Capital does not always mean employer. A Liberty Bond is capital but it is not an employer; the Government is an employer but it is not capital, and when any one is arguing a case for an employee against his employer let him use the proper terms. The misuse of words can cause a miscarriage of justice as the misuse of railway signals can send a train into the ditch.
All my life I have been changing big words into little words so that the employee can know what the employer is saying to him. The working man handles things. The professional man plies words. I learned things first and words afterward. Things can enrich a nation, and words can impoverish it. The words of theorists have cost this nation billions which must be paid for in things.
When I was planning a great school for the education of orphans, some of my associates said: “Let us teach them to be pedagogues.” I said: “No, let us teach them the trades. A boy with a trade can do things. A theorist can say things. Things done with the hands are wealth, things said with the mouth are words. When the housing shortage is over and we find the nation suffering from a shortage of words, we will close the classes in carpentry and open a class in oratory.”
This, then is the introduction to my views and to my policies. They are now to have a fair trial, like that other iron worker in the Elwood police court. I know what the word “previous” means. I can give an account of myself. So, in the following pages I will tell “where I was before I came here.”
If my style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract problems of child education. A speaker must entertain his hearers to the end or lose their attention. And so I taxed my wit to make this subject simple and easy to listen to. At last I evolved a style of address that brought my points home to the men I was addressing.
After all these years I can not change my style. I talk more easily than I write; therefore, in composing this book I have imagined myself facing an audience, and I have told my story. I do not mention the names of the loyal men who helped work out the plans of Mooseheart and gave the money that established it, for their number is so great that their names alone would fill three volumes as large as this.