INFLUENCE OF WORKERS 465 



of tlie soil ill tlie 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. l?ut 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 land- 

 owner, 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 perma- 

 nently 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 witli 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. These men, in many differing careers, 

 do the work which is most important to the com- 

 munity s life, although, of course, it must be supple- 

 mented by the work of the other men whose education 

 and activities are literary and scholastic ; who work in 

 politics or law, or in literary and clerical positions. 



Never forget that in any country the most important 

 activities are the activities of the man who works with 

 head or hands in the ordinary life of the community, 

 whether he be handicraftsman, farmer, or business man 

 — no matter what his occupation, so long as it is useful, 

 and no matter what his position, from the guiding 



