Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/267

Rh method of judging which is beginning to make itself felt in industry. That we have not more generally used such tests hitherto is one of the reasons why broad and intellectually respectable principles have been so slow in gaining control of industrial action, and why it has been so difficult to detect the really capable administrators among the crowd of men who are merely, and perhaps even accidentally, rich.

The early administrators, living in a highly individualistic and self-confident society, worked out rules of action each man for himself. Many of them were rather builders than administrators, emphasizing the builder's tests of size and growth. They made many mistakes which they could not perceive because, living in a community which had broken sharply with the past, and which had little applicable history of its own, they thought little of lessons drawn from the past. As they were devoted to little else than business, they saw few analogies between the administration of industry and of other forms of social action.

Being so much in a world of their own creation, they looked upon the administration of the organizations with which they were connected as their own private business. Such organizations were, therefore, in many cases, no more than mere extensions of themselves, incapable of serving as the object of the loyalty of the various classes of persons which might become connected with them. While these men sometimes made notable technical achievements, and claimed the title of super-men, they were, many of them, mere master mechanics, putting men and equipment together into corporations in a wooden way and driving them with their individual will power, rather than true administrators with a social sense.

And so it is that, in spite of the magnificent physical development of industry, and the more noble spirit which now begins to animate it, the conduct of affairs is often thought of as something cold, mechanical, and out of line with the ethical feeling of the time—as a matter of endless negotiations and compromises and makeshifts which can not bottom themselves on permanent principles. And, because it has received this (reputation, many fine spirits keep clear of it, as they do also from politics. And many others who take part in it do so without making a fair effort to comprehend its possibilities.

Since the ranks of the first generation of administrators have begun to be seriously thinned by death, a notable change has been taking place in the character of our industrial leadership and in the conditions under which it is exercised. The natural growth of businesses into units embracing, under a single administration, hundreds and even thousands of stockholders and employees, and which must unite many minds in operations requiring long periods of time for their completion, calls for