The Career of Leonard Wood Part 13

The elimination of distance, the making of human relation as easy for continents as for {261} adjoining communities lessens the size of the world and standardizes the rules that govern life. All intellectual, political, commercial and military procedures have changed therefore in the last half century to a greater extent than in hundreds of years prior thereto. One race in the fifth or sixth grade of civilization begins to discover what the other race in the first grade is doing.

One commercial country of a lower order finds what it is losing because of another country of a higher order of commercialism. The laborers of Barcelona discover what the laborers of New York are receiving in compensation for the same work. The people of Russia discover the different political conditions existing amongst themselves and the people of England and France. The government of the German Empire sees what a united nation backed by the biggest army on earth might do in Europe. The men of Austria who have no vote learn what the men of the United States procure from universal suffrage.

With the belief on every human being's part that the other fellow is better off than he, with the education which goes on through the medium {262} of emigration and immigration, with the immense number of detail short cuts, with the prodigious increase in reading and the resulting acquirement of the ideas of others, with the myriad of other matters patent to any one who thinks--with all this and because of it the methods and procedure of daily life have changed entirely throughout most of the civilized world since a man who is now nearly sixty was born.

At the same time the family remains the same; the marriage law is unchanged; the right of private property is what it was in the days of ancient Rome. The Const.i.tution of the United States is what it was a hundred and thirty years ago. Justice is the same as it was in the time of Alexander. The Golden Rule has not been altered since the time of Christ. Love, hate, fear and courage stand as they were originally some time prior to the stone age.

To revert, then, to the simile of the construction of the house, it seems true that while the plaster and the wall paper--the decorations of its interior and exterior--change from time to nevertheless on the whole, as a rule, in the main {263} the pa.s.sage of the great ages has not materially changed the supports of the structure--and never will.

In the matter of interior and exterior decoration periods come and go during which those who build houses decorate according to schools of art. It is the only belief that any sane and hopeful human being can have that these schools of decoration for the old house of civilization in the main steadily improve. If it is not so, then we have nothing to live for, nothing to which we may look forward. Also, however, there are fas.h.i.+ons and fads running along by the side of these great schools which are suggestive, amusing or ludicrous, as the case may be. The cubists and the followers of the old masters paint at the same time. One, however, dies shortly and the other lives on--often to be sure affected in some slight way by the grotesque but honest fad, but never giving way to it.

In the month of November, 1918, greater changes of this nature took place in the political world than in all the years which preceded that month since the beginning of the Christian era. {264} In that month some scores of crowned heads stepped down from their thrones and made haste to reach shelter as do the rats in a kitchen when the cook turns on the electric light. At that time something like three hundred millions of people gave up their particular forms of government and to a certain extent have been living on since without any subst.i.tute.

Some of these crowned heads have sat on their thrones from five to ten centuries. Some of the governments have lived as long.

It looks like a general tumble of the house of civilization. And yet most of these millions of people go on getting up in the morning, going to bed at night and, impossible as it may seem, conducting commercial enterprises. The kings have gone; the governments have gone; yet the people remain and their daily life goes on--not as usual --but in the main the same.

At such a time amidst such stupendous changes it is natural that an infinite number of plans for reconstruction come forward. All the century-old panaceas crop up. All the moss-grown plans for a perfect world are thrust forward in a new {265} dress and naturally gain credence. And with the increased ease of intercommunication of individuals and ideas the opportunity not only for many more but for widely divergent theories to make themselves heard is immeasurably increased. Thus it becomes possible for a Lenine and a Trotzky to leave their tenement flats in the slums of New York and proceed to the palaces of the Czar to show the hundred and twenty millions of Russians what can be done--and, what is far more to the point, get a hearing. Thus it becomes possible for the International Workers of the World in Russia, France, England and America to get together in conference in Switzerland or elsewhere and discuss how best to destroy not only governments, but private property, law, order, the family and all the beams of the great house at one time. Thus it becomes possible for a host of less radical but none the less pernicious plans for the good or evil of the world to fly about amongst unstable but well-meaning minds.

Our country, so remote in miles from the scenes of these upheavals, is by the development of {266} modern times so near that it is to a certain extent affected by them.

In a population of one hundred millions in the United States there are probably one hundred million different views entertained upon each of the questions of this disturbed period. But a fair cla.s.sification of them could be safely made into radicals, moderates and conservatives--Bolsheviki and theorists, slow-moving and hard-thinking citizens and stiff-necked reactionaries--all honest and earnest in the mean. If the Bolsheviki and theorists outnumber the others we shall have a situation in the United States similar to that in Russia, Austria and Germany. If the stiff-necked reactionaries outnumber the others, we shall smother the flame for a time only to have it burst forth shortly in an infinitely more terrible explosion. If the slow-moving, hard-thinking citizens outnumber the others, we shall maintain the main structure of our house so laboriously built throughout the ages while we change to some extent the nature of the wall paper and the plaster to adapt it to modern conditions.

Some of us want to achieve the first, some the {267} second and some the third status; and it would be safe to say that up to the present in this country the people of the great middle cla.s.s--the not rich, the not poor, the steady business man, the ordinary mother of a family--are in the majority and are trying to adapt themselves to the new conditions even if only in a slow and somewhat halting manner.

It will help them and therefore help the country to maintain themselves and itself on an even keel until the storm subsides if they can have some concrete standard to work by. And as standards in this sense usually become established by example, by what each of us thinks the man he looks up to is doing, thinking and planning, it seems fair to say that the example of a few leading men of the strong sanity which characterizes General Wood is having now or will have in the future a great influence for good.

When we are all complaining at the changing conditions, when we see apparently permanent organizations like the government of thousand-year-old empires crumbling in a month, when we hear the new-old theories for a new form of {268} existence, we are somewhat dazed, somewhat influenced by the outward signs and somewhat skeptical about our own small but to ourselves important outlook. At such a moment the voice of one who says in substance: "Do not let superficial changes --no matter how important they seem--make us forget the law of man and nature; do not forget that the fittest survives; do not imagine that wars are over because the most terrible one in history is just finished; do not hesitate to prepare for your own duties and those of your country; do not forget that organization and cooperation produce peace, safety, prosperity and happiness"--when a voice in our land announces this and its owner proves by his whole life the truth of his statements, then it pays to listen and inwardly digest.

In spite of all we are being told to the contrary, there need be no alarm for the future if the country contains enough of such leaders to make themselves heard above the babel of new cries and beliefs, notwithstanding the attractive pictures some of these theorists present. For that reason leaders must always exist where progress is to be {269} made and the great majority must stand behind them to back them up.

The effective spear cannot do its work without its steel point, nor yet without its long handle to force the point home.

This biographical sketch treats of one of these spear points and as such represents to a greater or less degree all great sane leaders, though it speaks of but one.

Leonard Wood's personality is one of mental sanity and physical health. It is non-reactionary and non-visionary. It is military only in the sense that the army happens to have been his business in life.

His business might have been that of the law, of banking, or leather, without in the least changing in it. He once said of this:

"The officers of the Army and Navy are the professional servants of the government in matters pertaining to the military establishment.

They are like engineers, doctors, lawyers, or any other cla.s.s of professional men whose services people employ because they are expert in their line of work. They do not initiate wars. Nine-tenths of all wars have their origin directly or indirectly in {270} issues arising out of trade. The people make war; the government declares it; and the officers of the army and navy are charged with the responsibility of terminating it with such means and implements as the people may give them."

His voice raised in behalf of preparedness refers therefore to the military, because as a Major-General in the United States Army he is not empowered to speak of other walks in life. Yet his own wide experience in Cuba and the Philippines in administration, very little of which was military, is a witness of his belief in preparedness in an life.

He founded schools where there were none to prepare citizens for the new Cuban republic. He reorganized and built up customs laws and regulations where there were only attempts at such in order to prepare revenue to build roads and finish public works to make a busy and healthy nation. He reestablished sane marriage laws in order to prepare a solid community resting upon the basis of the clearly defined family. In the Philippines he inst.i.tuted local government to prepare the islands for self-government.

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None of these acts, nor many others of like nature, had anything to do with the military. They were all based on the law that a sound and successful community, whether that community be a village, town or nation, rests in the final a.n.a.lysis on personal, individual responsibility which in the group makes a responsible government, that personal responsibility comes only from preparation, from execution as a result of preparation and from efficiency which is its synonym.

We study for this or that profession. We cannot practice law unless we prepare and take a degree. We cannot enter the medical profession unless we study and take a degree. Wood's great thesis is that we cannot become sound citizens and, therefore, in the group a sound nation, unless we study and prepare to be such.

It sounds so simple that one wonders why it is written. And yet for the last two years under the guise of war necessity this country has been moving in quite another direction. Instead of personal responsibility we have been subst.i.tuting more and more government responsibility. Instead of individual effort we have been advancing governmental {272} effort. Instead of natural compet.i.tion we have been subst.i.tuting government regulation. Instead of advancing patriotism, nationalism, Americanism, we have been letting all these give way to internationalism. We have not been preparing ourselves as individuals to a.s.sume individual responsibly, but in fact we have been giving up that responsibility to government.

It is through the sense of the people quickened by such men as Wood that we shall come back to sounder methods--not to where we were before. That can never be. If it were so, the world would not be moving forward. But we shall come back to the basic principle that individual initiative, energy and the rewards that accrue therefrom are and always must be the basis for collective initiative, energy and the rewards thereof; that no collective organization such as a government can remain virile and effective unless its component parts--the individuals--remain virile and effective.

The appeal which Wood's life makes to us is toward this responsibility of the individual _for_ his own work, his own affairs, his own family, and {273} to his own country, and that has been found throughout history to be the groundwork, the foundation upon which civilization rests. Translated into current phrase this means that we must follow such men as he, keep eternally at work to improve ourselves individually, to make a good and honest living, to hand on the torch of patriotism, of sanity and of ever-increasing knowledge by furnis.h.i.+ng to the world the new generations that shall carry on, and to weld and stabilize the whole structure by building up Americanism within our borders. In the vocabulary of General Wood this is translated again into the words: "Prepare! Prepare! Prepare!"

Such has been the career of the New Englander from Cape Cod who has worked in his own land, in the tropics, in many spheres, at many problems until at the age of fifty-eight in sound mind and body he stands firmly still in the prime of life ready for many years yet to come of service and work for himself, his family and his fellow countrymen.