STRING SAVER OR TIME SAVER?

I HAVE ALWAys been a string saver. I read in McGuffey’s First Reader about a boy who got a fine job because he was observed to save, rather than cut and destroy, a heavy twine from a package which he unwrapped. I have been influenced by that McGuffey story all these years. Not long ago I told Henry Ford of that influence and he admitted that he, too, had always been a string saver because of that story.

In fact, Mr. Ford was so interested in the McGuffey readers that he had several hundred thousand of each of them printed and distrib- uted to American libraries. Those books certainly did set a lot of American ideals a few generations ago. I wonder how many of my readers were influenced by the McGuffey books?

However, there is another angle on that string saver habit. This is it: Andrew Carnegie, in one of his peculiar testing techniques for boys, invited two boys into his office. He gave each boy a package to untie. One boy got out his knife immediately and cut the twine, throwing it into the waste basket; the other boy carefully untied the twine, rolled it up, and put it in his pocket to save it.

When both boys had left the office Mr. Carnegie’s secretary asked him, “Which one is to get the job—the string saver or the other?” Mr. Carnegie replied: ‘The time saver is to get the job.

Time is more valuable than string these days. The one who saves string at the sacrifice of time is out of the running. That belongs to another day. What we want to save these days is time.

Give the time saver the job.” And Carnegie was right. “A stitch in time saves nine,” is an adage that partly expresses this new philosophy. ‘“Time is of the es- sence” is a more modern legal phrase which expressed this phi- losophy.

When a man can get into a plane in London in the morning and be in Washington by the evening of that same day, we begin to realize that modern machinery is entering into this time-saving spirit. The most astonishing records for time saving are being set by airplanes every day of our lives. Then comes the inevitable question, “What are we going to do with the time that we save?”

The Oriental world has never under- stood our American speed and time saving. They know how to live in leisurely fashion—how to sit and feel and think, how to meditate. It is to be hoped that we on this continent shall continue to save time, but that we shall also learn from the Oriental the use of the time which we have saved.

An American in South America was driving a caravan of natives through the jungles at a tremendous pace for a week. Finally, one night the whole lot of them squatted down on their haunches and absolutely refused to move forward for several days.

The American protested and bribed and threatened but they would not budge. He asked them why, and they said, “We have been moving too fast for a week. Now we shall sit down and let our souls catch up with our bodies.” And what a wise thought that was for all time savers and speed artists!