Moral Overstrain

IN mechanics it is part of the engineer’s profession to consider carefully the amount of physical weight and pressure which various substances will bear, how many pounds a given girder will sustain; how much an upright. It is upon this science and its carefully figured mathematical details that the safety and well-being of the housed community so largely depend. Sometimes, to be sure, even the most carefully estimated plans are spoiled by some unforeseen and unforeseeable weakness in the structural material, and it gives way at a pressure or strain apparently none too great for its endurance. But these occasional obsessions of inanimate nature do not discourage the engineer, or make him abandon his interminable mathematics. In spite of them, or rather on account of them, he continues his studies so that he may better succeed in placing on the materials which he uses no grievous burden, and may not subject them to a stress or strain forbidden by natural law. Collapses of buildings are less frequent, and community life becomes safer, as this expert knowledge, founded on study and experience, grows broader and surer.

It is rather a sad thing, when one thinks of it, that the field of this sort of mathematics has such definite limitations, and that we cannot by mathematical formulæ calculate moral stress and strain, and ascertain how far we can safely go in placing burdens on the characters of those with whom we do business, or of those with whom we have social intercourse. Consider, for example, the great court calendars in the large cities. How many thousands of those cases, formal announcements of men at war with one another, or of society itself at war with the individual, are really nothing more or less than examples of the unfortunate results of moral overstrain. One man has placed too great a burden on the moral strength of another, and there has been a break or a total collapse. And when that collapse comes, note the difference in the procedure which follows. As soon as the building wall cracks, or at the first observable indication of insecurity of foundation, the builder’s first thought is to preserve the building, to relieve the strain on the weak spot, to strengthen its supports, and to reinforce its foundation. There has been no corresponding practice yet devised which may be taken when the moral crash comes and a business man’s character goes to pieces, or when a thief or murderer is brought to the bar of criminal justice. There is no “jackingup " process for overstrained morals to be found in the law courts.

We take philosophically enough the daily moral breakdown of our fellow men, and do not ordinarily complain to Providence against our inability to ascertain with mathematical certainty the extent of the confidence we can safely repose in the people with whom we have intercourse. It has always been so and always will be. We cannot apply mathematics to human conduct. The Fidelity insurance corporations which have sprung up within recent years have, to be sure, their systems based on experience for estimating moral hazards ; and they have curious and exceedingly interesting theories of moral probabilities by which, for example, they estimate the chances of defalcation by an employee in a given employment in which given opportunities for wrong-doing are not counterbalanced by certain systems of inspection or supervision. These corporations and a few large financial institutions apparently recognize the necessity of considering moral risks somewhat in the way in which the engineer estimates as to the girder, — how he can make it perform its useful functions in a house without being broken down by overstrain and bringing calamity with its fall. The method of the financial institutions in dealing with this question deserves a study by itself. Their method involves, generally, in its application to subordinate employees, a complex and carefully studied business system filled with “ checks and balances,” with frequent inspections and examinations, which are intended to reduce the opportunity for successful wrong-doing to a minimum. The pay of the minor employees of a banking house who handle fortunes daily is, as a rule, pitifully small, showing a conscious purpose in these institutions of relying principally upon a practical certainty of detection, coupled with a remorseless and relentless severity in prosecution and punishment, as a relief for the severe moral strain upon employees whose opportunities and temptations for wrongdoing are, from the nature of the employment, large.

Outside of these financial institutions and these Fidelity insurance corporations, there seems to be in practical operation no rational system for estimating or relieving the strain upon morals which business life necessarily involves. Outside of this narrow group the only theory which seems current is one based upon a generality, the fallacy in which receives almost daily demonstration, and yet one which is firmly fixed in the public mind. It is a theory which is as far as possible the absolute opposite of that upon which the engineer deals with the question of strain and stress in mechanics. This theory, curiously enough, has a quasi-religious origin. It is based upon that duty of faith concerning which we hear so much in this generation. We are realizing now, as no previous generation has realized, the importance and power of the element of faith, both to our happiness and to our capacity for usefulness. The word itself is a noble one, and has the greatest importance, not solely in its connection with the unrevealed part of religion, but with our daily work in business as well. It is certain that we must have faith in our fellow men. It is undoubtedly true that one of the worst misfortunes, as well as one of the most singular marks of weakness and incapacity in either man or woman, is the absence of faith and the habit of suspicion. As Lord Bacon well said : “ Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats among birds. They ever thrive by twilight. Certainly they are to be repressed, or at least well guarded, for they crowd the mind, they lose friends, and they check with business, whereby business cannot go on currently and constantly.”

It is undoubtedly true that faith itself is something essential to the happiness of mankind, whether one considers it as including faith in God, or in man, or in both. Our great men, both in public and private life, have been men who had trust and faith in their fellows. It cannot be too often repeated that this element of faith is one of the strongest and finest of those unseen particles which go to build up the highest type of character. But, as La Rochefoucauld says, “ the truth has not done so much good in the world as the appearance of truth has done evil.” The trouble with this constant iteration in these days of the necessity for us to have faith in our fellows is that it fails to note the necessary and logical limitations of the doctrine. The engineer or builder may have faith in a span or girder he uses, but he does not for that reason allow an unlimited pressure to fall upon it. On the other hand, the rule of faith which is commonly preached to us from the pulpit is generally based upon the assumption that faith itself has the unique quality or power of creating strength where it puts pressure, and that the rules of natural or physical law cannot be applied in this regard to the unseen structural materials of the spiritual world. How many times, for example, have we all heard, in one form or another, the pathetic anecdote of the malefactor turned from his projected crime by some one trusting him, or of the criminal placed with a full opportunity of crime immediately before him, with escape practically certain, who has been deterred from his evil purpose simply by the moral force which the trust and confidence of another have created in him.

