Hamlet: Odd's bodikin, man, much better! Use every man after his desert and who shall 'scape whipping.
[5] In the volume called The Musical Amateur. (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.)
CHAPTER IX THE MOTIVE OF SOCIAL WORK
What is the motive of social work? Why do we do it? Why is it worth while? What will keep it going?
To me it seems like a head of energy behind a faucet or behind a dam, a pressure that has to be explained; and as we use the word motive, we may well think of it in a literal sense as something that pushes, something that moves. Then what moves? Energy, which is the source of our work, is perhaps the most general term that there is in the world. Behind everything, we say, there is energy. Behind the activities of our physical bodies there is energy to an extent that those who have not studied medicine or other physical sciences do not always recall.
Eighty per cent of any human being's body is made up of water. Where did it come from? It came from what he has taken in in the form of drink. Where did that come from? From the earth and the streams. Where did they get it? From the clouds. Where did the clouds get it? From the seas. Where did the seas get it? From the interplanetary spaces and God knows where. Eighty per cent of our bodies, of our available energy, comes out of something as far off as that, out of sources that have ultimately as little to do with us as that.
The other twenty per cent, the solids of every organ in our body, the brain included, are alike widely distributed in source. We do not always stop to think how widely distributed are the foods out of which the body's solids are built. Grains, fruits, vegetables, meats, we get them out of every part of the globe. The minerals that are deposited in us as what we call bone, the lime and other salts, are something which a plant once sucked up out of the earth, or another animal took out of his food to pass on to us. The bones of a human being come out of the bones of the earth through his food, animal and vegetable. The breath of the trees, the oxygen which the trees give out every day and every night, we breathe in. They take up in turn the carbon that we give out, so that there is constantly an exchange between the animal and vegetable kingdom and ours. We are warmed by inheritance from thousands of years in the coal that plants have laid down their lives in layers and strata to form; we are warmed also by the constant literal burning up of food energy in ourselves. We are clothed with borrowings from sheep and cows and other animals; birds' feathers go to make our pillows, beds, and hats.
Sometimes I wonder whether we are worth all this destruction and all the other forms of destruction whose living incarnation we are. I described, in speaking of fatigue and rest, how our physical life is a constant process of burning up and breaking down tissue, hence of destruction. And of course the money and labor of our parents that kept us alive up to the time that we call ourselves self-supporting, represents other stores of energy passed on through various way-stations, by the same sort of borrowing, from every part of the universe.