With an admirable energy,
promptitude, and sang-froid he threw off his clothes and plunged into
the water to rescue the drowning infant.
Possibly the reason why there is less bitterness in the agrarian
socialist movement than in that of the towns is that the field labourer,
although his wages and his standard of living are no better than those
of the miner or artisan, has a clearer consciousness of the social value
of his work. Sowing corn is a different thing from extracting diamonds
from the earth.
And it may be that the greatest social progress consists in a certain
indifferentiation of labour, in the facility for exchanging one kind of
work for another, and that other not perhaps a more lucrative, but a
nobler one--for there are degrees of nobility in labour. But unhappily
it is only too seldom that a man who keeps to one occupation without
changing is concerned with making a religious vocation of it, or that
the man who changes his occupation for another does so from any
religious motive.
And do you not know cases in which a man, justifying his action on the
ground that the professional organism to which he belongs and in which
he works is badly organized and does not function as it ought, will
evade the strict performance of his duty on the pretext that he is
thereby fulfilling a higher duty? Is not this insistence upon the
literal carrying out of orders called disciplinarianism, and do not
people speak disparagingly of bureaucracy and the Pharisaism of public
officials? And cases occur not unlike that of an intelligent and
studious military officer who should discover the deficiencies of his
country's military organization and denounce them to his superiors and
perhaps to the public--thereby fulfilling his duty--and who, when on
active service, should refuse to carry out an operation which he was
ordered to undertake, believing that there was but scant probability of
success or rather certainty of failure, so long as these deficiencies
remained unremedied.
Pages:
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386