Vocational Service

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. [...]