A CALL FOR WORK THAT WILL COUNT
Even at the risk of repetition, some facts should be driven home.
We are now working under conditions that should especially emphasize the fact of time-saving. We must take ourselves seriously, whether we are in the lines or behind the lines.
In the eight million men in this country between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four are the country's greatest executives and financiers. We can no longer give these executives and financiers two months in the South in the winter and a long summer vacation. We can no longer let a Plattsburg camp be a strenuous sifting out, a mere survival of the physically fittest. We need every man whom we can make available, and we need him with his vitality fully preserved and his endurance appreciably heightened. Some are stronger, naturally, than others. In football parlance we are no longer trying to pick a team out of a squad of two hundred men; we are trying to get a hundred and seventy-five out of the two hundred that can stand a fair pace and have enough left to fight with when they get there. Any one who has been in touch with affairs in Washington, any one who has been engaged in our munition-plants and in our factories, any one who has worked upon Liberty Bond drives or Red Cross fund-raising, knows that if we are to support our boys on land and sea, these men who are trying to solve the problems of executive management, and who have the task of raising funds in thousandfold increased volume, must be also carefully conserved. For, after all, even though we spell Patriotism with a capital P and Government with a capital G, even though army and navy orders take precedence, there is one great mistress of all, Dame Nature! And when she taps a man on the shoulder and says, "Quit!" that man stops; and when he offers the excuse that he has done it out of patriotism and loyalty she merely says: "I don't care why you did it, you have finished!" And there is no appeal to Washington from her verdict.