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( Originally Published 1908 ) Anent University Training There was toil, hardship, difficulty, with a strict necessity for economy of time and materials: and there was also encouragement and a rich reward for the men who would work. It was an atmosphere of effort, invention, adjustment readjustment. Paul Morton, man of action and man of power, brought up in Nebraska, and graduating at the University of Hard Knocks, is as good a specimen of the new genus, as I can now recall. He has health, enthusiasm, courage, and the fine fusing and mixing qualities that mark him as a man among men. Difficulty does not daunt him, nor is he appalled when some one says, " This has never been done before!" His business, like the true railroad man that he is, has been to do that one thing—the thing that had never been done before. Of all men, the builder and organizer of railroads, must be a man who can abandon a good plan for a better one. A good railroad manager throws an engine on the scrap-heap every morning before breakfast. Appliances are no sooner invented and tried before they must be replaced by better ones. And so the railroad builder must be a man of great fluidity of spirit; quick to see a betterment, and firm in his decision to utilize it. Moreover, he must know humanity—the needs of the public—something of every business—and season all of his work with courtesy and enough of beauty to make it acceptable. And this is Paul Morton! Going into the Burlington & Missouri employ as errand boy at fifteen; rising in a year to clerkship ; next head-clerk of his office; private secretary to a Divison Superintendent; Assistant General Freight Agent; General Passenger Agent; Traffic Manager; Second-Vice-President and practically manager of one of the greatest railroad systems in the world. A member of President Roosevelt's Cabinet. He was right in line for the presidency of the Santa Fe, and would have landed the office, had he not chosen to take control of a proposition that offered bigger difficulties. So much for Paul Morton. And now behold this man, strong as he is, dodging behind a superstition, unable to face a popular fallacy, side-stepping a pedagogic bugaboo, hugging the ropes, and crying for quarter. " What do you think of college education ?" asked an editor of Paul Morton. And Paul Morton ducks, courtesies and with a finger in his mouth, says, "It is the regret of my life that I did not go to college!" Fie upon you, Paul Morton, why didn't you say, "Polly wants a cracker," or something equally startling and original ? You know perfectly well, Paul, that your going into that office as an errand boy, was exactly the start in life that your needs required. You know, too, that you have all the education you can carry—all you can possibly use in your business. Why twitter twaddle and sputter the trite ? Why not say that college education is good for those who need it, and let it go at that ! Or say,—I see—when you expressed regret that you had not gone to college and been landed in a railroad office at twenty-two, too proud to scrub, too smart to hustle, and too old to quickly adapt yourself to the letter file, you were passing us out a subtle one, soaked in tincture of iron—I see! |