The process referred to consists in the moving of men. What is meant by the distinction here drawn is this—that the industrial efficiency of a community {62} does not depend solely on the muscles of the manual workers being given a right direction, so that they shall shape material objects in such and such a way; but it depends also on the movements which are prescribed to the men, being prescribed to the men best fitted to perform them, and being prescribed to them in such order that when each movement has to be made, the men told off to make it shall be ready to make it at the moment. Here we see part of the secret of the success of the great contractor. The importance of these considerations becomes all the clearer to us when we reflect on the fact that the mere production of commodities, and the production of the means of production, form but a part of the processes which advance, maintain, and indeed constitute civilisation. A part almost equally large consists in the rendering of various personal services, which often, no doubt, involve the utilisation of improved appliances, but which almost as often are neither more nor less than the performance of actions of a simple and ordinary kind, the merit and demerit, the wastefulness or the economy of which depend on their being performed with absolute punctuality and despatch. A good example of this is the case of a large hotel. Whether a large hotel is carried on at a profit or at a loss depends almost entirely on this question of personal management. The success of a successful manager does not depend on his capacity for inventing new methods of waiting, of cooking, or of making beds. It depends on his {63} capacity for organising his staff of cooks, waiters, and chamber-maids. This is well expressed by that most significant American saying, “He’s a smart man, but he couldn’t keep a hotel”; the meaning being that one of the most important, and at the same time one of the rarest faculties required for maintaining a complicated civilisation like our own is the faculty by which, given a number of tasks, one man governs a number of men in the act of cooperatively performing them. Examples of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied, but those just adduced are quite sufficient to prove the sole point insisted on at the present moment—namely, that whatever be the part (and Mr. Spencer admits it to be “_all-important_”) which the great man plays as a leader in primitive warfare, a part precisely similar in kind is played by other great men in the peaceful processes, and, above all, in the progress of civilisation.