CHAP. XXXIX The Good Force Out the Bad Men or Be Them selves Forced Out by Competition Instruc- into the hearts of the shysters, ambulance chasers and juryfixers who hang on the skirts of the law, or of the charlatans and blackguards who slip into medicine. In fact, mere moral suasion no more suffices to keep the professions straight than public opinion suffices to keep the peace. In either case, tribunals and punishment are necessary. The good in each of the professions ought to be organized in order to pursue and harry the bad. Resistance to such organization comes not only from those who want a free hand in earning fees but as well from the individualistic tradition that nobody is concerned but practitioner and patron. And, in sooth, while the doctor gets his living from his patients, the lawyer from his clients and the editor from his advertisers, it is asking a good Ideal to insist that he shall behave as if he were a salaried civil servant. Nothing but strong discipline can induce such professions to become virtually branches of social service. The opening up of non-private employment-such as that of government, of the philanthropies, and of the universities removes a deflecting pressure from the consciences of many professional men and promotes the growth of the spirit of service. Army and navy officers are proverbial for espirit de corps and devotion to their ideal of duty. The sale of instruction for profit is so nearly extinct that teachers as a body have developed a strong sense of the social aspect of their work. Earnest doctors feel that the salvation of their profession lies in its being absorbed out of the private illness service into the public health service, while thoughtful journalists see no hope save the advent of the endowed or public newspaper. THE TEACHING OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS Because of the rising tide of criticism of the professions and perhaps also owing to a growing fear of taint from commercialism, professional schools are making more effort to acquaint their students with the temptations and the standards of their future calling. This tendency has developed along with the movement to codify professional ethics and may be due to the same cause. About three quarters of the seniors in American law schools are receiving instruction in legal ethics averaging eight hours in amount. Of the twenty-eight law schools reporting the number of years they have maintained such instruction. eighteen have established their courses within the last eight years, i.e., since the code movement gained prominence in the American Bar Association. One law school has just put in a fifteenhour course on legal ethics while another contemplates a course. of thirty hours. In CHAP. XXXIX Medical In American medical schools, ethics has received little attention. Generally two lectures on the moral problems of medi- Ethics cal practice suffice. Yet the newness of the courses shows that the subject is thrusting itself upon the attention of the schools. Out of twenty schools stating the length of time they have been giving specific lectures on medical ethics, sixteen began the work within the last six years and ten within the last three years. About three fourths of the deans think such instruction is of high value, while the rest have little use for it. Most of the objection springs from the notion that "honesty and integrity," "the Golden Rule," or "being a gentleman" fully equip a young man to solve all the ethical problems he will meet in his practice. For these no special instruction is required, or in any case the professional school is far too late a place to begin. The best refutation of this notion is the statement of the chairman of the Committee on Professional Ethics of the New York County Lawyers' Association as to the character of those availing themselves of this famous "legal clinic." "They have included established practitioners of high ethical standards who were seriously perplexed by their own problems and desired independent and unbiassed counsel; laymen who wished to regulate their own conduct toward the profession by the advice given; young men recently admitted who were uncertain of what is esteemed the proper course; law students who have sought advice. respecting their conduct during their student period, and men. who would probably be considered by the thoughtless to be wholly outside of and indifferent to ethical influences." Elsewhere Mr. Boston uses the following words: "In the hands of the wily the law can too often be misapplied to accomplish unjust results; it behooves the profession, as well as the people, to prevent so far as possible guile among its practitioners. Many men without the honorable traditions of the Bar before. their mind's eye, are too apt to pursue merely the subterfuges which the law suggests. An early training in the best traditions of the profession will not only discourage such tendencies. The Clar ification Ethical Problems sion a Profes Presents Helps to Raise Its Tone CHAP. XXXIX Private Employees in the individual, but will tend also to create a general professional atmosphere in which it will be too uncomfortable for the guileful to live." LIMITS TO THE EXTENSION OF THE PROFESSIONAL SPIRIT Now that the social welfare has come to be considered as well as the claims of the individual, there is a marked tendency to expect too much from the diffusion of the professional spirit. sionalized Seeing that this spirit affords a means of mitigating and refining the workings of private interest without resort to the more or less uncertain and risky method of regulation by law or administrative board, some want to foster the professional spirit in occupations in which it is quite incapable of producing the hopedfor benefits. It is too much to expect one to put quality of service above gain when one is the employee of a man who prefers gain to service. Generally the servant will be obligated to do his work according to the ideas of his employer. When, therefore, in the production of any service, capital comes to be a factor so prominent that the capitalist hires labor instead of the laborer hiring capital, we shall have a business rather than a profession. All the more will this be true, when, as in the case of the newspaper, the