"Well, if you can learn one thing, you can learn a hundred, can't you?" "Guess so." "Will you?" "I sure will." If you are a worker and not a shirker--if you are a lifter and not a leaner--if you have done your best to succeed in your present vocation, and are still dissatisfied, and feel that you could do better in some other line of work, we hope that this book has been of some assistance to you in determining your new line. If, however, you have never attempted your best--if you have never worked your hardest--if you have grown weary, and laid down your burden in the face of difficulties and obstacles--if you have neglected your education, your training, your preparation for success, then, before you make a change, before you seek vocational counsel, do your best to make good where you are. It may be the one vocation in which you can succeed. PART TWO ANALYZING CHARACTER IN SELECTION OF EMPLOYEES CHAPTER I THE COST OF UNSCIENTIFIC SELECTION People used to thank God for their sickness and pain--at the same time naively praying Him to take back His gift. This inconsistency was due to a combination of ignorance and the good old human foible of blaming some one else. Folks did not know then, as well as they do now, that they had the stomachache because they were too fond of rich dainties. The cause of the pain being mysterious, they went back to first principles and blamed (or thanked) God for it. They believed that God afflicted them for their good and His glory, but their belief was hardly practical enough to keep them from praying Him not to do them too much good or Himself too much glory. Bodily ills are no different from our other troubles. In case of doubt as to their origin, it is far more convenient to blame some supernatural source for them than to take the blame upon ourselves. In support of this, take the attitude of employers toward strikes and lockouts, their most outbreaking and violent troubles. These are named in all of our contracts along with lightning, tornadoes, floods, and other "acts of God," if not directly, at least by inference It is plain enough, at any rate, that those who draw up the contract consider strikes and lockouts as wholly outside of their control, as they do the elements. It is the same old ignorance, the same desire to shift the blame. WHO IS TO BLAME? Modern business common sense counts strikes and lockouts among preventable industrial diseases, just as the modern science of medicine classes smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, the plague, tuberculosis, and the hookworm amongst preventable bodily diseases. The strike is a violent eruption, according to those who have made the closest study of the situation, resulting from long-continued abuses of bad management, bad selection, bad assignment of duties, and other vicious or ignorant practices. So a fever is a kind of physical house cleaning for the removal of debris of months or even years of foolish living.