“In vain we build the city if we do not first build the man.”

“Our hope is in heroic men,
Star-led to build the world again.
To this event the ages ran:
Make way for Brotherhood-
make way for Man.”

—from Brotherhood

Charles Edwin Anson Markham (1852 - 1940) was an American poet. From 1923 to 1931 he was Poet Laureate of Oregon.
In his day Markham managed to fuse art and social commentary in a manner that guaranteed him a place among the most famous artists of the late nineteenth century. His reputation has faded because of the somewhat dated nature of his verse; nevertheless, he remains a notable figure for his contributions to American poetry. His work stands as an example of what American critics and readers valued near the turn of the century.

The single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

Herbert Spencer (1820 –1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was "an enthusiastic exponent of evolution" and even "wrote about evolution before Darwin did."
During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia.

"The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century."

Spencer was

"the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century"

but his influence declined sharply after 1900.
Spencer is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest", which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
While most philosophers fail to achieve much of a following outside the academy of their professional peers, by the 1870s and 1880s Spencer had achieved an unparalleled popularity, as the sheer volume of his sales indicate. He was probably the first, and possibly the only, philosopher in history to sell over a million copies of his works during his own lifetime. In the United States, where pirated editions were still commonplace, his authorized publisher, Appleton, sold 368,755 copies between 1860 and 1903. This figure did not differ much from his sales in his native Britain, and once editions in the rest of the world are added in the figure of a million copies seems like a conservative estimate. As William James remarked, Spencer

"enlarged the imagination, and set free the speculative mind of countless doctors, engineers, and lawyers, of many physicists and chemists, and of thoughtful laymen generally."

Poet's Code of Ethics

In the later decades of the 19th Century, the British philosopher, Herbert Spencer, took an honest look at world trends and predicted that civilization was on a downward trend, for culture, beauty and ethical practices were neglected in society. He believed that politicians were not likely or able to change the trends. If there was to be a change, how would it come about? He believed the poets, visionary thinkers and artists of the world would have the solution. In Britain he inspired men such as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Darwin to consider the problem. In America, his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Howard Bridge, Richard Watson Gilder, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Henry Holt, John Burroughs, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie took up the question. These men, searching for a way in which to change the negative direction of society to positive action, formed a gathering, calling themselves the Twilight Club, because they met at twilight—not simply the twilight of the day, but, as they saw the situation, they were meeting at the evening twilight of the 19th Century and the morning twilight of the 20th Century—at the twilight of civilization, unless the downward trend could be stopped.

Man must remake himself.

French-American surgeon Alexis Carrel was the winner of the 1912 Nobel Prize in medicine, for his pioneer transplant work at the University of Chicago and with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
“Man, the Unknown” was reprinted in America fifty times after the first publication, and was translated into eighteen languages.

“The science of man will be the task for the future. Man must now turn his attention to himself. The development of the science of man, even more than that of the other sciences, depends on immense intellectual effort. We must realize clearly that the science of man is the most difficult of all sciences. Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself. To progress again, man must remake himself.”

Alexis Carrel ( 1873 – 1944) was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles A. Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. He is also known for making famous a miraculous healing at Lourdes by witnessing the event Like many intellectuals before World War II he promoted eugenics.
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to the manipulation of human populations.
By the mid-20th century eugenics had fallen into disfavor, having become associated with "racial hygiene", human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups.
In Canada, the eugenics movement gained support early in the 20th century as prominent physicians drew a direct link between heredity and public health. Eugenics was enforced by law in two Canadian provinces.
In 1928, the Province of Alberta, Canada, passed legislation that enabled the government to perform involuntary sterilizations on individuals classified as mentally deficient. In order to implement the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta in 1928, a four-person Alberta Eugenics Board was created. These four individuals were responsible for approving sterilization procedures. In 1972, the Sexual Sterilization Act was repealed, and the Eugenics Board dismantled. During the 43 years of the Eugenics Board, it approved nearly 5,000 individual sterilizations, and 2,832 procedures were actually performed.
The campaign to enforce this action was backed by groups such as the United Farm Women's Group, including key member Emily Murphy.
As in Alberta, the British Columbia Eugenics Board could recommend the sterilization of those it considered to be suffering from "mental disease or mental deficiency".

