twenty, fifty, or even ninety per-cent, in the common run of American industries.[119] The work of the efficiency engineers being always done in the service of business and with a view to business expediency, their findings bear directly on the business exigencies of the case alone, and give definitive results only in terms of price and profits. How much greater the ascertained discrepancies in the case would appear if these findings could be reduced to terms of serviceability to the community at large, there is no means of forming a secure conjecture. That the discrepancy would in such case prove to be appreciably greater than that shown by the price rating is not doubtful. Under such an appraisal, where the given industrial enterprises would be brought to the test of net serviceability to the community instead of the net gain of the interested businessmen, many industrial enterprises would doubtless show a waste of appreciably more than one hundred per cent of their current output, being rather disserviceable to the community’s material welfare than otherwise. That the business community is so permeated with incapacity and lack of insight in technological matters is doubtless due proximately to the fact that their attention is habitually directed to the pecuniary issue of industrial enterprise; but more fundamentally and unavoidably it is due to the large volume and intricate complications of the current technological scheme, which will not permit any man to become a competent specialist in an alien and exacting field of endeavour, such as business enterprise, and still acquire and maintain an effectual working acquaintance with the state of the industrial arts. The current technological scheme cannot be mastered as a matter of commonplace information or a by-occupation incidental to another pursuit. The same advance to a large and exhaustive technological system, in the machine industry, that has thrown the direction of industrial affairs into the hands of men primarily occupied with pecuniary management has also made it impossible for men so circumstanced at all adequately to exercise the oversight and direction of industry thereby required at their hands. And the ancient principles of self-help and pecuniary gain by virtue of which these men are held to their work of business enterprise make it also impossible for them adequately to surrender the discretionary care of the industrial processes to other hands or to permit the management of industry to proceed on other than these same business principles.