Description
Excerpt from Taft’s: Training for the Presidency
The rule which works so well in the busi ness world and in the household should be applied in the same degree to public affairs. The people have a right, although they do not always exercise it, to insist that men proposed for important public service shall have demonstrated not only their honesty, but their capacity. The greatest danger to republican institutions, as shown by the history of these United States, unquestion ably lies in the proneness of the people to be led away by demagogues and to take men at their own estimate. This great country of ours is entitled at all times and in everyposition to the services of men who are specially trained and specially adapted for their work. Now and then a new man in public life accidentally makes a success. Now and then a trained public man makes a failure in some new environment. As a rule, however, the people are best served by those who unite executive capacity with ir resistible integrity. With two men equally honest, the people will stand the best chance with him who has demonstrated his capacity in different ways. Experience is often a bitter teacher, but it is always a teacher with those who are willing to learn. In politics, as in business, or in the law, or medicine, the intelligent man who profits by his op portunities and who has been tried in many different capacities is certain to succeed in a greater percentage of cases than he who has to attack each problem as a novelty. The young medical student just starting on a professional career might perform a difficult operation with entire safety to the patient, but the average man would hate to take the chance. N 0 great corporation with a caseinvolving millions of dollars would entrust it to the young graduate from the law school, however intelligent he might be. No board of directors would entrust the property of their railroad and the lives of its patrons to a general manager who had had no more experience than that gained as rear brakeman on a suburban train.
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