Let us examine a case where mutualistic conduct shows traits beyond the reach of selective love. I go to a shoemaker and ask for a pair of shoes. He hands me a pair, I pay his price, and carry them home. As I come to wear them, I find them admirably made. They give me greater comfort than I have ever had before and wear longer. The leather appears to have been selected with care, and every nail and stitch to have received attention. I return to their maker and say: “That was a remarkable pair of shoes. Did you make them specially for me? Perhaps you have known me before, have taken a fancy to me, and so have been willing to put yourself to all this trouble for my convenience. That is the way with love. It takes burdens on itself to relieve another.” How astonished the dealer would be at such talk! Would he not answer: “I had no thought of you, but I made the shoes as well as I could. It is my business.” “But,” I continue, “if you never know to whom your shoes will go, why take such pains?” “Because I mean to be true to my job and not shirk my part in the ongoing of the world. If I do bad work somebody, I don’t know who, will suffer. I mean to be a good shoemaker.” Here is professional responsibility. The man deals justly with his unknown public.
And in such professional responsibility we pass from individual love to that noble public love which I have ventured to call Justice. Love remains, but it is now universal love, love freed from selection and without those restrictions of knowledge, circumstance, and temperament on which selection is based. No doubt in individual love there is an intimacy and a wealth of feeling which this case has not. But in it selfishness is also more pronounced. Knowing John well, I am confident that in joining my life with his, and with his only, we shall both be enriched. But the shoemaker carries his blessing to the unknown and joins himself rather with the public good. He gets his gain by giving gain to those whom he has never seen. It is true that the transaction may be partly explained on the grounds already noticed. An exchange has occurred by which buyer and seller have alike profited. But something more than calculation of profit has gone into these shoes. They would have sold readily with half the care. But this man respected business standards, was something more than a trader, gave not by equivalent measure, and was more concerned over possible danger to his customers than over extra labor for himself. That is the essence of professionalism. While frankly seeking mutual gain and declining anything one-sided, it abandons all thought of exact equivalence, keeping in the foreground standards of excellence approved by its group and looking to public service.
Or is there in the professional man something still deeper than the characteristics just mentioned, something of which these are but the outgrowth? The professional man enjoys his work and would rather do it than not. Many of us, perhaps most, are driven to work by the need to live. We will do that work faithfully and not disappoint those who depend on us. But we often think of work as toil, do as little of it as possible, and find our enjoyment quite outside it. Days of freedom from that toil are eagerly anticipated. How different is the professional spirit! It took up its work originally not as a task but as a chance to gratify a personal interest. To following that interest through all its windings its heart has been given. Throughout there has been a passion for perfection, never realized, never abandoned. Each day carries accomplishment forward and discloses wider ranges into which skill might extend. Hardship, lack of gain, failure to be recognized are matters of slender consequence. The work itself is its own rich reward.
Such is professional responsibility at its best. It is responsibility to no individual, not even so much to the general public as to the profession chosen. Perhaps we catch the spirit most readily among artists and scholars, who proverbially show little regard for financial results. But even where regard for money is patent and necessary, this professional spirit is often also present.
I am ill and call a physician. He comes to my bedside day by day, studies my case with elaborate care, gives up large amounts of precious time to my whims, and never allows his moods to intrude, so that on my recovery I cannot help saying: “What a sympathetic person you are! I do not see how you can hold an interest in so many people and feel their afflictions as if they were your own.” Such a remark would be as inadequate as if I had said: “You have thoroughly earned your fee.” Both would be true, and both would point to motives which might rightly influence him. But into that complex motive would go a third factor more influential still, if he was a worthy physician. He cares for the healing art. Of course he is unwilling that I, this individual person, should suffer. But it is not the “me” element nor the money element which made him take his trouble. He would have done the same for a stranger. And this impartial attitude is, on the whole, best. Personal sympathy is often disturbing. Let him coolly survey me as a case of typhus fever, and I shall get his best service. Through me he relieves suffering, obtains for himself a due income, gains larger knowledge of disease and skill in combating it; in short, meets the responsibilities of an arduous and interesting profession.
One may wonder why I call this impersonal extension of love Justice. Because justice seeks to benefit all, but all alike. It knows no persons, or rather it knows every one as a person and insures each his share in the common good. All the altruism of love is here, but without love’s arbitrary selection and limited interest. We do wrong in thinking of justice as chiefly concerned with penalties. These are incidental, inflicted on those who refuse to find their gain in the gain of others. The main work of justice is its equal distribution of advantage and its insistence that each individual shall be faithful to what he undertakes for the benefit of all. Justice is therefore thoroughgoing love, its mutuality guarded, rationalized, stripped of personal bias, and brought near us through the avenues of our special work.
Only we must not confine the professions to the four usually reckoned: teaching, preaching, medicine, and the law. The professional spirit may vitalize work of every sort. Here is a poor man to whom few enjoyments are open, who goes out morning after morning to shovel gravel or to engage in some other labor equally uninteresting. He earns his two or three dollars a day, takes it home, and hands it to his slatternly wife. Once he was drawn to her by romantic love. With her he figured a real union, each continually happy in the sight of the other and each day bringing to both an inward joy. He did not know her. He had neither the opportunity nor the ability to study her temperament and learn whether it was adjustable to his. It proved not to be so. Children came, cares increased, she neglected herself, her home, her husband. There was no longer any warmth of affection between them. But still he goes on working for her unmurmuringly. She is a wife and mother, he a husband and father. To these relationships he will be faithful. Is not his a larger love than that of the courtship? I do not see that we can say so. But it is love of a different sort and a very noble sort. We called love the joint service of a common life. Though she no longer joins him, he joins the community in maintaining the family tie. What keeps him going is his professional responsibility. Being a good husband is the task assigned him in the general division of labor. He recognizes its justice, controls his temper, and patiently meets the hardship involved. I cannot see how there is less professional responsibility here than in the case of the shoemaker or physician. Indeed, wherever any one is true to his specific task, puts his heart into it, works not for money alone nor through interest in a single individual, but, without calculating any equivalence between what he gives and receives, studies how he may most fully perform the work to which he has been called, that man is exhibiting professional responsibility, honoring love, and exalting justice in a way to deserve profound reverence.
CHAPTER VIII
CONCLUSION
Love is so often proclaimed as a social panacea that I have thought it well to subject it to a careful criticism and indicate its defects when regarded as a complete embodiment of altruism. Some of those defects are incidental. Since it is an affair of human beings it cannot fail to show the imperfections characteristic of such wayward creatures. Seldom does even marriage, love’s best opportunity, attain that full mutuality which I have eulogized. Self-assertion intrudes early. The interests of one or the other party become predominant, and mutuality gradually declines. When the simple-minded man was told that in marriage two persons become one, he naturally enough asked: “Which one?” Yet if the completely conjunct life is rare, it is precious as an ideal for directing conduct. We often speak of love as something we fall into. Rather it is something to be made, developed, steadily approximated. The best marriages are accomplished works of art, yielding large rewards through all their progressive stages. But love is ever unstable. Unwatched, it slips down among the lower forms of altruism.