it is a sure sign of incompetency.  Experience demonstrates that such an one is incapable of properly directing any great enterprise.  Men must be trusted if you would bring out their capacities.  Their work should be specifically laid out before them; that is, that which is required of them; not, necessarily, in minute detail, but the general results that are to be achieved.  Then give them their freedom to work the problems out in their own way.  Give them responsibility, trust them, and then leave them alone. Quit your worrying about them.  Give them a fair chance, expect, demand results, and if they fail, fire them and get those who are more competent.  Mistrust and worry in the employer lead to uncertainty and worry in the employee and these soon spell out failure.

In subsequent chapters, various worries are discussed, with their causes and cures.  One thing I cannot too strongly and too often emphasize, and that is, that the more one studies the worries referred to, he is compelled to see the great truth of the proverb, “More of our worries come from within than from without.”  In other words, we make more of our worries, by worrying, than are made for us by the cares of life.  This fact in itself should lead us to be suspicious of every worry that besets us.

CHAPTER IX

HEALTH WORRIES

There is an army, whose numbers are legion, who worry about their health and that of the members of their family.  What with the doctors scaring the life out of them with the germ theory, seeking to obtain legislation to vaccinate them, examine their children nude in school, take out their tonsils, appendices, and other internal organs, inject serums into them for this, that, and the other, and requiring them to observe a score and one maxims which they do not understand, there is no wonder they are worried.  Then when one considers the army of physicians who feel it to be their duty to write of sickness for the benefit of the people, who give detailed symptoms of every disease known; and of the larger army of quacks who deliberately live and fatten themselves upon the worries they can create in the minds of the ignorant, the vicious and the diseased; of the patent-medicine manufacturers, who spend millions of dollars annually in scaring people into the use of their nostrums—­none of which are worth the cost of the paper with which they are wrapped up—­is there any wonder that people, who are not trained to think, should be worried.  Worries meet them on every hand, at every corner.  Do they feel an ache or a pain?  According to such a doctor, or such a patent-medicine advertisement, that is a dangerous symptom which must be checked at once or the most fearful results will ensue.