INFLUENCE OF WORKERS 
465 
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 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 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. 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 
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