. It was right then that the glimpse came.” Thurber paused for a moment and then continued:
“Like the breaking of day, it flashed into my soul one morning in Ethics class, that if I could only go to work in that industry and reform it, that I should be doing a public service: that I should be following the advice of the college and giving moral service. But I realized that I should have to train myself in the science of ethics and morals; the history of economics and the deeper things of social science in order to reform the business intelligently, constructively and profitably to myself and the employees.”
“Oh,” I commented, “you want to make your type of social service earn money?—is not that an unusual sort of social service?”