Let me tell you something of the history of these
attempts by the elders to curb the everlasting spirit
of youth. At one time they would have eliminated
all the sports. But we didn’t let croquet
become the national game! You ask what this nation
of ours will become, and in reply I ask you what will
you make of your boys?
Statisticians tell us that 90 per cent. of the men
who go into business fail. Do you want your boy
to fold his hands and say that because the chances
are against him he will not try at all?
Are you going to let him get such a maximum of old
man’s caution that he reduces to a minimum the
young man’s courage?
Make him strong and well, just as you wish the nation
to be strong and sound. There will always be
plenty of middle-aged failures to preach caution.
Teach your boy fair play and may the best man win.
Teach him that the true sportsman “boasts little,
crows gently when in luck, puts up, pays up, and shuts
up when beaten”; that he should be strong in
order to protect his country. A boy may over-emphasize
his sports, but he will get over that. They tell
us about the good old times when boys at college spent
all their time in study and loved one another.
There never were any such times. The town-and-gown
riots took the place of sports, that’s all.
We are all of us very much interested in the life
of an automobile tire, and it seems to speak to us
in terms we can readily understand. But only
the particularly wise and successful men of our generation
know and appreciate how valuable the life of a man
is when expressed in those same terms of good hard
dollars. Many manufacturers in the last two or
three years have awakened to the fact that when, they
put in a man and he stayed with them only two or three
months, or even, in the case of executives, two or
three years and then dropped out, either to go elsewhere
or on account of ill health, it was a very distinct
loss. In other words, they had put a certain
investment into the man and that investment should
have been growing more valuable to them all the time.
Germany’s General Staff, previous to this war,
was working overtime, just as our Cabinet and National
Board of Defense are doing now—namely,
till midnight and beyond. But the German General
Staff was taken out into the Thiergarten in the morning
for from one to two hours of exercise as a beginning
of the day.
It therefore sifts itself down to this: If we
had an ordnance officer who fired a gun, that was
tested for but two hundred rounds without heating,
five hundred times and thus cracked it, he would probably
be discharged. If the superintendent in a factory
doubled the number of hours he was running his automatic
machinery, and instead of doubling the amount of oil
actually cut it in half and thus ruined the machines,
he would be regarded as a fool. Yet we are letting
our men, high in executive positions, heads of departments
in the government, and leaders of manufacturing, transportation,
and commercial interests, do this very thing.
Is it possible that we regard them as less valuable
to us in this emergency than machines and guns, that
we should burn them out for lack of lubricant and
rest or physical conservation?
