My Dear Boy:--I happened to meet your general manager the other day, and the way he spoke of the good work you are doing warmed the cockles of my old heart. He said that you couldn't rest easy until you knew more about the division than any other man. This, of course, is as it should be, but it is astonishing how many division superintendents are satisfied to grope along in the dark. Then some fine day the general officials come along on an inspection trip and unintentionally make the superintendent look like thirty cents by the sincere questions they ask about the division which he is unable to answer. If one's memory has not been trained by education it is a good thing to condense information and have it in a notebook in the vest pocket. Some wise man has said that all education after we are twenty-five years old consists in knowing where to look for things.
Another help that school education gives to an official is to broaden him so that he can use different methods on different properties. There are three main reasons why officials without much early education have succeeded and will continue to succeed. The first is native ability, which remains comparatively undeveloped without the second, which is opportunity. The third is the good luck to work under organizers and developers of talent. Training under the right sort of leaders is an education in itself. The danger of relying on such training alone is that one may copy too blindly the methods of his master without being broad enough to realize that the same master under other conditions of territory would adopt radically different methods. This is the reason why there are so many failures when a new man takes a crowd of his followers to reorganize a property. If all succeed, very well, but if one fails the most of the bunch go tumbling down like a row of blocks.
Again, the educated man from his knowledge of history is less likely to forget that what may go in fifteen-year-old Oklahoma will receive the icy mitt and the marble heart in three-hundred-year-old Virginia. Triples that are O.K. in cavalier South Carolina may be too quick acting in puritan Massachusetts. Commercialism, like patriotism, rests on certain fundamental principles. The application of these principles may be as uniform as a train of system cars; it may be as diverse as the cars in a train of a connecting line. Orthodoxy is usually my doxy.