This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

?A Message to Garcia? may not be t world?s best example of labor relati
I wonder how many of us were brought up with the editorial, "A Message To Garcia," ingrained as a guide to how we should lead our lives. Written by Elbert Hubbard in 1899, the editorial used an incident in the Spanish American War as its basis.
The editorial has an amazing history and its influence on thousands is staggering.
Shortly after it came out,
Views From a Front Porch
by Paul Estronza La Violette laviolet@mail.datasync.com
the editorial was copied and printed in a dozen languages including Russian, Turkish ? and Japanese. Millions on millions of the essay were printed in a flurry that may well have exceeded ?Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.?
The editorial lasted and lasted and even I and a million other kids of my much, much later generation were raised up on it. However, I came across a
copy recently and read it again with more mature eyes. It?s a little long, but let me give you the first part and you will get the gist of the entire Hubbard editorial:
?In all this Cuban business there is one man who stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion.
?When war broke out between Spain and the United States it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba - no one knew where. No mail
nor telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly. What to do!
?Some one said to the President, ?There's a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.?
?Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How the fellow by the name of Rowan took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on
the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia -are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail. The point that I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, ?Where is he at??
?By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be
loyal to a t promptly, c energies: d (Carry a m Garcia!)?
?Genera! now, but th Garcias. N< endeavored enterprise hands were been well-n times by th the average inability or to concentr; and do it.
?Slipshoc foolish inat indifference
VI