_A Message to Garcia_, if devoured eagerly by half a world, was an American fable. It is, in fact, America (however resentful older countries feel about this) that more and more sets the pace and the standard to-day. And possibly it is just the ability to succeed (less characteristic of the mass of Americans than they would have us believe, but at any rate characteristic of what they would like to be) which is most influencing the rest of the world. The admirable things about success are so obvious as hardly to demand mention. Courage, determination, impatience with ineffectiveness and vacillation, refusal to acknowledge defeat, and a kind of drastic simplification of the facts, are among the virtues inherent in the doctrine. It is, however, equally obvious that if nothing is to matter but success, the attainment of results, the results for which everything is thus sacrificed, and for which innumerable complex side-issues are swept away, must be of the highest importance. Yet extraordinarily little of the energy and intelligence so lavishly employed appears to be directed toward ascertaining the quality of the results to be striven for. That is assumed almost as a matter of course. All the magnificent effort is devoted to achieving them. It is as though in the midst of a terrific blizzard, with the roads impassable and no trains running, people all about me were to say: ‘It is very important that you should go somehow from New York to New Haven and buy a certain kind of lead-pencil made only there,’ and I should reply, though my lips were white: ‘Yes, it is very important that I should go get that lead-pencil made only in New Haven,’ and then should, in fact, at the risk of my life, make that journey on foot through snow-drifts--and procure the pencil. But the oddest thing of all would be if then New York and New Haven were both to ring with my praises, and there were not a soul, not even half-dead me, to ask whether a lead-pencil was really worth all that effort. Well, any sustained heroic effort is admirable for its own sake. We quite properly admire explorers of poisonous forests and climbers of difficult peaks, even when there is little of value to be obtained by their reaching their goal. Yes, but this particular merit has nothing to do with the matter, but, indeed, runs counter to it, is one of those side-issues to be brushed away. ‘Results! Get results!’ is the cry. There is no way out of it: if the cry has significance it can only be because the results are important.