Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/270

 a64 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

sinners^ prepared to make every Baerifice that the service may demand. We know of physicianB or nurses who look upon their work as a calling; we can even imagine a grocer who looks upon his task as in the nature of a mission — ^he may feel that he is sent to distribute to the multi- tudes their daily bread, in various kinds of cans and bags and botttes and packages, gathered by him for this purpose from the four quarters of the globe, through the intermediation of the wholesalers and jobbers. But it seems almost ridiculous to speak of the calling to paste labels on bottles of fraudulent imitations of fruit syrups, or to address envelopes for an advertising concern.

The fact is that most workers have no calling or vocation whatever, that most of them have not even any pride in their work, certainly no moral enthusiasm in connection with it. Moreover, most workers change their occupations so many times that any possible spiritual con- nection between the work and the wholeness of life is rudely broken. Nor do these changes correspond, in general, with stages in mental or moral development, or witii stages of technical proficiency. They cor- ieqK>nd for the most part with such stupid and irrelevant facts as these :

Boss went oat of business.

We moved aerois the river.

The new foreman eat down the force.

Laid off — alaek. Got job in biseuit factory.

They changed to piece work.

New director put in his nephew.

Well, we know what these things mean.

But now that attention haa been directed to the need for a deliberate choice of a 'location'' as well as for a systematic preparation for it, the question of what kinds of jobs there are, the question of what the jobs demand and of what the jobs offer must come rapidly to the front. A given employment may be entirely satisfactory to one type of person, and a living hell to another. But, in addition to that, there are some people who are practically worthless for any job ; while there are many jobs that are not worthy of any human being.

The United States Census enumerators have been sorting all of us according to a list of 9,326 gainful occupations — ^including yours and mine as gainful, although we may have different opinions on that point. Many of these occupations represent merely minute subdivisions of work in special industries, like the collator in a bindery, or the "puller" of basting threads. No one person, not even a reasonably small group of persons, knows all the important facts about all these occupations, except perhaps in the case of the so-called professions. But the occupations are grouped about large industrial processes, so that many of the important facts are true for whole families of occu- pations.

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