her specialization might be expected.
Some of these psychological engineers would devote themselves to the
problems of vocational selection and appointment; others would
specialize on questions of advertisement and display and propaganda; a
third group on problems of fatigue, efficiency, and recreation; a
fourth on the psychological demands for the arrangement of the
machines; and every day would give rise to new divisions. Such a
well-schooled specialist, if he spent a few hours in a workshop or a
few days in a factory, could submit propositions which might refer
exclusively to the psychological factors and yet which might be more
important for the earning and the profit of the establishment than the
mere buying of new machines or the mere increase in the number of
laborers.

No one can deny that such a transition must be burdened with difficult
complications and even with dangers; and still less will any one doubt
that it may be caricatured. One who demands that a chauffeur or a
motorman of an electric railway be examined as to his psychical
abilities by systematic psychological methods, so that accidents may
be avoided, does not necessarily demand that a congressman or a
cabinet minister or a candidate for marriage be tested too by
psychological laboratory experiments, as the witty ones have proposed.
And one who believes that the work in the factory ought to be studied
with reference to the smallest possible expenditure of psychical
impulses is not convinced that the same experimental methods will be
necessary for the functions of eating and drinking and love-making, as
has been suggested.

And if it is true that difficulties and discomforts are to be feared
during the transition period, they should be more than outweighed by
the splendid betterments to be hoped for. We must not forget that the
increase of industrial efficiency by future psychological adaptation
and by improvement of the psychophysical conditions is not only in the
interest of the employers, but still more of the employees; their
working time can be reduced, their wages increased, their level of
life raised. And above all, still more important than the naked
commercial profit on both sides, is the cultural gain which will come
to the total economic life of the nation, as soon as every one can be
brought to the place where his best energies may be unfolded and his
greatest personal satisfaction secured. The economic experimental
psychology offers