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idea. I have had lots of outside offers. I work here because I feel at home. My job is good as long as I take care of it. No man loses his job because of age."

Another man said: "I never saved a dollar until the president asked me, 'How many days' work have you put by since you have been here?""

Interviewing men and women for a day and a half showed that cleanliness, loyalty, ability, and work were in the minds of all. As one old man put it, "This man Kindleberger never said, 'Go on,' but 'Come on, let's do it.'"

Jacob Kindleberger is the president and founder of the now seven-milliondollar plant, created in sixteen years. If you ask him his idea of his employees, his answer is: "We are one people: if those who work for the company succeed the company succeeds; if the company succeeds the workers succeed. Everyone is in the open here, and we feel that the spirit of service and fair dealing are not just words, but actualities out at Parchment."

Industry has made greater progress in the past twenty-five years than in the previous five hundred years, and from this forward movement has come service to mankind. Uncounted millions living in every part of the globe where gas is to be found are using hot water from a big service station that has been years in the making.

Cleanliness can be next to godliness since hot water is cheap. Tables show that cold water service in cities costs from $22 to $300 per person. The cost of heating water, after deducting the cost of the Humphrey heater, is the actual cost of the gas used.

H. S. Humphrey, the designer and inventor of Humphrey Gas Water Heaters, and president of the company, started to manufacture them forty years ago.

In going through the Humphrey Company buildings in Kalamazoo, Michigan, your guide tells you: “We make the most complete line of gas water-heaters in the world." He introduces you to one of the men, and, as the guide steps aside, the man says: "Humphrey is one of us. He worked on the bench when we were just a few. He was then interested in what we did and how we got along. The men will all tell you that we all own our homes and feel certain that, as long as we can work, there is work here for us. If a man is in trouble or distress and Humphrey knows it, he will help him out. The fear of getting old, of not having a job, does not exist in this factory."

The shorthand notes taken from over eighty of the employed force show that a distinct fellowship of service is expressed in this concern.

Humphrey service comes in many types and sizes. For example, Humphrey Automatic Gas Water Heater, Type A, gives a limitless, instantaneous, economical hot-water supply. It has a thermal control. The operation is entirely automatic. Water is heated only as it flows through the coils. Opening any hot-water faucet starts the flow of water through the heater, and automatically turns on the gas. Closing the faucet stops the water, the gas, and the expense.

Frank A. Lemke, secretary, treasurer, and general manager, stressed the point that these Humphrey Automatic Hot Water Service Heaters are used in all kinds of places and in all climes.

H. S. Humphrey, the president, said: "In rendering a service to humanity, we are not unmindful of the men who have worked and aided in this endeavor. We take a personal interest in each and every one of them. They have shown high purpose in their usefulness, and we appreciate them."

INSTITUTIONAL PUBLICITY

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MAY, 1926

ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN AMERICANS

BY AGNES REPPLIER

FIFTY-SEVEN years ago Mr. James Russell Lowell published in the Atlantic Monthly an urbanely caustic essay, 'On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners.' Despite discursiveness (it was a leisurely age), this Apologia pro patria sua is a model of good temper, good taste, and good feeling. Its author regretted England's dislike for our accent, France's distaste for our food, and Germany's contempt for our music; but he did not suffer himself to be cast down. With a modesty past all praise, he even admitted, what no good American will admit to-day, that popular government 'is no better than any other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so'; and that self-made men 'may not be divinely commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities of opinion on all possible topics of human interest.' Nevertheless he found both purpose and principle in the young nation, hammered into shape by four years of civil war. 'One might be worse off than even in America,' mused this son of Massachusetts; and we are instantly reminded of William James's softly breathed assurance: 'A Yankee is also, in the last analysis, one of God's

creatures.'

VOL. 137 - NO. 5

I

Fifty-seven years are but a small fragment of time. Not long enough surely for the civilizations of Europe to decay, and the civilization of the United States to reach a pinnacle of splendor. Yet the condescension which Mr. Lowell deprecated, and which was based upon superiority of culture, seems like respectful flattery compared to the condescension which Americans now daily display, and which is based upon superiority of wealth. There has been no startling decline of European institutions, no magnificent upbuilding of our own; only a flow of gold from the treasuries of London, Paris, and Rome into the treasury of Washington. Germany's atavistic belief in the economic value of war, fruit of the evil seed sown in 1870, has been realized in a fashion which Germans least expected. England is impoverished in money and men. The casualties in the British army were over three million; the killed numbered six hundred and fifty-eight thousand. France is impoverished in money, men, and resources. A conscientious destruction of everything that might prove profitable if spared marked the progress of the invading. Teutons. But the tide of wealth did not flow to Berlin. It leaped the sea,

and filled the coffers of the nation that had provided the sinews of war, and that had turned the tide of victory.

Under these circumstances, the deep exhaustion of countries that have been struggling for life as a drowning man struggles for breath is hardly a matter of surprise. Cause and effect are too closely linked to need elucidation. When an American newspaper syndicate tells us that 'Dr. Frank Crane Explains Europe,' we wonder how he comes to know more than the rest of us about it, until we find he does n't. "There is only one thing the matter with Europe,' says 'the man with a million friends,' 'one root trouble from which all its difficulties spring. And the matter with Europe is that it has not yet learned to work and to love work. Europeans still idealize idleness. What is happening now is that the people who are coming into power under the influence of democracy are getting tired of this sort of thing.'

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My only excuse for quoting these words is that they were written by an American adult, syndicated by Ameriçan adults, and read by American adults, and that they may therefore be taken as representing one layer of the American adult mind. Now it is all very well for an ironical scientist, like Dr. Joseph Collins, to intimate that there is no such thing as an American adult mind, and that the great body of the people think like children until they reach senility and cease thinking at all. The fact remains that nobody but a moron has any right to think like a child after he has ceased to be one. He goes on doing it because it is an easy, pleasant, and vastly self-sufficient thing for him to do. But the value of our thinking is the test of our civilization. If we apprehend the exact nature of our offering to the great depositories of human thought, we know where we stand in the orderly progress of the ages.

There does not seem to be much doubt on this score in the mind (I must continue to use the word) of the average American. The Atlantic Monthly published, in February 1924, a paper by Mr. Langdon Mitchell on "The American Malady.' The writer quoted a few lines from an editorial in the Ladies' Home Journal, August 1923. "There is only one first-class civilization in the world to-day. It is right here in the United States and the Dominion of Canada. Europe's is hardly second-class, and Asia's is about fourth- to sixthclass.' I verified this quotation, finding it a little difficult to credit, and borrowed it for a lecture I was giving in New York. My audience took it at its face value, and cheerfully, I might say enthusiastically, applauded the sentiment. It was evident that to them it was a modest statement of an incontrovertible fact, and they registered their cordial agreement. They seemed - so far as I could apprehend them — to believe that we were, like the Jews, a chosen people, that our mission was the 'uplift' of the human race, and that it behooved those who were to be uplifted to recognize their inferior altitude.

Is this an unusual frame of mind among educated Americans? Is it confined to Main Street, or to those who cater with shameless solicitude to our national self-esteem? Where can we find a better spokesman for the race than Mr. Walter Hines Page, a man to whom was given a hard and heartrending job, who did it superlatively well (even the animadversions of his critics are based upon the success of his activities), and who died in the doing of it, worn out, body and soul and mind, as if he had been shot to pieces in the trenches. Yet this able and representative American thought and said that Latin civilization was a negligible asset to the world. He could see little good in people who did not speak English,

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