It was time now to relieve Bennett at the wheel, not only that he might stretch his legs, but so that he could pour gasoline into the tanks from the five-gallon tanks stowed all over the cabin. Piloting was not difficult because of the smoothness of the air, and I was able to check myself on the course by holding the sun-compass in one hand and steering with the other. I had time now leisurely to examine the ice pack and eagerly sought signs of life, a polar bear, a seal, or birds fly. ing, but could see none. When Bennett had finished pouring gasoline, he took the wheel again, and I went back to the incessant navigating. So much did I sight down on the dazzling snow that I had a slight attack of snow blindness. But I need not have suffered, as I had brought along the proper kind of amber goggles. We were opening unexplored regions at the rate of nearly 10,000 square miles an hour, and were experiencing the incomparable satisfaction of searching for new land.... The sun was still shining brightly. Surely fate was good to us, for without the sun our quest of the Pole would have been hopeless. When our calculations showed us to be about an hour from the Pole, I noticed through the cabin window a bad leak in the oil tank of the starboard motor. Bennett confirmed my fears. He wrote: "That motor will stop." It was a big moment. Bennett suggested that we try a landing to fix the leak. But I had seen too many expeditions fail by landing, so we decided to keep on for the Pole with our two remaining motors, if necessary. At 9:02 a. m., Greenwich civil time, our calculations showed us to be at the Pole! The dream of a lifetime had at last been realized. We headed to the right to take two confirming sights of the sun, then turned and took two more. After that we took some moving and still pictures, then went on for several miles, and made a larger circle to take in the Pole. Time and direction became topsyturvy at the Pole. When crossing it on the same straight line we were go ing north one instant and south the next! All directions became south from the Pole itself. At 9:15 a. m. we headed for Spitsber gen. To our surprise, the motor with the oil leak never stopped because (an we afterward found out) the leak was caused by a rivet jarring out of its hole, and when the oil got down to the level of the hole it stopped leaking. The reaction of having accomplished our mission, together with the narcotic effect of the motors, made us drowsy when we were steering. I dozed off once at the wheel and had to relieve Bennett several times because of his sleepiness. But that return trip was a momentous experience. The wind began to freshen and change, and in an hour we were making over 100 miles an hour. The elements were surely smiling, that day on us, two insignificant specks of mortality flying there over that great, vast, white area in a small plane with only one companion, deaf from the motors, just a dot in the center of 10,000 square miles of visible desolation. We felt no larger than a pinpoint and as lonely as the tomb; as remote and detached as a star. Here, in another world, far from the herds of people, the smallnesses of life fell from our shoulders. What wonder that we felt no great emotion of achievement or fear of death that lay stretched beneath us, but instead, impersonal, disembodied. On, on we went. It seemed forever onward. I realized fully then that time is only a relative thing. An instant can be an age, an age an instant. We were aiming for Grey Point, Spitsbergen, and finally, when we saw it dead ahead, we knew that we had been able to keep on our course! It was a wonderful relief not to have to navigate any more. We came into Kings Bay flying at about 4000 feet. That tiny village was a welcome sight, but not so much so as the good old Chantier. I could see the steam from her welcoming and joyous whistle. In a few moments we were in the arms of our comrades, who carried us with wild joy down the snow runway they had worked so hard to make. M "College Years Are Wasted"---Wells Condensed from the Cosmopolitan (September, '26) H. G. Wells Y skepticism about schools extends to universities, and particularly to what one might call the universities for juveniles like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, the annual cricket, boat-race, baseball and football universities, where every sort of intellectual activity is subordinated to a main business of attracting, boarding and amusing our adolescents. I think that we who deal with the world's affairs have been very negligent about the things that have been done to our sons and daughters in these institutions, and that we need to give them more attention. They are not giving value for the money E and respect they get. They fail to do any adequate educational work upon the larger part of the youngsters who spend in them what are perhaps the cardinal years of their lives. Only a minority do sound work. Much of it they could do far better in closer touch with London or in any other habitable town. ་ Both Oxford and Cambridge lie in low river valleys; the heavy air demands much time out of every day for exercise, and a vast industry of games has grown up to overshadow all intellectual activities. There is no effective supervision by the tutors who are supposed to guide the mental growth of the undergraduates, and a considerable number of these undergraduates waste their time in little musical and dramatic societies that lead neither to musical nor to dramatic achievement, and in similar forms of amateurism. Such opportunities for frittering away time are endless. Few of the dons are of a quality to grip the undergraduate imagination. They fail to excite a new generation to vigorous thought and effort. I encounter a growing discontent with Oxford and Cambridge among many of my friends who have had undergraduate sons. I know three or four who have been bitterly disappointed in reasonable hopes. They find themselves confronted with pleasant, easy-going, evasive young men, up to nothing in particular and schooled out of faith, passion or ambition. I think we must be prepared to cut out this