Even in essentials the highest standards are often modified to suit the
preference of the majority. It is not always considered dishonorable for
a man to cheat in business, so long as the cheating is done without
interfering in any way with the general customs of the business world.

When we say that a man of the world is generally understood to be a man
who "knows all the villains in it," it seems at first sight an extreme
statement, but as the world goes now, it certainly represents the
general tendency of thought. The distinction is too seldom made between
a man of the world and a worldly man,--between a man who really knows
the world as it is and a man whose familiarity with it is narrow and
sordid. When people speak of "seeing life" they seldom mean seeing the
best of it.

The same tendency toward perversion, as being the more interesting phase
of life, is found among physicians and trained nurses. A good physician
once told me, with pained indignation, that his students would go miles
to see an abnormal growth of tumor, but not one of them would turn
around to enjoy the mechanism of a healthy heart. And it is a well-known
fact that many trained nurses will lose interest in a case the moment a
patient begins to recover. "A splendid case of typhoid fever" is, not a
case in which the patient is throwing off the effects of the germ with
wholesome promptness, but one in which the germ is doing its
worst,--where the illness is extreme, and the delirium exciting. To be
sure, in such a case, there is intense interest in taking all possible
means, with promptness and decision, to save the patient's life; but, if
this were done only with a keen love of wholesomeness and normal health,
the interest of the nurses and physicians would never wane until the
patient had become strong and vigorous. If the standard of the best
physical health were steadily before the eyes of physician and nurse,
and if both had a strong desire to bring the patient, as nearly as
possible, up to their own high standard of health, there would be a very
great difference in the atmosphere of sick rooms and hospitals. The work
of physicians and nurses seems to be more often that of protection
against disease than that of achievement of health; and the distinction,
though at first sight it may seem a fine one, is nevertheless radical.

Note the parallel between this negative tendency toward health of body,
and the same negative tendency in the world towa