AMBITION—PUBLIC AND PERSONAL

Evening Star, Issue 19441, 27 December 1926, Page 8

AMBITION—PUBLIC AND PERSONAL

P The other day the ‘ Morning Port ’ published a lay sermonulte by the novelist, the lale William Caine. Many readers may lind it a useful quotation for their scrap book;— “ Personal ambition is of the jungle public ambition is Christianity. Personal ambition leads the man who takes it, for his guide to money, lame, and power; but it can take him no further in this life, and when it bids him good-bye he is likely to find himself standing at the door of Tophet, especially if he oorae-s of pious parents. At the best of it, personal ambition must be a sorry death-bed comforter. “ if we owe our material comfort largely to personal ambition, which 1 am ready to admit, we owe everything else (including a great part of our material comfort) to public ambitkn. Personal ambition never made a friend, it makes useful acquaintances; never fell in love; it marries; never obeyed a kindly impulse; never made a hundred and iitty a year as a bacteriologist when it could have made ten thousand a year in Harley street. “ H is stupid to say lhat if originality and hard work met with no material reward industry and invention would cease among men. To-day thousands of men of the first intellectual rank are working their nails off for a hare living wage that ihe lot of mankind may be happier. And if these, why not everybody? Why should not everybody work for mankind instead of for themselves ?

“ If the personal ambition of each of us could aim singly at public usefulness; if we, vied with one another, not in our possessions, dignities, and power, but in the amount of work we could get through on behalf of our fellows, there would he an end to slums and overwork, and drunkenness and the white slave traffic, and war and gambling, and everything else against which Parliament wastes nine-tenths of its time frying to legislate. It might even put an end to the politicians. At least, it would produce a new kind of politician, the publicly ambitious politician. That would bo yen iatsmtiaa,"