Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/554

550 loyalty, and we rather overdo the thing at times in the southern states where we keep up family feuds one generation after another, and vote with one political party all our lives through thick and thin. In his story of "Red Rock," Thomas Nelson Page expresses the more serious southerner's view when he says of the soldier, "It is loyalty, not success, that is knightly" (p. 145).

Without making any fine distinctions, I start with the proposition that loyalty is the most valuable attainment, if we may call it an attainment, or the most valuable trait of character, if that is a better name, that any man or any people can have in this life. And I challenge any one who questions this theory to put the matter to any test he chooses to apply from the highest moral standards down to the lowest commercial ones.

Now loyalty has to do with our relations to principles, to organizations, to communities and to persons. I would have it distinctly understood that I regard loyalty to a right principle as the highest type of loyalty, and the kind that must always be most satisfactory in the end. Practical illustrations of the importance of the professional forms of loyalty are constantly falling under our attention, and it is chiefly of these that I shall speak. These lower types consist in loyalty to organizations of various kinds and to individuals. As many people insist on the commercial standards of values let us see, if we can, what business men think of it.

When you get through your university studies and go out into the affairs of life, if you become employers of other men, you will lay great stress on the loyalty of those you have about you. You may not put it to yourselves in just this form, but if you are wise, you will none the less be influenced as much, or even more, by the loyalty of your employees than by any other one quality they may have. You will say of every man you engage: "If I can't trust this man to think of and work for my interests, I don't want him around, no matter how skilful he may be in his particular line of work."

If you seek employment under others you must surely count on having to meet this test yourselves, for this will be the unfailing attitude of your employers. And the more important the position you are to occupy the more weight will be given to this particular trait of your character.

The matter simply reduces itself to this, that a man who is not loyal is not wanted by anybody for anything.

In a business like that of mining, consulting geologist and the like, what do you suppose a man would be worth who was not loyal to the interests of his employer? How long would any one keep an employee who was not loyal? How long ought he to be kept?

Let us take a simple case: Imagine a man employed to examine