three- or four-year holiday at Oxford or Cambridge, and their American compeers, from the lives of the young men we hope to see playing leading parts in the affairs of the world. It is too grave a loss of time at a crucial period; it establishes the defensive attitude too firmly in the face of the forcible needs of life. The conviction has grown upon me that as early as 15 or 16, a youth should be brought into contact with realities and kept in contact with realities from that age on. That does not mean that he will make an end of learning then, but only that henceforth he will go on learning-and continue learning for the rest of his life --in relation not to the "subjects" of a curriculum, but to the realities he is attacking. We are parting from the old delusion that learning is a mere phase in life. And all the antiquated nonsense of calling people bachelors and masters and doctors of arts and sciences might very well go, with the gowns and hoods that recall some medieval alchemist or inquisitor, to limbo. They mean nothing. There is no presumption that a man who has the diploma of M.A., is even a moderately educated man. No doubt the modern world requires an increasing number of institutions conducting research, gathering and presenting knowledge, affording opportunities for discussions and decisions between keenly interested men, working perpetually upon the perpetually renewed myriads of interrogations with which the intelligent adult faces existence; but such institutions, without teaching pretensions, are not universities in the commonly accepted sense of the word at all. The newer institutions, the research and postgraduate colleges if you cling to the word, will offer no general education at all. The only students who will come to them will be young people who are specially attracted and who want to work in close relation as assistants, secretaries, special pupils, collateral investigators with the devoted and distinguished men whose results are teaching the world. These men will teach when they feel disposed to teach. They will write, they will communicate what they have to say by means of conferences and special demonstrations, and their utterances will be world-wide. The new institutions for the increase of knowledge will become the constituent ganglia of one single world university and a special press and a literature of explanation and summary will make the general consequences their activities accessible everywhere. of The modern university, as Carlyle said long ago, is a university of books. So far as general education is concerned I agree entirely with that. As the prestige of tradition and traditional institutions fades, an immense desire for knowledge and for new sustaining ideas spreads through the world. There are millions of people, half educated and uneducated, vividly aware that they are ill-informed and undirected, passionately eager to learn and to acquire a sense of purpose and validity. This new demand for information, for suggestion and inspiration, is perceptible now not only in the Atlantic communities but increasingly in India, in China, in Russia and in the Near East. We make no concerted effort to cope with it. It rests with us, the people with capital and enterprise, to treat this phase of opportunity with a better respect, to show a larger generosity in the promotion and distribution of publications, to use the great new posibilities of intellectual dissemination that arise worthily and fruitfully. The world university must be a great literature. We cannot have our able teachers wasting and wearying their voices any longer in the lecture theaters of provincial towns; we want them to speak to all the world. And it must be a literature made accessible by translation into every prevalent language. The literature of ideas must be a world-wide literature sustaining one world-wide civilization. To this sustaining contemporary literature in its variety and abundance our young people of all classes must go for their general conception of life, and throughout all their subsequent lives they will follow it and react to it and develop mentally in relation to it. Such upper personal teaching as will remain in the world, will direct their attention to what is being written and said, and will advise and assist in study and selection. That in effect is the real upper education of today; that is how we are being kept alive as a thinking community now. Here as with monarchy and militant nationalism we do not need so much to attack as to disregard and neglect, to supersede and efface, through the steadfast development of a new worldwide organism of education and interchange, press, books, encyclopedias, organized translations, conferences, research institutions. A time must come when Oxford and Cambridge, Yale and Harvard will signify no more in the current intellectual life of the world than the monastery of Mount Athos or the lamaseries of Tibet do now, when their colleges will stand empty and clean for the amateur of architecture and the sightseeing tourist. M* Ford Discusses Human Flivvers Condensed from Everybody's Magazine (August, '26) Judge Henry Neil Y first meeting with Henry Ford was back in 1914, when I spent the major portion of every day with him for a week. The reason he welcomed me in this fashion was simply that he had been interested in my work for mothers' pensions. "Organized charity and schools of philanthropy and the whole idea of giving to the poor are wrong," he told me. "If a railroad had a bad piece of track where trains were wrecked every now and then, it wouldn't help matters to build a fine repair shop there to fix the smashed cars. The thing to do would be to fix the track. Charity and philanthrophy are repair shops. They do not remove the cause of human wrecks. "Trying to help men by handing them something is a failure. We don't give our men anything. They earn all they get. Charity does the recipieut no good; it only makes the giver feel better." A few months later, in London, I was walking home from the theater with George Bernard Shaw. We passed a number of pitiable old women, and Shaw