Eugenics in Canada

Emily Murphy (born Emily Gowan Ferguson; 1868 –1933) was a Canadian women's rights activist, jurist, and author. In 1916, she became the first woman magistrate in Canada, and in the British Empire. She is best known for her contributions to Canadian feminism, specifically to the question of whether women were "persons" under Canadian law.
During the early twentieth century, scientific knowledge emerged in the forefront of social importance. Advances in science and technology were thought to hold answers to current and future social problems. Murphy was among those who thought that the problems that were plaguing their society, such as alcoholism, drug abuse and crime were caused because of mental deficiencies. In a 1932 article titled “ Overpopulation and Birth Control”, she states: "... over-population [is a] basic problem of all…none of our troubles can even be allayed until this is remedied."
Her argument was that: if there was population control, people would not need as much land. Without the constant need for more land, war would cease to exist. Her solution to these social issues was eugenics. Selective breeding was considered a progressive scientific and social approach and Murphy supported the compulsory sterilization of those individuals who were considered mentally deficient. She believed that the mentally and socially inferior reproduced more than the “human thoroughbreds” and appealed to the Alberta Legislative Assembly for eugenic sterilization. In a petition, she wrote that mentally defective children were, “a menace to society and an enormous cost to the state…science is proving that mental defectiveness is a transmittable hereditary condition.”
She wrote to Minister of Agriculture and Health, George Hoadley that two female “feeble-minded” mental patients already bred several offspring. She called it: “a neglect amounting to a crime to permit these two women to go on bearing children. They are both young women and likely to have numerous offspring before leaving the hospital”. Due in part to her heavy advocacy of compulsory sterilization, thousands of Albertans, who were not considered to possess any intelligence, were unknowingly sterilized under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta before its repeal in 1972.

Mentors.

After the war years, Thomas J. Watson, head of International Business Machines, became inspired by the ideals of the ethical movement organized by Herbert Spencer, wanting the business world to practice these principles.
On visiting NCR, he met John J. Range and asked him for a job. Determined to join the company, he repeatedly called on Range until, after a number of abortive attempts, he finally was hired in November, 1896, as sales apprentice to Range.
Watson attributes his success to the close guidance of his branch manager at NCR, John J. Range. It was Range who taught Watson about his business and management style. Watson thrived under Range's watchful eye and even earned a promotion.
Led by John Patterson, NCR was then one of the leading selling organizations, and John J. Range, its Buffalo branch manager, became almost a father figure for Watson and was a model for his sales and management style. Certainly in later years, in a 1952 interview, he claimed he learned more from Range than anyone else. But at first, he was a poor salesman, until Range took him personally in hand. Then he became the most successful salesman in the East, earning US$100 per week.

We Cannot Afford To Have A Single Dissatisfied Customer.

John Henry Patterson (1844–1922) was an industrialist and founder of the National Cash Register Company[NCR]. He was a business person and salesperson.
He oversaw the development of the cash register as a sophisticated data gathering device that revolutionized the retail trade, making the company a pioneer in the development of information technology. Patterson also introduced the practice of systematically training employees when he established the first world’s first sales school in 1893. Although employee training is a practice now viewed as a matter of common sense, it was derided by Patterson’s contemporaries who believed that a good salesman was born and not made.
He also hired somone to landscape the grounds of the National Cash Register Company campus in Dayton, with spacious lawns and landscaping with colorful plantings. And the residential community surrounding the plant (South Park) as well as a park system for the City of Dayton was redesigned.
Patterson established the world's first sales training school on the grounds of the NCR factory campus (at Sugar Camp in Dayton, Ohio). He also coined a phrase for his service division which, until about the time the company was bought by AT&T, hung on the wall of every service department in the company. The phrase was,

"We Cannot Afford To Have A Single Dissatisfied Customer".