OVERBURDENED LEADERS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 31, 6 August 1923, Page 6

OVERBURDENED LEADERS

Mr. Calvin Coolidge, who has automatically become President of the United States through the death of Mr. Harding, will have to act differentlyfrom his late chief and from Mr. Woodrow Wilson if he is to carry the heavy burden of his high office. American newspapers, it is cabled, lay stress on the enormous amount of business, under modern conditions in the United States, that must be personally attended to by the President. It has now become more than one man can do. Mr. Harding was evidently a sick man at the time he became President, but he may not have known how ill he was; his will was superior, perhaps, to his physical condition, and so he carried on with a burden greater than mortal man should carry. Mr. Wilson, too, affords the sad spectacle of a broken man dwelling in the twilight. Consultation of the Bible in matters of national as of personal difficulty is hopelessly old-fashioned—in-deed it is by many regarded as childish; and yet when Moses sat from dawn to dark, judging the people, it was the common-sense of his father-in-law, a man of the country, that saved him from himself. Jethro realised that Moses had assumed, a greater burden than he could carry in the flesh when he said, "The Jhing thou doest is not good.'Thou wilt surely wear thyself away, both thou and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone." So Moses was advised to delegate much of his work in deatil to suitable rulers and attend to the greater task of leadership.

Here is a lesson given tragic point to by the death of Mr Harding; and in respect to Great Britain there is the example of Mr. Bonar Law, a sick man, made worse by the tremendous burdens that modern conditions place on modern statesmen. It is in the nature of some men to pride themselves on their masterly knowledge and transaction of detail, and it is m the nature of some such men, too, to imagine that no one can be trusted to do things as they think they should be done. We need not go so far afield as the United States and Great Britain for instances. The point made by Jethro, that the people suffer when leaders are overladen with duties, cannot be ignored with impunity. The wear and tear on public nien in the highest positions of the State under present conditions can be terrific if they take their duties seriously and conscientiously; but the people's interests also suffer. There is a lesson and a warning in the death of Mr. Harding that all statesmen in the highest positions should not and must not be permitted to forget.