The Lakeland evening telegram. (Lakeland, Fla.) 1911-1922, 1919-08-16
What Is And Isn't Work,
A New World Problem

men specially gifted or unusually in
dustries or talented in some peculiar
way, to find uses for his iron, to
make it into fine implements, to in
crease its value a thousand fold by
the force of trained or scientific
minds.
A pound of iron is worth few
cents. A pound of watch springs is
worth hundreds of dollars. Is the pa
thence and knowledge that makes such
a transformation possible worth any
thing? What do men who practise
these qualities contribute to the sum
of created values?
The brotherhoods make no secret
of their conviction that they are the
railroads. But they never would have
built and organized the railroads.
The risk, the daring, the imagination
necessary at the beginning and still
necessary must be possible always
only to the lonely and unorganized in
dividual whose instincts are invari-
ably opposed to all that we have come
to talk about as group action.
Other men made the rails and the
buildings. But the Pennsylvania rail
roads is Scott and Cassatt. The
Northern Central and good deal of
the prosperity of the great northwest
is Hill, Inventors, pioneers, vision
aries, scientists, investors who were
willing to take long chances-all indi-
vidualists to the homemade the rail-
road system of the country possible.
They contributed much. They pro.
duced much They could not have
gone alone. They had to have the
help of men who worked out their
schemes. But the man who gets the
iron out is not the only producer.
There are millions of producers of
whom you never hear. Teachers con-
tribute knowledge. They produce ideal
ism and ideas. Ministers of Chris
tianity contribute spiritual discipline.
They are not at Washington with ulti-
though we could get along
without railroads before we could get
along without schools. It is the mod
ern contention of some radicals that
the Cassatts and the Hills are unnec.
essary and superflous. It is fashion
able to believe that committees can
do better than they did-or at least
as well. But it is not easy to imagine
committee opening up the northwest
or, like Cassatt, lunging forward in |
of magnitude that fright |
ened stockholders out of their shoes |
year after year. You might as well
expect a committee of conservative
citizens to write an ode.
The vast majority of those produc.
ers who work is even more important
than that of the railway brotherhoods
are unorganized and obscure. They
are thinkers, teachers, writer's,
preachers, men whose creative minds
ire forever at work to make human
snergy or the earth itself productive
If good. There are others whose
genius serves to give better order
o civilization or to make life happier
n at least more tolerable. They are
busy in countless ways? What of
hese workers in the world? Who
al measure the good they do? We
lave no code by which the rights of
ZACH may be understood or even dis.
erned. But we shall have one later
llong.
In the future when ward bosses
work honestly for living, when there
re no more kings, we shall be able to
consider each man according to his
vork-not according to his claims or
he size of his fortune or the strength
If his Observation-Disclosures Public
ledger.