Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/268

264 searching tests and clear and stable policies. The use of the corporate form of organization, which makes the business unit the dependent creature of the state, coupled with the increasing sensitiveness of public opinion to the probity of the financing and the humanity of the operative policies employed, unite to demand a more skillful diplomacy, and methods which will bear public inspection. The question of getting adequate administration has now become pressing.

If the task of the executive is now more difficult than before, there have been provided various helps to assist in its performance. In the first place, the physical sciences have been applied to industrial operations in a multitude of ways in recent years. They assist in the testing of materials, the refining of productive processes, the preservation of the health of the operative, the sharpening of technical standards, and the provision of new forces and instrumentalities. A second aid is the greatly improved systems of accounting and cost accounting, and the developing theories of valuation, which serve as the administrator's chief instruments of precision, where problems of value rather than problems of physical processes or of human nature are concerned. A third aid is what is commonly called "system"; a somewhat indefinite mass of rules of procedure, together with appropriate equipments, relating especially to office work, and representing the accumulated experience of innumerable official minds. The most recent aid is "scientific management" which, taking its rise as a philosophy of the shop, has culminated in a group of principles constituting an encouraging earnest of a forthcoming more fully developed science of administration.

The large business enterprises now required to meet society's need are gathering the money of hundreds of investors, so that individual or family domination resting upon ownership must decline as a system. Between the multitude of stock and bond holders, on the one side, constituting the proprietors, and the still greater multitude of employees, on the other, there is being created a central strategic position to be occupied by the professional administrator. The whole situation of industry now conspires to create an opportunity for a new race of executives which shall justly appreciate the various classes of responsibilities resting upon it. Upon these men will rest a sort of trusteeship to preserve the property entrusted to them, and a sort of leadership to guide and guard their employees. Upon them will also rest a general responsibility to the public to help this day to live its life, and this generation to make its contribution to progress.

Wanted, therefore, new leaders for industry, who shall unite with