effort to orient
themselves with the business facts, they get the business point of view
and run the risk of centering attention too much on materials and
material forces. Even psychological reactions of men and women may be
analyzed from the standpoint of their mechanics, without ever going
back to those impelling motives which have their roots in the human
instincts and complex social reactions of which the men and women are a
part.

Approached from the standpoint of scientific method, the field of
conflict between different interests in business and between so-called
"good business" and "good ethics" becomes measurably narrowed. I do not
mean to give science the sole credit for achievements along this line.
More frequently advance in moral standards has been forced on unwilling
victims through legislation, public opinion, or class struggle, and
then men have discovered, as a happy surprise after the event, that
"good ethics" was profitable. But science has done something, and might
have done still more, if our efforts at scientific analysis had not
been so often underweighted on the human side. These very discoveries
of harmony between wholesome practice and good business constitute a
part of the body of fact of which a truly scientific method must take
account. When a review of all the cases in which compulsion has changed
existing methods shows an almost invariable adaptation and a tendency
toward better results after the level of competition is raised, a man
of scientific training immediately asks the question, whether a
fundamental law is not at work.

A glance at social legislation during the last century reveals some
interesting uniformities. Every step in the development of the English
Factory Acts as they stood at the beginning of the present war,
starting with the first Child Labor Bill in 1802 and ending with the
Shop Regulation Act of 1912, had been taken against the protest of the
most vocal elements in the trades concerned. In nearly every case
investigation will show, either that the requirements of the measure
enacted fell considerably below the practice of the best concerns, or
that the whole industry was in need of some outside impulse to start it
in the way of more efficient organization. As long as it is permissible
to employ five women and five children to tend five machines, there is
not the right incentive to make adjustments by which all five of them
can be tended by one man.

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