It is obvious that in such circumstances the service offered the consumer, however carefully safeguarded by his representation on the authorities controlling each industry, would depend primarily upon the success of professional organizations in finding a substitute for the discipline exercised to-day by the agents of property-owners. It would be necessary for them to maintain by their own action the zeal, efficiency and professional pride which, when the barbarous weapons of the nineteenth century have been discarded, would be the only guarantee of a high level of production. Nor, once this new function has been made possible for professional organizations, is there any extravagance in expecting them to perform it with reasonable competence. How far economic motives are balked to-day and could be strengthened by a different type of industrial organization, to what extent, and under what conditions, it is possible to enlist in the services of industry motives which are not purely economic, can be ascertained only after a study of the psychology of work which has not yet been made. Such a study, to be of value, must start by abandoning the conventional assumptions, popularized by economic textbooks and accepted as self-evident by practical men, that the motives to effort are simple and constant in character, like the pressure of steam in a boiler, that they are identical throughout all ranges of economic activity, from the stock exchange to the shunting of wagons or laying of bricks, and that they can be elicited and strengthened only by directly economic incentives. In so far as motives in industry have been considered hitherto, it has usually been done {156} by writers who, like most exponents of scientific management, have started by assuming that the categories of business psychology could be offered with equal success to all classes of workers and to all types of productive work. Those categories appear to be derived from a simplified analysis of the mental processes of the company promoter, financier or investor, and their validity as an interpretation of the motives and habits which determine the attitude to his work of the bricklayer, the miner, the dock laborer or the engineer, is precisely the point in question.