Keeping Fit All the Way | Page 8

fought a good fight in the War of
Independence for Freedom and Equality. Then came the lesser gods of

material success. They broke the nation apart. But it survived. Since the
Civil War we have grown rich and fat, flaccid and spineless. We are
like a great, careless boy with a rich father; our crops and material
resources symbolize the rich father who is able to pay for all his son's
foolishness. And so the youth has never stopped to think. But
underneath that careless exterior there are muscle and character. For
what is the history of Youth? If the youth is to become a real man he
cannot be curbed to the extent of forgetting courage in an excess of
caution. And the rush of our youth to the service showed this.
THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH
An Englishman once writing of the tendency of the elders to blot out all
the fire of youth with restrictive legislation, said, "It is a fearful
responsibility to be young, and none can bear it like their elders." How
can a youth whose blood is warm within sit like his grandsire carved in
alabaster? He cannot and he will not, and that is the salvation of the
race. It is the old story of the stag in the herd. He will see no other
usurp his rights until he is too old to have any.
Let me tell you something of the history of these attempts by the elders
to curb the everlasting spirit of youth. At one time they would have
eliminated all the sports. But we didn't let croquet become the national
game! You ask what this nation of ours will become, and in reply I ask
you what will you make of your boys?
Statisticians tell us that 90 per cent. of the men who go into business
fail. Do you want your boy to fold his hands and say that because the
chances are against him he will not try at all?
Are you going to let him get such a maximum of old man's caution that
he reduces to a minimum the young man's courage?
Make him strong and well, just as you wish the nation to be strong and
sound. There will always be plenty of middle-aged failures to preach
caution.
Teach your boy fair play and may the best man win.

Teach him that the true sportsman "boasts little, crows gently when in
luck, puts up, pays up, and shuts up when beaten"; that he should be
strong in order to protect his country. A boy may over-emphasize his
sports, 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