gain. If you thought that the preacher were in love
with his purse more than with his Gospel, you would not come again to
hear him, and you would be right; if you thought that the teacher of
your children cared for payday first and for teaching second, you would
find another teacher for them tomorrow, and you ought to; if you
thought that your physician cared more for his fees than he did for his
patients, you would discharge him to-night and seek for a man more
worthy of his high profession; if you had reason to suppose that the
judges of the Supreme Court in Washington cared more for their salary
than they did for justice, you could not easily measure your
indignation and your shame. In the development of human life few
things are nobler than the growth of the professional spirit, where in
wide areas of enterprise, not private gain, but fine workmanship and
public service have become the major motives. If one says that a sharp
line of distinction is to be drawn between what we call professions and
what we call business, he does not know history. Nursing, as a gainful
calling, a hundred years ago was a mercenary affair into which
undesirable people went for what they could get out of it. If nursing
to-day is a great profession, where pride of workmanship and love of
service increasingly are in control, it is because Florence
Nightingale, and a noble company after her, have insisted that nursing
essentially is service and that all nurses ought to organize their
motives around that idea.

What is the essential difference between professions and business? Why
should the building of a schoolhouse be a carnival of private profit
for labourers and contractors alike, when the teaching in it is
expected to be full of the love of fine workmanship and the joy of
usefulness? Why, when a war is on, must the making of munitions here
be a wild debauch of private profits, but the firing of them "over
there" be a matter of self-forgetful sacrifice? Why, in selling a food
which is essential to health, should the head of a sugar corporation
say with impunity, "I think it is fair to get out of the consumers all
you can, consistent with the business proposition," when the physician
is expected to care for the undernourished with a devoted professional
spirit utterly different from the sugar magnate's words? There is no
real answer to that "why." The fact is that for multitudes of people
business is still in the unredeemed state