ndividual, whether locomotive
engineer or von Moltke, whether the manager of a plant employing ten men
or Judge Gary, chairman of the board of the gigantic Steel Corporation,
will depend the ultimate value of all that creative physical or
philosophical ability has brought together.

Recently there was submitted to me in the office of one of Chicago's
greatest businesses the draft of its organization. No man can pass on the
merits of the details of a complicated organization without long and
intimate acquaintance with its workings. Seeing the plan of the Chicago
plant, pressed for a suggestion, I said: 'Your chart is upside down; the
president belongs at the bottom, sustaining and carrying, through his
organization, all the operations of the plant. Because he is in supreme
authority he has the responsibility of making available for everyone, down
to the tool, all the wisdom in the universe in order that each may fulfil
perfectly its special duty and task.'

Whether on the grounds of Long Branch, on the desert trail, in a section,
department, division, or plant of a great manufacturing concern or
railroad; whether on the deck of a battleship or on a battlefield, what is
wanted is a leader who can swing and manage what has been entrusted to
him.

It has become the fashion in history to decry the strong-man theory, to
turn for understanding to evolution, to explain the strong man as the
inevitable accident of the moment. There is evolution; there comes, at
last, opportunity, but only rarely does the strong man arise; hence we
have England, not Norway or Sweden or Holland; hence we have Prussia, not
Saxony; Germany, not Russia; Italy, not Portugal; France, not Spain;
Japan, not Siam or Korea.

In 1536 was born in Japan an undersized, monkey-faced boy of good but poor
parentage, who, at the age of thirteen, resolved to make himself the chief
power in the distracted kingdom. For 200 years the militant barons had
warred against each other, each trying to grab, annex, and hold what he
could.

The boy, Hideyoshi, deliberately visited the different courts, picked out
the baron he thought most endowed with suitable character, succeeded with
great difficulty in entering his service in the humblest position, and
then steadily and inevitably rose, firstly because he could read human
character and always knew almost as soon as they did themselves what his
and his lord's enemies were plotting, and secondly, because he was always
p