Ten Talents and a General

Sir Charles Napier, a soldier and military critic of international fame, said, during the Peninsular \[Iar: "I know of but one man who is capable of commanding an army of one hundred thousand men and that man is Lord Wellington."

How quickly things have changed. During the late WorldWarthat many men was only a stop-gap in the line; generals in these days are comm;rnding arnries ten, twenty, thirty times as great as Napier had dreamed of.

The powers of our generals today grew with their responsibilities; their hogizons widened with the giowth of ideas; they stood upon different platforms; and history will judge them by different standards.

To compare Napoleon with Foch; Haig with Hannibal; Pershing with Wellington; Joffre with Alexander; this were futile unless the surrounding times and conditions were weighed at the same moment.

Each was the product of his swn time and each must stand fixed on the pages of history by what he did with what he had to do with, and in the face of the competition that then existed.

And that judgment will be severe exactly in proportion as the amount and qirality of urhat each had to do wtith bears ratio to what he accomplished.

It is the old Parable of the Ten Talents again. A greater return was demanded of the man with Ten Tdents, than of the man with one.

So it will be with each of us; we will fail or succeed I we will enjoy prosperity or suffer loss; and we will finally be judged, not by what we have done, but by what we did with what we had to do with.

Take the retail lumber business of today.

We have much more to do with than any o{ our pre. decessors in this business i just as Foch and Hindenburg had more to make war with than Napoleon and Wellington ever dreamed about.

And because we have more, we should accomplish more, and more should be expected of us; our judgment shall be the more drastic.

WHAT SORT OF A GENERAL ARE YOU?

What folly to compare business today with business of fifteen years ago ! There is no intelligent comparison possible.

Of course, one may take little cross-sections of business and draft comparative figures, but they mean nothing.

Fifteen years ago your yard may have sold 500,00O feet;

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