That is an extreme picture. Yet if such tragedies occur (as every reader knows from his own observation and experience they _do_ occur too often) among those who have voluntarily chosen their own lines of work, how much more frequently must they occur among those whose daily occupations have been determined for them, not through any voluntary choice or intelligent guidance but solely through the accident of having been “thrown into” certain jobs when they were young? That is the way in which the vast majority of individuals have their careers shaped for them. The world of business and industry and of the professions is full of blacksmiths who ought to be carpenters, indifferent lawyers who would have made good dentists, teachers who are failures because they should have been trained as stenographers, good cooks who have been spoiled to make mediocre shop attendants, and so on through the list of possible occupations. Within every business organization, moreover, there are grades and degrees of requirements and responsibilities into which some employees may fit perfectly, others less perfectly and others not at all, though all be drawn from the same group or from those performing the same general class of service. Here, as in the matter of original employment, the general custom of dealing with the human element in industry is the wasteful “hire-and-fire” system, analogous to the purchasing of machinery or equipment without first ascertaining whether it will do the work, and scrapping it when it fails. We found out long ago that we couldn’t afford to do that sort of thing with machinery. We are just beginning to find out that it is even more expensive to do it with the human element in industry. It would perhaps be going too far to claim that the whole problem of the “labour turnover” arises from the effort to fit square pegs into round holes, but it is certain that a very large share of all human troubles, industrial unrest, discontent, inefficiency and unhappiness is traceable to the lack of proper adjustment between the man and the job, and this in turn is due in large part to the failure to determine in advance the fitness of the particular individual for the particular task. What is needed, obviously, is a measure of human capacities, just as we have means of measuring every phase of the machine’s capacities. Just as we measure a machine by the most precise gauges and tests available, why not measure the human individual by the most precise means we are able to apply?