Except in certain high kinds of work, which depend upon originality and initiative, method, neatness and exactness are essential. "Time is money" in most of the business of the world; in fact time is the great value, since in it life operates. The unmethodical and untidy waste time as well as offend the esthetic tastes, as well as directly lose material and information. The habits in this sense are the tools of industry, though exactness may be defined as more than a tool, since it is also part of the final result. He whose work-conscience permits him to be inexact, permits himself to do less than his best and in that respect cheats and steals.
The work-conscience is as variably developed as any other type of conscience. There are those who are rogues in all else but not in their work. They will not turn out a bad piece of work for they have identified the best in them with their work. Contrariwise, there are others who are punctilious in all other phases of morality who are slackers of an easy standard in their work efforts. This is as truly a double standard of morals as anything in the sex sphere,--and as disastrous.
There is on every second wall in America the motto typical of our country, "Do it now!" To it could be added a much better one, "Do it well!" The energy of work and its promptness are only valuable when controlled by an ideal of service and thoroughness. A great part of the morals of the world is neglected; part of the responsibility is not felt, in that a code of work is yet to be enunciated in an authoritative way. I would have it shown graphically that all inefficiency is a social damage with a boomerang effect on the inefficient and careless, and in the earliest school, teaching the need of thoroughness would be emphasized. Our schools are tending in the other direction; the curriculum has become so extensive that superficiality is encouraged, the thorough are penalized, and "to get away with it" is the motto of most children as a result.
In an ideal community every man and woman will be evaluated as to intelligence and skill, and a place found accordingly. Since we live a few centuries too soon to see that community, since jobs are given out on a sort of catch-as-catch-can plan, it would be merely a counsel of perfection to urge some such method.
Nevertheless ambitious parents, whose means or whose self-sacrifice enable them to plan careers for their children, should take into solemn account, not their own ambitions, but the ability of the child. A man is apt to see in his son his second self and to plan for him as for a self that was somehow to succeed where he failed. But every tub in the ocean of human life must navigate on its own bottom, and a father's wishes will not make a poet into a banker or a fool into a philosopher. Nothing is so disastrous to character as to be misplaced in work, and there is as much social inefficiency in the high-grade man in the low-grade place as when the low-grade man occupies a high-grade place. We have no means of discovering originality, imagination or special ability in our present-day psychological tests, and we cannot measure intensity of purpose, courage and the quality of interest. Yet watching a child through its childhood and its adolescence ought to tell us whether it is brilliant or stupid, whether it is hand-minded or word-minded, whether it is brave, loyal, honest, a leader or a follower, etc. Moreover, the child's inclinations should play a part in the plans made. A man who develops a strong will where his desires lead the way will hang back and be a slacker where dissatisfaction is aroused.
To that employer of labor who seeks more than dividends from his "hands," who has in mind that he is merely an agent of the community, and is not obsessed with the idea that he is "boss," I make bold to make the following suggestions:
