Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/411

 The Ethics of Solicitation By Frederic Cunningham, of the Boston Bar The difficulty is so to act tnat we may feel that we have done those things which we ought to have done and not done those things which we ought not to have done. It often becomes not so much a question of what is our duty towards our neighbor as our duty to wards ourselves; we are almost per suaded sometimes to think that our time and money are not our own, but most of us still cherish the idea that we have a right to direct these things ourselves, since they have been placed in our hands and keeping. The idea that God has given us everything, that we hold it merely as trustees, that we have no right to do with it as we think best, but are bound to use it according to certain rules prescribed by others who assume to be the interpreters of God's wishes, though still sometimes heard from the pulpit, will hardly find much favor in the world of today; nor does it seem to "Where, then, ah, where! shall 'affluence' be the best way of stimulating people reside, To 'scape the bore who will not be denied?" to generosity, to tell them that in doing a certain thing they will be doing no Social activities have increased to such more than their plain duty, for which an extent and competition among them they are entitled to no credit. in every branch, whether it be commer Let us assume then that we are en cial, political, economic, benevolent or titled to direct our own time and money religious, has become so keen, that the and that we are to get credit or the individual is no longer allowed to work contrary for the way in which we use out his own salvation and act accord them just as we do for the use or misuse ing to his own will and judgment and of our other opportunities for good or knowledge, but he is more or less the evil. We may also safely assume that there victim of circumstances, and acts not according to his own ideas but as he is are very few people in the world who pulled or influenced this way or that by do not know what to do with their others. The modern word "pull," as money, or who have more money than used in the political sense, is significant they know what to do with; there are of the tendency of modern conditions in some, certainly, but not many. There are, no doubt, many who use their all the social activities.

TO paraphrase Mr. Dunning's famous resolution in the House of Com mons, "the tribe of bores (not South African) has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished." The wellto-do American citizen of today is often confronted with the questions how far he ought to allow himself to be ap proached, interviewed, browbeaten, cajoled, to talk, to buy, to subscribe, to give, to insure his life, to sign peti tions, etc., to join societies, clubs, to act as officer or patron of this or that, to allow the use of his name,—in a word to have his privacy so intruded upon, his time so preoccupied, his purse so depleted by others, that he wonders whether he has not lost his identity and volition and longs to be a pelican in the wilderness, an owl of the desert, or to take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.