t, he held, would always give an
adequate basis for the prosperity of a house that employed the salesman
method of distribution.

Neither the fear nor the assurance here expressed reveals a scientific
attitude of mind. Careful analysis shows, on the one hand, that the
mail-order policy is not the most effective means of cultivating
intensively a well populated territory. On the other hand, it shows
that the expense of sending salesmen to distant points in sparsely
populated areas more than absorbs the profits from their sales.
Individual concerns have arrived at these conclusions by experiment and
accurate cost-keeping and have succeeded in reaching a scientific
decision as to which territories should be cultivated by salesmen and
which ones should be covered exclusively through advertising and the
distribution of catalogues and other literature.

The difficulty that business men find in applying scientific method
consistently in the analysis of their problems is strikingly revealed
in the labor policy of the great majority of industrial concerns. While
many men of scientific training are dealing with problems of
employment, probably no concern has undertaken to make a scientific
analysis to determine what are the foundations of permanent efficiency
of the labor force which they employ. This is not surprising, when we
remember how complicated is the problem and how short the time during
which we have been emphasizing the human relations as distinguished
from the material or mechanistic aspect of business organization.

To state even a simple problem of management, like the one concerning
the order sheet, set forth above, is to reveal some of the difficulties
of analysis which characterize all subject-matter having to do with
human activity. This means that we should not expect results too
quickly nor should we be disappointed if the first results of efforts
at scientific analysis are not absolutely conclusive. As soon as we
recognize that business is primarily a matter of human relations, that
it has to do with groups and organizations of human beings, we see that
scientific analysis of it cannot proceed in exactly the same way as
with units of inanimate matter. The reaction of human relations to
changed influences, frequently cannot be predicted until the changes
occur. Business, in other words, is a social science and, like all
social sciences, must deal primarily with contingent rather than exact
data; likewise co