repared in advance for any undertaking and skilled in carrying out. Thus,
when scarcely more than a child, he reduced the cost of firewood used in
the palace to less than one-half; a little later he rebuilt the castle
walls in three days, a task estimated as requiring sixty days; again,
single-handed, he secured provinces that armies had failed to conquer.

By gifts of tact, of insight, of diligence, of readiness, that each one of
us thinks he possesses, that any one of Nippon's 30,000,000 inhabitants
might have possessed and exercised, Hideyoshi rose, step by step, until he
directed and guided the whole country, his general, Iyeyasu, becoming the
first of the Tokugawa dynasty, which lasted from 1603 to 1867, with
headquarters at Yeddo (Tokyo).

Temuchin, Jenghis Khan, born in a tent in 1162, son of a petty Mongolian
chieftain, succeeded his father when only thirteen years old. Many of the
tribes immediately rebelled, but Temuchin held his own in battle and in
counsel against open enemies and insidious traitors, until his empire
extended from the China Sea to the frontier of Poland--an empire larger
than modern Russia, the largest the world has ever seen.

The man of supreme ability is the one who has supernal ideals, who
recognizes and uses those underlying principles without which human effort
is futile, its results ephemeral. The man of supreme ability is the one
who can create and control an organization founded on and using principles
to attain and maintain ideals, who then is able to assemble for the use of
his organization the incidentals of land, of men and money (Labor and
Capital), of buildings and equipment, of methods and devices. All these
incidentals make for volume, for quantity, for man's work instead of
woman's work, but they do not make for the spirit, nor for the quality,
nor for the excellence of work.

THE ELEMENTS OF EXECUTIVE ABILITY

We have quoted thus at length from Mr. Collins and Mr. Emerson to show the
inbornness, so to speak, of real executive ability. The art of handling
men depends upon certain inherent aptitudes plus a certain amount of the
right kind of training. A very large class of executives lacks the
aptitude; a still larger class lacks the right kind of training. It is
possible, of course, to give training to those who have the aptitude. It
is impossible to give training which will make efficient executives of
those who are deficient in the natural aptitudes. The result of all