This illustration of the power of faith is one used most frequently by persons whose understanding of spiritual matters and things of God far overbalances their judgment and their practical insight into human character. It is a very beautiful story when well told, and we all have sentimental sides to our natures to which it appeals. But while these occasional cases may and undoubtedly do exist, a theory of conduct based on them is scarcely less foolish than for the reader of sentimental novels to assume that in the world of men truth crushed to earth always rises uninjured, and that virtue always triumphs in the last chapter.

A doctrine, the precise opposite to this rule of faith, I heard as it was laid down impressively some years ago by a great criminal jurist. His long daily experience on the bench with human weakness, while it had enlarged his great natural insight into character and motive, had neither soured him nor made him cynical. He, certainly, could speak on the subject of moral strain with the voice of authority. It was in the old court of Oyer and Terminer in New York, and Recorder Smyth had just passed sentence on a young man who had been convicted of robbery in snatching a watch from a lady in the shopping district of Sixth Avenue. It was in the fall of 1892, when times were hard, and the streets and park benches were filled with gaunt, hungry-faced creatures, out of work and full of misery. This lady had been shopping all day long in streets thronged with these people, wearing a small jeweled watch attached by a chatelaine to her dress. This young man, who was scarcely more than a boy, had seen the watch, and, snatching it, had attempted to escape in the crowd, when he was caught. After the Recorder had passed sentence, sending this young fellow to penal servitude, he turned and addressed a few remarks to the prosecutrix, who stood near the bar, weeping sympathetically, and mopping up her copious tears with her handkerchief. The tears were even more copious, though from different emotions, when the judge had finished. “ Madam,” he said, “it is one of the great defects of the criminal law that it has no adequate punishment for those who incite their fellows to crime. If it were in my power to do so, I can assure you I should feel it a pleasanter duty to impose an even severer sentence than the one I have just rendered, on the vain woman who parades up and down the crowded streets of this city, filled as they are to-day with hungry people, wearing ostentatiously on her dress, insecurely fastened, a glittering gewgaw like this, tempting a thousand hungry men to wrong-doing. There are, in my judgment, two criminals involved in this matter, and I sincerely regret that the law permits me to punish only one of them.”

These rather caustic remarks of the old Recorder have a much broader scope than merely an application to the women who love to display costly finery. How many thousands of business men there are who manage their affairs in slipshod, slovenly fashion, and who complain bitterly of the abuse of the “ perfect confidence” which they have reposed in their employees. My own notion of this “ perfect confidence ” is that in ninety cases out of a hundred it is not genuine confidence at all, but a mere excuse for business shiftlessness or lack of system. The law relating to actions for personal injuries provides that a man whose body has been injured by the carelessness of another must, in order to entitle him to claim damages, prove not only that carelessness, but also his own freedom from negligence contributing to or causing the injury. If every business man who suffers from a defaulting employee were obliged to prove not only the employee’s crime, but the absence of substantial business carelessness on his own part, which afforded both the opportunity and the temptation for the offense, how few convictions of these defaulters there would be! It is a great misfortune that those who speak so eloquently and so often on the duty of “faith in man,” and who expound this doctrine as though it had no limitations or qualifications whatever, do not devote at least a substantial portion of their attention to expounding earnestly the equally important duty which each man owes his fellow of not throwing unnecessary moral stumbling-blocks in his way. It is curious that almost the only “ temptation ” which receives any particular attention from moralists, either in the pulpit or elsewhere, is that occasioned by one man offering spirituous beverages to another who may be inclined to indulge in potations to excess. By some odd distortion of moral values the custom of “treating” has been singled out as though it were the greatest or most important of those actions or omissions by which we cause our neighbors or employees to offend. Whoever heard a sermon or lecture on the duty of keeping reasonably strict oversight on one’s employees, or on the duty of having a business system which shall reduce the opportunities of dishonesty to a minimum ? The duty of not putting on the character of another a greater burden than it can safely bear is as important as any duty in the realm of morals, and the matter of temperance is only one branch of it, and by no means the most important. An examination of the daily criminal calendars in the courts of the large cities conclusively proves this fact. In early days, when property was mainly in land or its products, and when business life moved more slowly than it does in these flush times, the temptations and opportunities for crimes against property were far less frequent. We are not essentially a systematic people. Our tendency is to do business on as large a scale as possible, without that care to detail which is exhibited in the more cumbrous business methods of countries in which the margins of profit are narrower, and where commercial transactions are not conducted with the astonishing rapidity which characterizes our own. To a large extent these defects in system are more or less necessary and inherent to these peculiar methods and habits of our business life. They are nevertheless defects, and should not be so consistently ignored and overlooked as they have been generally in the past. We are paying greater attention yearly to the physical discomforts of the worker, trying to relieve the overburdened, and to lighten the load of hard work which has fallen so heavily in our struggle for commercial supremacy, particularly on the women and children. This is all excellent, but we must remember that we have no more right to overload a man’s morals than his back, and that while it is a duty as well as a privilege to have faith in our fellows, we should temper that faith with common sense, so that our faith may be to them a help and a support rather than a stumbling-block and a cause of offense.

George W. Alger.