gave each of them half a crown. I asked him just why he did it. "Selfishness," replied Shaw. "It just pleased myself. Gratified my vanity. You can't help people much by E dealing out small doles. That only makes you feel a little better, and leaves them worse off in a day or two. The only way you can help the destitute is by finding work for them to do, paying them fairly for it." 1 I have met many very wealthy men. None of them has made as much money as Henry Ford; and none of them is as happy. He doesn't try to find happiness by establishing orphan asylums, or by any other form of charity. He employs 75,000 men, and he puts the money into their envelopes, instead of into asylums for their children. A wealthy woman told me once that Ford "had ruined the labor market," and led working people to crave luxuries that are reserved for the few. I told Mr. Ford about this. "My labor market isn't ruined," he said. "The workers who come back to the plant on Monday after a day in their cars in the country are healthier and happier and they do better work. Just because a man uses his hands to operate a lathe instead of to clip coupons is no reason he and his family should not enjoy comfortable lives. The harddriven, underpaid, slum-living worker is stupid and half-sick and mentally distracted by hardship. I can't afford to have such men working for me." Mr. Ford looks upon his great welfare enterprises-his hospital service and recreational work-not as a charity but as essential to the efficiency of his business. I talked with one of Ford's important executives who told me that he himself had served a year in the penitentiary for embezzling funds from the Standard Oil Co. When he came out, Ford gave him his chance to reclaim himself, and he in turn had taken 200 men from the prisons and given them jobs in the Ford factory. He told me that he had saved more than a million dollars while in Ford's employ-and that once, when his home had been robbed, he sent down into the factory for one of those former convicts. To him he explained the details of the robbery. "That's Chicago Bill done that-he's the only one I know who works that way," said the ex-convict. He helped put the detectives on the right trail, and the Ford official got his stolen property back. The first thing Ford showed me on my first visit to him was the annealing room, where in the warm, dry temperature he had men with incipient tuberculosis at work. "Discouragement is the worst enemy of the sick man," he said. At sanitariums every one is sick and everybody talks about his troubles. But here our sick men do the work that they are capable of. They have no worry about their families. This feeling helps them profit by the medical attention we give them." Bill Haywood was at one time stirring up labor trouble in Chicago. "You go to Chicago and bring Haywood up here and I'll put him to work," said Ford. "If he can stir up any discontent among my employes, I'll know it's my fault because I'm not giving them a square deal, somehow, and I'll see to it that they get a square deal.” Henry Ford is not a church man; yet he comes closer to reconciling modern business with the ideals of Jesus than any manufacturer I know. "When we first put our $5 minimum wage into effect," Ford once told me, "we reduced the worries and cares and ill health of our employes. The men came to work with clear heads, enthusiasm and energy. A man who had made 200 bolts for $2 a day, turned out 600 at $5 a day. Production increased more than expenses all along the line, and we made more money. "Every one of our employes receives at least twice the usual wage for his work; and when one of them dies, his widow continues to receive a pay envelope until her children are old enough to go to work in their father's place. It isn't charity; it is only putting my money to work in a useful way for the good of mankind. And the more money I spend in useful ways, the more money I make." Mr. Ford's chief disagreements with his associates have come because they were too much absorbed in making money. The men who had their eyes exclusively on the almighty dollar have gradually been edged out of the Ford business. Mr. Ford told me about a visit he had from George W. Perkins, repre senting a Wall Street group that was trying to monopolize the automobile business. "Perkins told me," said Ford, "that his assistants could make more money for me if I went into the deal than I could possibly make for myself. "I replied, 'Mr. Perkins, you are right. And you might as well go back to New York. I cannot answer your arguments. We could probably make many millions. But I don't want them. I am not making automobiles to make money; I am making automobiles so that every family can ride in one'." I remembered the time when Ford had talked enthusiastically for several hours about the development of the tractor. He talked about what it would mean to the farmer; how it would reduce the deadening drudgery that makes a farmer's life narrow and dull. He painted vividly his dream of happier farm homes. But he never once mentioned the possibility of making money out of the tractor. If the Bradstreet figures are right, 95 per cent of the men who jump into business with their eyes only on the dollars they expect to make, fail. But Ford, bent on the service of mankind through the particular mechanical genius that is his, has made more money than anybody else. He is starting to build flivver airplanes, today, with the same vision of their future service to humanity that has lured him into all his other enterprises. Henry Ford has interpreted in new terms the great American religion of success. He doesn't measure it in dollars, and he doesn't believe that any. body's success which is measured in He dollars is really success at all. measures success in the number of people who are happier because of the work he is doing in the world. Some day historians will look back to him as the man whose example helped most to lead American business out of the era when financial success was abjectly worshipped, into the era of success enjoyed through the consciousness of social service. |