You need in this country, as is the case in every
other country, a certain number of men whose education shall fit them
for the life of scholarship, or to become teachers or public
officials. But it is a very unhealthy thing for any country for more
than a small proportion of the strongest and best minds of the country
to turn into such channels. It is essential also to develop
industrialism, to train people so that they can be cultivators of the
soil in the largest sense on as successful a scale as the most
successful lawyer or public man, to train them so that they shall be
engineers, merchants--in short, men able to take the lead in all the
various functions indispensable in a great modern civilized state. An
honest, courageous, and far-sighted politician is a good thing in any
country. But his usefulness will depend chiefly upon his being able to
express the wishes of a population wherein the politician forms but a
fragment of the leadership, where the business man and the landowner,
the engineer and the man of technical knowledge, the men of a hundred
different pursuits, represent the average type of leadership. No
people has ever permanently amounted to anything if its only public
leaders were clerks, politicians, and lawyers. The base, the
foundation, of healthy life in any country, in any society, is
necessarily composed of the men who do the actual productive work of
the country, whether in tilling the soil, in the handicrafts, or in
business; and it matters little whether they work with hands or head,
although more and more we are growing to realize that it is a good
thing to have the same man work with both head and hands.
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