But persistent violation of the laws of health does not always lead to acute disease. Seated in the office of a prominent and successful physician in a Western city one day, we were discussing with him the true nature of disease. "My patients," said he, "many of them are now lying on beds of pain, burning with fever. They are called sick people. The folks walking along the street out there are called well people. The terms are inaccurate. Fever is the effort of nature to throw off poisons, poisons which have been accumulating in the system for years as the result of wrong ways of living. Many people suppose that fevers are caused by germs. This is not true. No germ can harm or disturb a healthy body. It is only when the body is depleted in vitality that its defenses come down and germs find a ready soil in which to propagate. People who have fevers, therefore, are only taking a violent manner of getting well, and, if wisely treated and intelligently nursed, they do get well. As you know, it is a very common experience for a person to feel far better after recovery from a spell of sickness than he has for years previously. Now, nine out of ten of the people going along the street who call themselves well are not well. The majority of them are probably only 25 per cent, efficient physically. They are loaded up with the debilitating consequences of their own recklessness or ignorant manner of living." A PROLIFIC CAUSE OF INEFFICIENCY In the same way, there are latent illnesses and inefficiencies in many commercial organizations which never reach the point of strikes and lockouts. For some reason or other that lively germ, the walking delegate, fails to get a foothold. Perhaps there would be a beneficial house cleaning if he did. Discontent, dissatisfaction, unrest, and constant changes in personnel load the body up with wastes, inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses. Any employer who thinks at all, and who has any basis for judgment as a result of observation, knows that what he desires to purchase, when he pays wages, is not a prescribed number of days and hours, is not a standard number of foot pounds of physical energy, but rather human intelligence and human willingness and enthusiasm in the use of that intelligence in his service. It is true that most employees do a certain amount of physical work, but it is also true that the value of that work depends entirely upon the amount of intelligence and good will the employee puts into it. The employee who is doing work for which he is not fitted and is unhappy and discontented is doubly inefficient. He is inefficient because he is not well fitted for the work and could not do his best even if he were perfectly satisfied and happy. And he is inefficient because he is in a bad psychical state. With his mental attitude, he could not do good work even if he were in the place for which he was best fitted.