REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT, 1915. 7 



tion's income a decade ago have entailed on our contemporaries 

 and successors a burden of harm which will require another 

 decade, or perhaps a generation, to remove; and in the mean- 

 time, recrudescence of such popular aberrations will constitute 

 a menace to the perpetuity of any organization whose endowment 

 is continually confounded with its income. 



Simultaneously also with the rise of other research organiza- 

 tions, the scientific method is rapidly gaining control in the 

 direction of commercial and industrial enterprises. Indeed, the 

 phrases ''scientific management," ''industrial efficiency," and 

 the like, are now so much overapplied and so often misapplied 

 as to render them offensive to judicially conservative minds; 

 for herein hkewise, as in most other contemporary affairs, there 

 is a popular tendency to anticipate the marvelous and hence to 

 obscure the realities of the forward movement now going on. 

 Thus one might infer from current literature that the doctrine 

 of efficiency is altogether new and that it has sprung suddenly 

 from a few Americans and from the general staff of the German 

 army. It is unnecessary here to explain that this doctrine is 

 not new, that it has undergone a long course of development, and 

 that it did not originate as commonly supposed. What is new 

 about it is a growing collective consciousness of its vahdity and 

 a rapidly increasing apprehension of the advantages it may bring 

 in many, if not most, fields of endeavor. But appreciation of 

 this doctrine is neither more nor less than a recognition of the 

 scientific method whose beginning dates far back, prior to the 

 period of unwritten history of primitive man. 



A far-reaching effect of the determinate introduction of the 

 principles of science in commercial and industrial affairs is seen 

 in the resulting diffusion of sound learning among the masses of 

 men. Increase in efficiency in such affairs requires, in general, 

 application of a wide range of demonstrable principles, all of 

 which must stand the tests of economic practicabihty. The 

 so-called laboring man, therefore, as well as the manager, must 

 become familiar with a correspondingly wide range of facts, 

 methods, and apphances affording typical illustrations of those 

 principles. Thus many manufacturing plants are now great 

 laboratories supplying instruction to operatives, although nomi- 

 nally conducted with quite other objects in view; while some 



