Judge — August 18, 1917 — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Not One of Them! CAREFUL tabulation of the efficiency stories printed A in American newspapers and magazines during the last ten years reveals that there are today upward of 82,431 efficiency experts in the United States of sufficient merit to have had their stuff set up in type and ignored. But so far not one of them has been called in by the government at Washington to manage the war. It’s ridiculous. Captains of industry, college presidents, engineers, automo- bile manufacturers, chemists, electricians, railroad executives and newspaper men have been summoned by the dozen. But the efficiency expert, the one man who knows how to do every- thing better than anybody else does, has been left out in the cold. The demand for war stories has even killed the market for his journalistic attempts, and now he must starve or go to work, It isn’t right. We should pretend that we think these effi- ciency geniuses amount to something, even if we know it isn’t so. We have led them to believe that they are of some use for the last ten years, and now, the minute that something is to be done, we forget their existence. Why couldn’t a corps of them be set to work to discover how many millimeters of useless genuflection a regiment indulges in When it goes through the manual of arms? Why couldn’t we turn a pack of them loose upon Congress or the Cabinet or the National Security League, with power to pick flaws? Why not put a well-known efficiency expert of broad magazine experience at the head of everything that needs a head? It looks as if this great nation of 103,000,000 people hasn’t taken their prattle seriously enough. Here we are, going into the most tremendous war in history with these thousands of keen conservers and reclaimers of energy left in the dark. Such is the gratitude of magazine republics. Evidently we don’t care whether we conduct this war in an efficient manner. Evidently we are willing to plunge into it and fight like blazes without stopping every eight minutes to Dyas if conduct a survey of our activities and reorganize ourselves along more efficient lines. That’s just like us. We stumble along until we bump our heads, and then we bawl aloud. But before this war is forgotten about, we'll be glad to call in what experts survive and have them tell us how we could have done it for a billion or so less. Sixes and Sevens OHN M. BAER, who was lately elected to Congress from North Dakota, resigned a perfectly good postmastership, to which he was appointed by President Wilson, to do cartooning for the Non-Partisan League. Most of the postmasterships recently relinquished, however, were prospective rather than possessive, and were given up not on account of cartooning but ‘on account of California. 2 Ever since the first Liberty Loan, some members of Con- gress have acted as if they were afraid that if they behaved too well their majorities for re-election would be oversubscribed. 2 With Jezupolciezov, Brzezany and Starylysiec for starters, how would you like the job of campaign poet to our next set of presidential candidates in Russia! 2 The aeroplane against the submarine! Darius Green never dreamed that it might be up to him to beat Jules Verne in a world war for democracy. 2 All the promised Mexican election reforms have failed, but in other respects conditions down there are still far from normal. 2 Censorship or no censorship, of course the American press can’t know what is going on at Washington like Germany does. # Prussian militarists say ours is a “paper army.” Well, you have to settle before you stop the paper, William. comicbooks.com