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Show Youth Not All. - , The brutal and silly policy adopted by a number of employing corporations sometime ago of discharging dis-charging employee- who had reached the age of So :' has proved a failure. 3fot only did a -number of railroad companies and other companies discharge their men'of S3, but they refused to hire men who bad reached that age, thus putting a premium on deceit. No industrial policy ever adopted received such severe condemnation from pulpit, press and public as that, but criticism is something the corpo-rations corpo-rations do not mind greatly. A stronger force op-' op-' posed the policy. It was the fact that the very young men, whose energy the corporations wanted, could not be trusted to do the work. Energy and vigor are valuable assets, but they cannot take the place of judgment and experience, and those only come with age. The reaction has come, and many of the roads have been obliged to change their policy. In the operating departments of a number of the roads the effect of tod much, youth soon became apparent. There were acqidentji'that caused loss of life and loss of property. The managers found that older . heads were necessary; that in emergencies youth l. .lr.l,,mi in mnfit OfllteS. I It is only a matter of time until air the employing employ-ing concern will have to return to the practice of choosing mtn because of their abilty and capability instead of en account of their years. There are many places for which men of mature years, men of middle age or past are better, fitted than are boys. There are places to which boys are better adapted. No concern can be conducted with all boys or all old men. , . The policy of taking young men, using the best years 6f their lives and then turning them adrift 4as inhuman in the first place, and an inhuman TKilicj is not the kind to prove successful in any business. Business is business, but it cannot be conducted upon such lines. ' . We ar.-glad that the corporations are regaining their sanity. We hope it will teach them that the relations between employer and employees' are those of man to man, not those of one part of a machine ma-chine to another. System is an excellent thing, but it must not be forgotten that the work of the world is being done by human beings, and that they must be treated as human. |