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.
ECONOMIC LOSSES
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?
WARNING EXAMPLES
A railroad president not long ago said that he had not the time to take
exercise or rest, that his salary was fifty thousand dollars a year, and
that his company had just given him a bonus of fifty thousand; hence he
could not shirk his responsibilities. He paid the fu
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