Newspaper Page Text
Shrewdness makes part
ners of all subordinates
in whom it detects com
petitors in the making.
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The Wealth of the World Is in Our Wits
By HERBERT KAUFMAN
This war is not beggaring the future; it is simply disturbing mortality balances and wasting an ac
cumulation of minted sweat and clock-ticks. |
- Storms destroy crops but not fertility. Whatever the ransom we pay for Democracy, Tomorrow
shall have ample time and acreage to satisfy needs.
The blood and ground we lose can be regained, if we but do not lose heart. The sword slays only
~discouraged people.
Babylon, Phoenicia, Attica, Syracuse, the Roman Empire and the Great Caliphate failed hope in
falling.
.Byzantium crumbled, Spain withered and vaster glories succeeded their default. Civilization is
superior to incidental disasters. . -
Antaeus, the Titan, was our father and true to breed, we rise more the giant at every knock-down.
History is a sob-swept path of triumph, along which man earned his strengths and learned his
lengths by toting inherited burdens. :
Races that yielded integrity first softened themselves for conquest. Dissipation and self-neglect
"gutted them in their rusting armor. » ;
Decent, honest, robust states recover from wounds and persist for keener, cleaner works.
If the crudely-equipped past could magnificently stagger out of its ruins, we can certainly recover
from any calamity our own genius has engineered.
Enormous as the present conflict and its corollary devastations may appear at close range, no im
mediately irreparable injury has yet been inflicted upon Progress.
Again as many valiants may be slain, twice the billions already blown away be loaded into guns,
and yet the recuperative capacity of the main belligerents will not be exhausted. /
Slay or disable even fifty million efficients and another decade will crowd the gap with automatic
machines; magnify the output of the remaining body economic with swifter, surer tools; erase the
blood-red debit and declare a dividend to boot. , :
Population is not in itself power: the swarms of China and India long ago established that fact.
- Enterprise, locomotives and persistence—universities, dynamos and ambition—lathes, drills, tur
»bines, printers’ ink, microscopes, steam and electricity: here is the alchemic formula by which as much
of this fecund earth as we please to exploit, may be transmuted into fresh Golcondas.
' ‘Every idle field has money in its grass roots, every unhitched waterfall is a stream of it, every laz
ing intellect is hoarding it. ; ,
- Harvesters, railroads and factories created more treasure in the last hundred years than all the
manual centuries managed to scrape together. '
Wheel and wire contract to repair all present material damage. | ,
Imagination will pay off the war debts. ' '
Bold minds are richer than gold mines. G |
The wealth of the world is in our wits.
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NS . WE have yet to remember a
Uy plan you liked,
7 g Or a notion we brought you that
(et { wasn’t spiked.
N A, SRS FHave you nothing in stock but
‘ P ) thehsar(;\e old knockt‘ll‘
SRR Is your head no more than a
‘ # ';‘."‘., stumbling block?
g B J Encourage something; speed the
S N\ A e game;
‘ oD 1M Can’t you ever approve—must
m‘l ANy you always blame?
om : We are designed for faith—to
P . \ bear
i/ /A o|r =2 4,,{ Against the adverse odds—to
(il - A dare.
M o _—,,/,f | It isn’t wise to criticise
7 BT ES-> 7 Incessantly. Ambition dies
SRR 1 ' Ly ¥, ™ Without a spurword now and
u ' = then.
L (" R 47 {4} When hopeful men
iy WHES J Set out to find
" "*\ &. )/ A silver cloud, don’t point behind
Y 8 A\ e And show the storm with which
|TS \bt it’s lined.
Her]:erthufinan'PWGeelcl}'paée
Can You Telegraph It?
HE man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, keeps rambling
T from the path like a traveler in strange territory. Many words mean
little information. The test of competence is directness. Experts
are concise. The Ten Commandments can be written on a postal card.
Lincoln immortalized Gettysburg in a three-minute speech. The kodak
‘became & multi-millionaire on a single explanatory sentence.
The measure of a mind is ability to simplify principles and issies.
Short cuts are only reached by long study. The telegram is more effective
than the letter, not alone because of urgency but clarity too. There’s a cer
tain amount of reflection behind every wire.
Knowledge can be reduced to an essential phase and expressed in a
comprehensive phrase.
Reserve a Few Comforts for “Sixty”
SAVINGS BANK is a place where dollars are taught self-support.
A It sets money to work—pays a regular wage for stipulated service.
How much of your income iy wearing overalls? Old age is trem
ulously interested in the matter. Youth and health don’t foot the wasters’
bills. Extravagance collects from invalids and threadbare gray-beards and °
pitiful old crones. Every gay calendar has its rainy days—and its bleak
and hungry ones, too. Stretch your “good times” over a greater number of
years—reserve a few comforts for sixty. " 2o
Copyright, 1918, by Herbert gKuufm.n. Great Britaln and All Other Rights Reserved,
Business Knows the Road
HE outstanding practical faet of this dazing war
T is that, above all else, it is a gigantic deal in
commodities and merchandise—primarily a
manufaeturing and transportation problem.
- Therefore the most valuable brain in America to
day is that which can best develop and manage a com
mercial organization.
(Citizens cannot become soldiers without uniforms,
weapons, ammunition and rations.
Armies cannot be convoked or kept afield without
supplies. k
We have the man-power but we can only engage
as much of it as may be equipped.
Consequently the chief qualification for a Federal
exeeutive, at this moment, is the possession of sound
business sense,
We are indefinitely committed to several onerous
but simple tasks—simple because the transactions are
not unique but merely enlargements of undertakings
in which several thousand tried men have already
shown themselves thoroughly efficient—the prompt
production and steady delivery of certain articles in
vast quantities.
The Administration is called upon to accomplish
hardly anything which was not, in degree, well done
by civilians prior to 1917. “
Such intelligence should be commandeered and
exploited for the benefit of the State.
Wherever experience is available, amateur judg
ment is perilously employed. This is not work for
academicians but a buying and selling and man-hand
ling proposition which isn’t taught by book or included
with college courses.
There are no printed or royal roads to factory
management, shipbuilding and freight-routing, and
the sole path to understanding them is too-long and
arduous for an impatient national clock.
Germany won’t mark time to let us make business
generals out of business rookies. Her guns will keep
pounding while round pegs are being whittled for
square holes.
Among a hundred and ten million people, it is pos
sible—it is necessary to discover and put in charge of
pressing works, a handful of veteran technieians, who
can authoritatively deal with any situation peculiar to
their intensively studied specialties. - :
Europe is fighting along unprecedented lines but
there are established precedents for almost every move
we must make in preparing to assmse‘ our share of the
struggle. : ,
Granted that the polemic enterprises are colossal,
none the less they present no principles with which
‘industry has not long and skillfully dealt. Once the
model idea is established, its proportions hold good
on any scale. After the unit plant is set up, multiples
are easily added; a magnified operation is not an orig
inal one. :
Any number of extra stories can be piled on a
sufficiently strong base, but a huge structure won’t
last on superficial foundations.
There are no indications of an early peace. We
shall possibly have five million men under arms.
Now is the time to make sure that the machine
in course of erection for them is valid at every point
—now is the time to correct any weakness in the ex
ecutive personnel.
The penalty of mistakes will be in geometrical
ratio to the scope of our activities. We don’t know
that anybody or anything is radically wrong, but we
want the assurance of maximum genius that all will
g Vg SAE .
It is our constitutional privilege to have and our
patriotic duty to demand the greatest procurable
talent in the management of this war—and that means
practical talent.
Where you start to plan
or what you start to do
mean little—it’s the habit
of progress that puts men
on top.