ted employees into a secure and
disciplined service, in which every man will work for honour,
promotion, achievement and the commonweal.

I write a "secure and disciplined service," and I intend by that not
simply an exterior but an interior discipline. Let us have done with
this unnatural theory that men may submit unreservedly to the guidance
of "self-interest." Self-interest never took a man or a community to
any other end than damnation. For all services there is necessary a
code of honour and devotion which a man must set up for himself and
obey, to which he must subordinate a number of his impulses. The must
is seconded by an internal imperative. Men and women _want_ to have a
code of honour. In the army, for example, there is among the officers
particularly, a tradition of courage, cleanliness and good form, more
imperative than any law; in the little band of men who have given the
world all that we mean by science, the little host of volunteers and
underpaid workers who have achieved the triumphs of research, there is
a tradition of self-abnegation and of an immense, painstaking,
self-forgetful veracity. These traditions work. They add something to
the worth of every man who comes under them.

Every writer, again, knows clearly the difference between gain-seeking
and doing good work, and few there are who have not at times done
something, as they say, "to please themselves." Then in the studio,
for all the non-moral protests of Bohemia, there is a tradition, an
admirable tradition, of disregard for mercenary imperatives, a scorn
of shams and plagiarism that triumphs again and again over economic
laws. The public services of the coming civilization will demand, and
will develop, a far completer discipline and tradition of honour.
Against the development and persistence of all such honourable codes
now, against every attempt at personal nobility, at a new chivalry, at
sincere artistry, our present individualist system wages pitiless
warfare, says in effect, "Fools you are! Look at Rockefeller! Look at
Pierpont Morgan! Get money! All your sacrifices only go to their
enrichment. You cannot serve humanity however much you seek to do so.
They block your way, enormously receptive of all you give. All the
increment of human achievement goes to them--they own it _a
priori_.... Get money! Money is freedom to do, to keep, to rule. Do
you care nothing for your wives and children? Are you content to breed
servants and depe