rendering of a public service is inextricably bound up with the sale of a profitable commercial product like advertising. Futility of Trying to Arrest the Decay of the by Profes Newspa per Men Hence the hopelessness of trying to redeem the newspaper by fortifying with the professional spirit young men preparing for journalism whose probable lot will be to be the salaried employees Newspaper of newspaper owners actuated by the commercial spirit. Good, sionalized indeed, will come of it, so far as newspaper men with ideals make themselves indispensable to their employers or get newspapers of their own. Walk-out or boycott would, no doubt, bring to terms the newspaper proprietor who construes the acceptance of his pay as the sale of a soul, but it seems idle to expect newspaper men ever to develop such a professional solidarity as to present an unbroken front to the exactions of their masters. If the commercial newspaper rises to the high function committed to it in modern society, the cause will not be so much the substitution of high ideals for low ideals in the minds of newspaper makers and publishers as the ability of the reading public to discriminate sharply between the bad newspaper and the good newspaper and their willingness to give the latter the support it deserves. CHAP. XXXIX The Stage Be Ele Profes The stage is in much the same state as the newspaper. Acting may be a profession, but the production of plays is a busi- Cannot ness. Little is accomplished toward making the stage the great vated by social institution it is capable of being by creating among play- sionalizing wrights and players a sense of responsibility for what they do, Players so long as what they shall present and how is determined for them by theater managers, most of whom are dominated by greed unashamed. If the despotism of commercialism over the theater is broken, it will be by the rebellion of theatergoers rather than by the revolt of stage folk. It is easier to keep frauds and sharpers out of a learned profession than out of trade. In the absence of any means of clearing out the crooks, it is vain to hope to purify the morals of trade by fostering in the business man a professional pride. In the making and vending of goods the competition of the crooked man with the honest man is much more deadly than is the competition of the tricky lawyer or doctor with honorable lawyers or doctors. The latter may in some degree brand the trickster by refusing to be associated with him in a case. Moreover, in a profession the bad man can capture from the good man no more practice than one man can attend to, while in manufacture or commerce the man quite unembarrassed by moral standards may expand his business until he has stolen most of the customers of his conscientious rivals and forced them quite out of the trade. In Trade the Unethical Man Has a Peculiar Advantage By Edu- cation, tion, and tion Much May Be Done to Raise the Plane of Commer Nevertheless, even if the branches of business are not to be made into so many professions, it does not follow that the good in business men may not be better organized to fight the bad. The preparation of young men for business life in schools of commerce in which moral problems are considered in advance of temptation and high standards of conduct are held up is likely to have a good effect. Until commercial practices are studied in a disinterested way honest men in the same branch of busi- Practice ness will not have thought through their special ethical problems and will therefore disagree as to where they ought to draw the line. But after such problems have been clarified by discussion in special associations, journals and schools, and young men enter business with clear-cut and uniform distinctions be ctal CHAP. XXXVIII The Company Is Not Amenable to the Professional Spirit It Should Be Regulated tween right and wrong in trade practice, it is possible for them by joint action to expose or punish the dishonest competitor until he is no longer a menace to them. In so fluid a medium as business, indeed, war to the knife is the only honorable reply men can make to the silent sapping and supplanting to which they are subjected by unscrupulous rivals. The crooks are not in the least obliged to fight the honorable men in order to eliminate them from the business; but the honorable men must openly and relentlessly fight the crooks if they are to escape ruin. In this struggle the public has so keen an interest that it should endeavor in every way-by laws, by rulings of trade and commerce commissions and by boycott- to help the champions of good practices to gain the victory. When it comes to making the large commercial corporation a tractable social servant, the difficulty of control from within becomes insuperable. The ultimate authority is, of course, the will of the stockholders, but in most cases the stockholders are too numerous, remote and scattered, too ignorant of the business and too little acquainted with one another to have any definite opinion as to the right and wrong of the practices of their corporation or to make such opinion effective if they had it. However excellent their character, their virtues do not extend to and purify their corporation. However richly developed their personality, about the only part of them influential in the management of their corporation is their quite natural and innocent hankering for dividends. Because in the end this incessant hankering triumphs over every other force within the enterprise, little is to be done by attempting to foster the professional spirit in the officers and managers of business corporations. It may just as well be recognized first as last that the structure of such entities furnishes a poor soil for disinterested motives, just as alkali furnishes a poor soil for orange trees. Regularly the corporation will follow the line of what appears to be maximum profits for the long run unless it is constrained by an outside force. While in the true profession the practitioner is made into a faithful servant of society by control from within, the business corporation requires control from without by means of law, railroad commission, public utilities commission, labor organization, shippers' association or other outside agency. |