whether if Don Quixote returned to-day with the same wild ways of knight errantry, it would not rather be the knighterrant that was sensible and the world all around him that was crazy. The poor knight's mockers were in the morning of the modern world; for them a more solid science, a more subtle statecraft, were not only growing, but promising things. It was sane enough in them to say that Cæsar and Hannibal were better worth reading about than Amadis of Gaul; that making a gun was as soldierly as breaking a lance; that mere random personal romanticism was more likely to ruin than redress. It was true then; at any rate, it looked true then. It is not true now. It does not even look true to any one who can open his eyes on that modern rationalistic world that the Renaissance has founded. The rationalistic world has turned out much more irrational than the Dark Ages. The Shavian idolatry of Cæsar as the Superman is much more fantastic than the boyish praise of courage in Amadis of Gaul. The nations have found more nonsense and nightmare in the build of guns than they ever did in the breaking of lances.

If a mediæval knight, such as the Black Prince, rose from his grave and looked round at our institutions he would call us more cracked than Quixote; and he would tell the cold truth. Suppose, say, that the Black Prince asked what had become of the Trade Guilds. He would immediately be invited to dinner with the Worshipful Company of Greengrocers; which he would find to consist almost entirely of aged and gluttonous colonels, spruce financiers, junior partners in entirely different businesses and dreary, bottle-nosed bachelors living on private means. The lion eye of that Plantagenet could roll over crowds of them without seeing a greengrocer or any one who had ever known a greengrocer. He would think such a Guild more grotesque that a gar

more

goyle. Or suppose (as seems likely) the Prince turned his attention to modern knighthood. Suppose he expected Sir Thomas Lipton to watch his armour all night in the chapel of his order. Suppose he attempted to joust with Sir Alfred Mond. Suppose he really required Sir Robert Perks to win his spurs. When he had really learnt what modern knighthood is, he would ask, with great simplicity and violence, why in the name of the Devil and St. Dunstan we gave a man a military rank and hit him with a drawn sword if swords had nothing to do with it. There would be no jest for Cervantes in a knight fighting a barber when so many baser trades are knighted and never fight anybody. But I think the colonel in the city company would puzzle the mediæval visitor more than the tradesman with spurs. That a greengrocer should call himself a military gentleman would be a very unmediæval piece of snobbery. But that a military gentleman should (in manifest defiance of the facts) affirm loudly that he was a greengrocer— this would have the sable warrior prostrate.

But there is a madder element in our world than this mere misfit of names and things. There is real delusion; deeper and darker than poor Quixote's. Take, for example, the most famous of his chivalric failures; the affair of the wind-mills. Quixote is crazy because he thinks the mills are alive and evil. Well, we are crazy for the same reason; we also think the mills are alive and evil. Whenever we talk of machinery demanding this or creating that, whenever we say that it is the "fault" of machinery or that machinery has "come to stay," whenever we talk (as we do most madly talk) about industrial clockwork as something that cannot be altered, but about marriage, liberty or the love of progeny, as things that might be altered-we suffer

are seeing windmills awhirl with our own madness and alive with our own sins. The only difference is a somewhat important one. Don Quixote attacked the windmills; but we run away from them.

But, above all, the return of Quixotry would be the return of sanity for this reason: that the knight-errant is suited to a lawless age; and this is a lawless age. Take another of the misadventures of the misguided Spaniard. If I remember right he attempted to free a gang of convicts under the impression that they were captive youths and maidens led away by bandits. Now what is the real implication of this rationalist satire. What was the difference between the convicts in a gang and the captives in a bandits' castle? Cervantes knew too much of life not to know that there are good men among prisoners and bad men among warders; and that bandits do not confine themselves to capturing virtuous persons. Convicts are not mere captives, because convicts are convicts. That is, convicted of something and sentenced to something. The point of the incident is the folly of casual justice compared with the possibilities of a systematic public justice that can really clear up quarrels and fix public penalties. A man sent to the hulks may serve a long or cruel sentence. But a legal sentence is like a grammatical sentence; it must have a full stop. Even if you hang a man, The Eye-Witness.

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you cannot extend his sentence. man captured by brigands might, in comparison, have quite a pleasant time: certainly I would much rather live in a cave with Rob Roy than in a reformatory with a lot of police doctors and detectives. There is only one objection to being in the cave with Rob Roy; and that is that he keeps you there as long as he likes.

There is the same objection to the modern prison. If Don Quixote stormed a modern gaol with shield and spear, he would find a number of citizens kept there exactly as his own romantic robbers would keep themunder Indeterminate Sentence, or according to their own taste and fancy. Quixote's attempt to avenge personally a purely personal apprehension would not be inappropriate now. By the Roman law of old Spain and Europe, he made a mistake. In modern England he would be making no mistake.

Lastly, our lawless condition, which makes all law a mere mass of experiment and human vivisection, really raises the question of whether any methods are practical except Quixotic methods. It is vain to bring wrongs before Courts that admit no rights. It is vain to lighten a sentence when gaolers can lengthen a sentence. It is vain to ask your persecutors to prove you wrong, when your country does not ask them to prove anything. By far the most practical politician now would be a knight-errant. The crazy spear of Quixote would be stronger now than all the paper swords of the lawyers. For we are back in the forest.

G. K. Chesterton.

I.

My last Sunday was a varied and a busy one.

