The physical analogies of these mental faults are interesting, I think. A person who has too great physical shiftlessness gets a bed-sore. Healthy people when they have lain in a certain position in bed for a time feel a discomfort and therefore instinctively turn over. We shift ourselves now and then in our chairs as we sit, and thus we relieve pressure which in turn would produce injury. But in chronic illness the patient sometimes lies in one position so long that he wears out his tissues till the raw flesh or even the bone is exposed. That is just as true on the mental side of life, true of us all. There is nothing I hate more than seeming to take a pharisaical attitude in our social diagnoses. All of us probably have failed to shift when we should. We might be more useful to-day if we had shifted more wisely. Still, we are getting along somehow, and some other people come to us for advice because they are even more shiftless than we. I never yet made a social diagnosis in anybody that I could not make also in myself. It is only a question of degree. _Industrial shiftlessness_ is an obvious example. A person gets into the wrong job and then does not get out of it. Most people choose their professions by the most irrational process or lack of process that can be conceived of. When a boy is ready to choose a profession, does he look around him, study the alternatives, and select one? Not at all. He does what the next man does, what his father did, what he happens to have heard most about. This is true whether people are pressed for money or not. They choose their job for no good reason; they are thrown into work by something pretty near to "chance." But they are often saved from the full consequence of their mindlessness because they shift. They shift either within the job or into another job. I got into medicine first on the laboratory side, began by writing a book on the blood and doing an unconscionable amount of work in the laboratory. It was wrong. I was not fitted for it, and luckily I knew enough to shift. Social medicine was what I wanted. So many a man shifts within his profession. That is why the wrong choice made at the start does not always get people into serious trouble. But the chronically shiftless man remains immobile. He does not know where else he might be besides the place where he is. So he stays where he happens first to fall, gets bitter, hard, poor, drunken, all because he is in the wrong niche. One sees _racial shiftlessness_ when people cross the ocean and try to take root in a new country. This racial non-adjustment has very tragic results. We see it, for example, in the Armenians in America who have come from a civilization two centuries back, and cannot jump these two centuries. Hence comes the breaking-up of moral and industrial standards because they have come suddenly into a civilization to which they cannot adapt themselves.