om or even of any
exercise of self-denial when he is concerning himself about the public
good even to his own momentary inconvenience or disadvantage. Public
spirit is that state or habit of mind which leads a man to care greatly
for the general welfare. It is this ethical quality that to my mind
should be the great aim and object of training.

On its best side, what we term the professional spirit is, then, very
closely related to this commendable quality in men of a right
intellectual and moral development that we call public spirit. The
chief difference lies in this: that whereas all professional men may be
public-spirited in a general sense, each professional man should, in
addition, manifest a special and technical sort of public spirit that
pertains to the nature of his calling. The lawyer should have a
particularly keen regard for the equitable administration of justice.
The doctor should truly care for the physical wholesomeness and
well-being of the community. The clergyman should be alive to those
things that concern the rectitude and purity of life. The journalist
should be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of the enlightenment
of public opinion; and so on. Without either the general or the
technical manifestations of public spirit, in short, the so-called
professional man is a reproach to his guild and a failure in his
neighborhood.

Now, what has all this to do with the moral standards that belong to
the business career as distinguished from the professional life? My
answer must be very clear and very direct if I am to justify so long an
analysis of the ethical characteristics of the professions themselves.
I have merely used the time-honored method of trying to lead you by way
of familiar, admitted points of view to certain points of view that, if
not wholly new, are at least less familiar and less widely recognized.
The whole thesis that I wish to develop is simply this: that however it
may have been in business life in times past and gone, there has been
such a tremendous change in the organization and methods of the
business world and also in the relative importance of the functions of
the business man in the community, that the distinctions which have
hitherto set apart the professional classes have become obsolete for
all practical purposes in many branches and departments of the business
world.

At least, the work of the responsible leaders is no longer to be
regarded as essentially a thing