Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1918-12-17

| feeling And, gentlemen. I knew then that
the war had been won" =.
And then he asked these questions:
Now gentlemen, what is the underlying
taken from the most diversified walks OF
life, brought up in surroundings and in a
spirit which are the YER negation of martial
disposition, became in an incredibly short
space of tine soldiers of first-rate efficiency;
that our business men, farmers, mechanics,
college boys are making competent, indeed
excellent officers; that our West Pointers
taken from small army posts or office posi-
tons in Washington, we're found qualified
generally net only to command large bodies
of troops, but that amongst them were dis
covered men fitted when the emergency
arose, to plai- and execute the business I'M
dertakings of war on stupendous scale
with high degree of organizing and admin
istrative ability (even though these men
would be the last to dispute that consider
able share of the credit for the results ac-
complished is due to those who, at the very
start of the war, eagerly volunteered from
civil life)?
Why did our commanding officers, our en-
gineers and others at various French ports
at our army bases, along our great line OF
supplies, in a strange country, under condi-
tions entirely new to them, demonstrate the
capacity of rapidly sizing up situations, of
boldly meeting and overcoming difficulties
of vigorously cutting the red tape OF gen
erations, of accomplishing to the admiring
amazement of our French friends and COM
rades, things which the bureaucratic routine
of ever so many years had found itself i'm
potent to deal with?
These questions Mr.. Kahn said he had
heard asked and debated many times lately
both in England and France, and the con-
sensus of replies was this:
''You in America have always been ma
ton of private enterprise and individual
initiative
'sYour incentive has never been to get a
government title or bureaucratic position.
Your incentive was zeal and scope for doing
things the joy of creative effort, a certain
crude, rough-hewn, unsystematic, but effec-
tive ideaIism and also, of course, the ma
teriaI reward of successful achievement. You
have had no caste, or fixed class, either arts
tOcratic or bureaucratic. You have given al
most unlimited, perhaps too unlimited scope
to ambition, ability, force, imagination, hard
work
your employe of today was and is the
employer of tomorrow.
THE state, far from enjoying the halo
descended from kingly times of something
resembling omnipotence anG omniscience,
and being allpervasive in its functions, was
largely limited in its activities, and you had
a healthy skepticism of governmental capac-
ity to do things we'll
Under the stimulus of these conditions
you have produced a race-daring. keen,
quick-witted, adaptable, selfreliant.
1.-THE American of today, as we see him
in the officers and men of your forces, and
in the business men we have net, is the
product of sturdy indiVidualism.'
And there is the answer to our railroad
question. 1t lies in the sturdy individual
ism of our people. not IN the enervating pa
teTnalism Of state socialism,; in private en-
terprise regulated in such way as our ex-
peTicnce has shown will be judicious, not
in such a way as to hamper Or nullify indi-
vidual effort. A study of the results OFF,
bureaucracy in Europe is convincing of
r. g.