Rotary's Power for World Peace

The Message of Paul P. Harris
President Emeritus

Two Big Candles for Rotary's Birthday Cake

SOME things creep into our lives so quietly that they seem to have been without beginning. From obscure and despised origin have come faiths that have lived to lift the gates of empires from their hinges. Rotary has developed in less than a decade from a theory into the most important, practical business movement of the age.

And more and better ‑ it is respected wherever known. If we could get far enough away to obtain a bird's‑eye view of Rotary and take a moving picture of its growth, we would indeed say "wonderful."

If the success of the movement is due to one thing more than to any other, it is perhaps to the fact that Rotarians have always considered business as fit for society as society is fit for business and have always been of the opinion that the world could get along a good deal better without society than without business. I use the word society here in its narrow sense. Rotarians believe that business friends are as warm‑hearted as social friends and often much truer; that business will mix with friendship, and that the best way to mix them is by elevating business to the plane of soulful friendship and not by lowering friendship to the plane of soulless business.

"If pleasure interferes with business, cut out the business," is an old saying, but it never got anyone anything nor raised the standard of a people. Rotarians find pleasure in business and business in pleasure.

Rotary is the only organization in which business has ever had a reasonable chance. The Rotarian conception of business differs from some. Some people think that the best way to do business is with a jimmy. If Rotarians took the same view, they would do just what those people do ‑ exclude business from polite society.

 Rotarians do not believe that success can be measured in dollars nor that business is merely a means to an end‑dollar grabbing. They think that business should be honored for its own sake and loved for the friends it brings them; that honorable business is an elevating influence, making business men stronger, more straightforward, more sincere and purposeful, more humane and charitable than other men; making business nations more progressive, more enlightened, and less murderous than other nations; that the merchantman has done more for the world than the battleship; that nations should be too busy to fight; that reputable business is full of potentialities and should be exalted, not debased; that business rectitude makes for civic righteousness; that business is and should be one of the most engross­ing things in the life of every normal‑minded man and that if business is good enough to live by, it is good enough to live with; that busi­ness affords most men their one best chance of rendering efficient service to society and of doing their part in the world's work.

May we not forget that each member has one duty in Rotary, which is distinctly individual, as much so as that of the shortstop on a baseball team. It is that of representing his trade or profession. I am the sole representative of my profession in our Rotary club. It is a responsibility to be proud of as well as to fear. It ought to be a great tumulus to my efficiency. This individual responsibility is an inevitable incident to membership in a Rotary Club. You may be a member of other clubs and if it pleases you, shirk the burden of individual responsibility. Not so in Rotary. The individual responsibility is the one responsibility which you must not shirk there. It is your own particular responsibility. Your club can‑not attain the maximum of efficiency if you fall short of being properly representative of your line, but your individual responsibility is also an individual privilege for "He profits most who serves best."

May Rotary during all the years that are to come continue to be a voltaic touch to civilization's nerve centers, awakening men to a new sense of the dignity and importance of business as a redemptive and regenerative influence in the lives of men ‑ and nations.

PAUL P. HARRIS.