Vagabond Editorials

BvJacL Dionne

I bought a dress on the installment plan, The reason, of course, to please a man. The dress is worn, the man is gone, But the damned installments go on and on.

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The line irr this colurnn about the guy who was so dumb he was twelve years old before he learned to say bye-bye, got a great kick-back. My friend "Flungry" Adams pulled nearly as good a one the other day. He told of a fellow who was so ignorant he couldn't spell cat if you spotted him ttca.tt

The prize for the best farm remark about agriculture goes to the fellow who said the trouble with the average farmer is he would rather smell the exhaust of a Ford than of a mule.

The fellow who named our government spending as "pu-p priming" came closer to the truth than he knew. All of youse guys that were raised on a farm know that when a pump has to be primed, it has to be done EVERY TIME YOU GO THERE FOR WATER. Priming a pump is about the least permanent thing in the full line of human activities.

"Experience, observation, and reason, are the only basis of knowledge" said a wise old man. Experiment, inexperience, and theorizing would be the prescription today. ***

We need competition in this country. We need it in our individual lives, in our business, in our government. We need competition to make men and things grow. Managed production destroys competition. And when you destroy competition you destroy initiative, destroy invention, destroy progress. In fact you destroy everything that made this country a great and good and prosperous place to live and rear children in.

When Henry Ford started for Washington the other day he was asked what he was going to do there. He said he was going to shovr the President a man who didn't want anything. Well, I don't know, but f imagine if I had a billion dollars and the standing in the nation that Henry has, I'd be independent, too.

To be really independent a man must be either very rich or very poor. The most independent man in history tirat I recall was the philosopher Diogenes, who lived at Corinth four hundred years before Christ. He lived in a barrel and went around in the daytime with a lighted lantern, seeking an honest man. He was a friend of Aristotle, friend and tutor of Alexander the Great. who then ruled the world.

Aristotle had told Alexander about Diogenes, so when the great king went on his conquering way to Corinth he confidently expected the great thinker to come to see him. But Diogenes was too busy thinking. So Alexander hunted him up. He found Diogenes sitting on a rock, deep in thought, the sun shining on his furrowed brow. The king said, "I am Alexander. What can f do for Diogenes?" And Diogenes replied, "Step aside so the sun can shine on me." All he wanted was the warm sunshine and the opportunity to think. And he got those gifts, not from the great king, but from the King of Kings. And he wanted nothing more.

Thinking of Diogenes reminds us that God always seems to send great men in groups-in constellations. What a group lived and thought and taught in the days of Diogenes. Plato, the great teacher of that time, used to publicly thank the gods that he lived in the age of Socrates. Socrates won immortality because he wasn't interested in it. He was the least egotistical of men. "Know thyself" was the text of all his Socratic discourses.

And his greatest orrpir,."rLo:*on immortality through writings that were as purely impersonal as the works of the immortal Shakespeare. ft remained for little men of little minds in these decadent days to depend upon the promiscuous use of the personal equation for their bid to greatness.

In the occasional homely philosophic utterances of Henry Ford there appears something of the Wisdom of those rugget thinkers of old. Mr. Ford says it is fine to sit by your warm fire in winter, but that if you will cut the wood for the fire, it will warm you twice. Plato had the same notion. He thought a man should work like a poor man, even

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