One may wonder why I call this impersonal extension of love Justice. Because justice seeks to benefit all, but all alike. It knows no persons, or rather it knows every one as a person and insures each his share in the common good. All the altruism of love is here, but without love’s arbitrary selection and limited interest. We do wrong in thinking of justice as chiefly concerned with penalties. These are incidental, inflicted on those who refuse to find their gain in the gain of others. The main work of justice is its equal distribution of advantage and its insistence that each individual shall be faithful to what he undertakes for the benefit of all. Justice is therefore thoroughgoing love, its mutuality guarded, rationalized, stripped of personal bias, and brought near us through the avenues of our special work. Only we must not confine the professions to the four usually reckoned: teaching, preaching, medicine, and the law. The professional spirit may vitalize work of every sort. Here is a poor man to whom few enjoyments are open, who goes out morning after morning to shovel gravel or to engage in some other labor equally uninteresting. He earns his two or three dollars a day, takes it home, and hands it to his slatternly wife. Once he was drawn to her by romantic love. With her he figured a real union, each continually happy in the sight of the other and each day bringing to both an inward joy. He did not know her. He had neither the opportunity nor the ability to study her temperament and learn whether it was adjustable to his. It proved not to be so. Children came, cares increased, she neglected herself, her home, her husband. There was no longer any warmth of affection between them. But still he goes on working for her unmurmuringly. She is a wife and mother, he a husband and father. To these relationships he will be faithful. Is not his a larger love than that of the courtship? I do not see that we can say so. But it is love of a different sort and a very noble sort. We called love the joint service of a common life. Though she no longer joins him, he joins the community in maintaining the family tie. What keeps him going is his professional responsibility. Being a good husband is the task assigned him in the general division of labor. He recognizes its justice, controls his temper, and patiently meets the hardship involved. I cannot see how there is less professional responsibility here than in the case of the shoemaker or physician. Indeed, wherever any one is true to his specific task, puts his heart into it, works not for money alone nor through interest in a single individual, but, without calculating any equivalence between what he gives and receives, studies how he may most fully perform the work to which he has been called, that man is exhibiting professional responsibility, honoring love, and exalting justice in a way to deserve profound reverence. CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION