Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1914 — GREATER THAN THE ‘MACHINE’ [ARTICLE]

GREATER THAN THE ‘MACHINE’

World’s Most Lasting Triumphs Have Been Those Achieved by the individual. '

Who Is the great leader, the man who can inspire his fellows with a splendid idea and‘move them to vast efforts and sacrifices for a cause, or the manager who apportions men their jobs and makes them work? A considerable school of ultramodernlsts would decide in favor of the manager. They want human affairs reduced to mechanical formulae, with a master engineer in control of the leyers. Socialists, “new nationalists” and tariff lobbyists differ on many points; but they agree in devotion to the machine. All regard human beings as “units" to be bossed, bullied, petted, taxed or directed; never as individuals who can be roused to work out their own salvation. It would seem that the burden of proof rests on the champion of this mechanical theory. History gives it small encouragement The great epochs of the past are those in which people thought for themselves and worked for themselves, and “never asked what’s to do.” The world looks back for inspiration and guidance not to the mechanically managed Roman empire, but to Greek republics, and medieval cathedral build.ers, and outbursts of individual art and freedom' of the renaissance.—Chicago Journal.