Life — May 14, 1914 — page 21: what you’re looking at

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

Hon. Beetle: PLAIN MISS nU: WHY ARE ALL THOSE You? —— re 3 FFLLOWS SO FOND OF THAT SHE'S TNE ONLY GIRL IN TOWN WHO CAN DANCE THE TANGO WITH SIX FEET AT ONCE.” relation between owner and worker than it is when they see one another often. Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., knows nothing, we suppose, about what is going on in that property in Colorado except what the managers whom he sends there tell him and what he reads in the papers, if he reads the papers. No doubt his managers are the best he can find; men whom he trusts, but they are deputies, and there are few deputies that can manage properties as though they owned them. In our in- corporated world there is a great pas- sion for organization. Organization means, largely, paying somebody else to do your work. Most of the work that is done nowadays is done by somebody else, but there are still some things that an owner or a leader must do for himself or step down. There are some things that take not only brains and fidelity, but spirit. Na- poleon could win battles, but when he sublet the job, as he did in Spain, he got into trouble. His marshals were effective when he was there, but much less able to do the trick on their own hook. Perhaps this Colorado muddle was a fight that a real king’s son on the premises might have won, albeit with a broken sword. As to that we don’t know, but when a property is in Colorado and a strike on it is run from Indianapolis, and the appeal to the responsible owner is to a man in New York who (we believe) has never seen the property, it seems a little as though the capacities of organization were being strained. Some things can be done by the long- distance telephone. Others have still to be done by hand. It makes one sus- pect once more that President Wilson made a timely innovation when he went to the Capitol and said his say to 877 Congress with his own voice. It may be that running the big far-off Colo- rado Fuel & Iron Company, with its thousands of miners, many of them turbulent newcomers, is not a hired man’s job, but requires a principal. It may be that direction of its affairs and decision of questions in a time of crises by a long-distance general in New York is an absurdity. But on the premises or in New York, the head of the company ought to be subject to the laws of Celorado and backed in just positions by the government of that State. In this case the State has not been equal to its duty. It has flunked. Its population is less than a million, and is considerably a mining population, and there may not have been enough militiamen tilable for strike service. Or perhaps it is that Colorado is feminized! Anyhow, gov- ernment there has failed to govern. ov troubles with Mexico are by no means over, but there is a lull in them, and the active work at this writing is being done by the mediators. They do not talk for pub- lication, so that there is not much to tell. But war has been postponed, which is delightful, and meanwhile stocks are up a little and every- hody is doing as well as could he expected. When one reads of the good work done in clearing prisoners out of the jail-fort of San Juan Ulloa at Vera Cruz, it brings the wish that Cole Blease, or somebody, would fit out an expedition and come up here and cap- ture Sing Sing. Some jobs have to be done with a jolt, otherwise they lag indefinitely. The rest of the news is that Colonel Roosevelt has heen restored to com- munication, and has boils to exceed the record, and that Job has nothing on him in the detail of patience. Who ever would have expected to find the Colonel matched against Job! comicbooks.com