[Footnote 1: Many transportation companies maintain a merit system. Sometimes they award special insignia, as the green flag to the New York bus-drivers who save gasoline.]
[Footnote 2: Wallas: _Great Society_, p. 197.]
To say that we are moved to action by praise and blame is not to indicate that actions thus motivated are done in a spirit of hypocrisy or charlatanism. Even the most sincere acts are prompted or sustained, especially where their performance involves serious personal privation or sacrifice, by the imagined or actual approval of those whom we love, admire, or respect. Whose praise and blame individuals will care about depends on their education and temperamental differences. That there will be some group, however small, is almost sure to be the case. The poet who curls his lip at popular taste cherishes the more keenly the applause of those whom he regards as competent judges. The martyr will be unmoved by the curses, the jeers, and the hoots of the contemporary multitude so long as he has the trust of his small band of comrades or faith that the Lord approves his ways. A man who is utterly alone in the approval of his actions is regarded as crazy or is driven so by the perpetual disesteem in which he is held. There have been cases in literature and life of accused criminals who could bear up against the belief of the whole world in their guilt so long as one friend or kinsman had faith in them. That faith gone, they completely collapsed.
DESIRE FOR PRAISE MAY LEAD TO THE PROFESSION RATHER THAN THE PRACTICE OF VIRTUE. While the desire for social approval is strong in most men, so are other desires. It happens, moreover, that the actions to which men's instincts prompt them are not always such as would be approved by others.[1] In order, therefore, to have their cake and eat it, to do what they please and yet seem to please others, men often conceal the discrepancy between what they profess and what they practice. One of the least agreeable features of civilized society is the extent to which the codes which men and groups profess differ from those by which they live. Men who have ostensibly Christian codes of honor, and, indeed, practice them in their private lives, will have an actual "ethics" for business that they could not possibly sanction in their dealings as trustees of a church. There are practices within trades and professions, the familiar "trade" practices, and "ethics" of the profession, which, for social as well as for professional reasons, their practitioners would not want known. "Company" manners are a trivial illustration of this, but there are more serious instances. One has but to recall the sensation created a few years ago when a minister of a fashionable congregation called upon his congregation to practice Christianity, or, on a superb scale, Tolstoy's leaving the estates and mode of life of a rich Russian noble, in order to live the simple life he regarded as prescribed by the Christian teaching.[2]