Efficiency experts maintain that the average employee in our industrial and commercial institutions is only from twenty-five to thirty-five per cent, efficient. Sixty-five to seventy-five per cent, loss in productive power on the part of the forty million workers in this country constitutes an almost incalculable sum. Who is to blame for this loss? Are we not too intelligent, too well versed in the laws of cause and effect and too courageous to try to blame the Almighty for it or to lay it to the public schools or to hold the employee accountable? As a matter of fact, no matter how we may try to shift the blame, those of us who are executives know only too well that our board of directors and stockholders hold us strictly responsible for results. What they want is dividends, not excuses. They do not care to hear how hard it is to find good men. They are not interested in the stories of employees who are so ungrateful as to leave just when they have become most useful. They will not permit you to shift any of the blame upon the shoulders of the employee. They expect you to use methods in selecting and assigning employees and handling them after they are selected that will yield the largest possible permanent results. HIGH COST OF HIRING AND FIRING Employers who will take the trouble to study their records for some years past, will, unless they are very exceptional, find that the average length of service in their organization is much shorter than they would be prepared to believe unless the actual figures were before them. We have the word of its manager in regard to a certain foundry in the Middle West that the average period of employment for any one man in that foundry is only 30 days. We know a large steel mill employing 8,000 where the average length of service per employee is a few days more than four months. These figures were given to us by the employment manager of the mill. The head of the employment department of a large electrical manufacturing company stated to us that the average length of service per employee for his organization was one year or a little less. From "Current Affairs," Boston, we quote the following significant editorial: "Do employers realize the waste and extravagance and actual money loss due to haphazard hiring and firing? "Twelve typical factories were recently investigated as to their employment records by Mr. M.W. Alexander. He chose the normal industrial year of 1912. He chose representative factories, big and little, in several States. The results of this inquiry were reported in an address before the National Association of Manufacturers.