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What Can be Done to Convince the Individual Rotarian of His
Responsibility in Vocational Service?
Edwin Robinson, Sheffield, England
[…] Since I have arrived in Mexico City
I have seen a clipping from a South African newspaper which
reports a short statement which Mr. Bernard Shaw made last month
at the Rotary Club of Durban in South Africa. I need not tell
you who Bernard Shaw is. His world publicity is probably as big
as Rotary's. But some years ago he condemned Rotary as an
organization which went to lunch, or was going to lunch, and was
never going anywhere else. Well, it is sometimes good for us to
see ourselves as others see us. And who would deny that this was
a salutary view of our performances as seen by a brilliant
outside observer, compared with what I might call our much
vaunted precepts?
Bernard Shaw has hit us again. He says that Rotary is even worse
than he thought, for he had found, and, mark you, by his own
actual observations, that Rotary is a charitable organization,
and "That," he said, "is a complete and fundamental mistake." He
went on to tell us what we ought to do (I love these people who
tell us what we ought to do). He pointed out that we are an
organization of business and professional men and he said this:
"The idea behind Rotary is to put business on a proper
scientific footing. It is not your business to be charitable
men. It is your business to organize the whole business of
employment and make it impossible for incompetent people to
enter business. Employers had the right to say: 'We are men of
science.' And they had as much right to say that as the man who
snipped bugs off of tomatoes to see what happened to them. A
proper scientific footing."
Do
you suppose that Mr. Shaw means to confine that phrase just to
material science, the science of ordinary business efficiency as
we call it, and not to the whole science of living the good life
as business and professional men? I don't. […]
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