t be of highest
importance for economic success. From many different sides willingness
was shown to study the problem of employment under the psychological
aspect. As my material came mostly from very large establishments in
which labor of very many different kinds is carried on side by side,
of course I frequently received the assurance that whenever an
industrious energetic man is unsuccessful in one kind of work, a trial
is made with him in another department, and that by such shifting the
right place can often be found for him. Young people, to whom, in
spite of long trial and the best will, it seems impossible to supply
certain automatic machines, become excellent workers at much more
difficult labor in the same establishment. Women who are apparently
careless and inattentive when they have to distribute their attention
over a number of operations do high-class work when they are engaged
in a single activity; and in other cases the opposite is reported.

I may mention a few concrete chance illustrations. In a pencil factory
the women in one department have to grasp with one movement a dozen
pencils, no more and no less. Some learn this at once without effort,
and they earn high wages; others never can learn it in spite of
repeated trials. If those who fail in this department are transferred,
for instance, to the department where the gold-leaf is most carefully
to be applied to the pencils before stamping, very often they show
great fitness in spite of the extreme exactitude needed for this work.
To show how often activities which appear extremely similar may demand
different individuals, if the work is based on different psychical
functions, I may refer to a report from one of the largest
establishments in the country. In the accounting department a large
number of girls are occupied with looking over hundreds of thousands
of slips from which the weekly pay-list is compiled. Each slip
contains six figures and small groups of twenty slips have to be
looked through to see whether those six figures on each correspond.
With moistened forefinger they turn up the slips one by one in much
the same manner that a bank clerk counts money. A good sorter will
turn up the slips so rapidly that a bystander is unable to read a
single figure, and yet she will not overlook an error in thousands of
slips. After the slips are sorted, the operation of obtaining the
totals on each order number is performed with the aid of an adding
ma