"Have you seen Milestones?" said Miss Goram, as we met in the Park. "Isn't it rather delightful?"

"Ye-es," I answered, "though I should prefer to call it 'pleasant.' Every detail of the production is excellent and the idea of epoch is novel and sound. But somehow, don't you think, it lacks the stirring element?"

This, to be candid, was not my own opinion, but my cousin John's; it seemed however to be the very one calculated to agree with and yet explain hers. Her "rather," however, had misled me.

"Oh, do you think so?" said she. "I thought it frightfully pathetic."

"Pathetic? Is that the general feeling, then?"

She was emphatic. "The most pathetic play in London."

"Pathetic," said I. "I must remember that."

II.

"Have you seen Milestones?" said my next-door neighbor, at lunch, giving me no hint that she held any opinion but the proper one.

"Isn't it delightful?" I remarked. "So frightfully pathetic!"

"Do you really feel like that about it?" said she, raising her eyebrows. "It left me cold. I consider it the prettiest and dullest play in London. When I go to a theatre, I like to see people getting in and out of complex situations and not merely growing old."

I got her to repeat that last bit, while I made a mental note of it.

III.

"I took tea with Mrs. Hansard. "Have you . . ." she began, almost at

once.

"Enormously," she said. "Do you?"

I am a man of peace, in thought, word and deed, and deserve, I think, more encouragement than I get. Even now, when I was shown the agreeable line and took it, I found that there was no pleasing people.

"Enormously," I said; and, since I knew the lady for one of those who, tiresomely enough, insist on downright honesty, I added, "Funny' isn't the word. It is the most excruciating play in London."

"Our ideas of what is funny are different," she answered coldly. "For my part, I wept."

V.

Even as next morning I came out of the Theatre Ticket Office in Bond Street I met Miss Goram, her of Section I., again.

"How very lucky that I should meet you," I cried, "just when my opinion happens to be in entire agreement with your own." I did not indicate the topic, because my experience over the week-end had led me to suppose that there was only one.

"What about?" she asked.

“Why, Milestones, of course," said I; "the most pathetic play in London."

Punch.

Apparently she too had had a busy Sunday and it had tired her.

"I am sick to death of Milestones," she declared.

"Don't tell me that it is the correct thing to be sick of," said I, crestfallen, "at a moment when I have at last booked myself to go and make its acquaintance first-hand.”

About thirty years ago a man who was employed as a machinist in running lathes in the Midvale Steel Company in America was promoted to "gang-boss." Having been a workman himself, he knew that the workmen were not getting one-third of a good day's work out of the machines. Feeling that he was now on the side of the management, he engaged for three years in an incessant and bitter war with the workmen in order to get a fair day's work out of the lathes. That was ended in a victory for the gangboss.

But Mr. Taylor, the gang-boss who subsequently became a chief engineer and President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, had during that war become profoundly impressed by the evils of the ordinary system of industry and management. He has spent the last thirty years in devising a remedy for those evils, the inefficiency of production and the perpetual discord between employer and employed. The remedy which has lately attracted so much attention in America claims to be a new science, and is called by its inventor "Scientific Management."

The science of management in industry, if there is such a science, is really only a part of the larger science of efficiency. To do any operation with the minimum expenditure of

strength or material, and in the shortest time possible, is to do it efficiently; the greater the expenditure and the longer the time, the less efficiently is it performed. The difficulty is to strike the mean between the expenditure and time. Mr. Taylor tells us that there is a science of doing anything, a science of cleaning one's teeth, of handling pig-iron, of shovelling dirt. If we know the laws of those sciences we can regulate our actions in order to attain the mean which is efficiency. Ordinarily in life and in industries nobody troubles about the science of doing things; we learn to walk and clean our teeth by walking and cleaning our teeth, or by watching other people do it; and the workman learns to handle pig-iron by handling pig-iron, or by watching other workmen handle pig-iron. Now, in factories everything is done according to these rule-ofthumb or traditional methods; and nothing is done efficiently, because the workman has not the time or the intelligence to acquire the science of doing it.

Many people may doubt the truth of this, when stated generally. Mr. Taylor gives instances which show that it is true. "I daresay," were his words to a conference, "that you think that there is no science in shovelling dirt, that anyone can shovel dirt. 'Why,' you

say, 'to shovel dirt you just shovel, that is all there is in it.'" And even if there were more in it than that, one would certainly suppose that as people must have been shovelling dirt ever since Adam delved, someone would have hit upon the best way to shovel it. But no one ever did, before Mr. Taylor "started to think on the subject of shovelling." And it took some days thinking even to find "the most important element in the science of shovelling." The most important element is: At what shovel-load will a man do his biggest day's work?

And then it took many more days experimenting to discover the answer to that question. Two men were kept shovelling dirt for two or three months, while another man stood over them with a stop-watch, timing them, counting the shovel loads, telling them what to do. They began with an ordinary shovel and a full shovel-load, which averaged thirty-eight pounds. In this way it was found how much they could do in a day when they were shovelling at thirty-eight pounds to the shovel. Then the same thing was done with shorter shovels and smaller shovel-loads, averaging thirty-four, thirty, twenty-eight, down to fourteen pounds. And as the shovel-load was reduced from thirty-eight to twentyone pounds, the total tonnage shovelled by each man in a day increased; after twenty-one pounds it began to decrease again; the answer to the question had been discovered. At twentyone pounds to the shovel-load, a man will do his biggest day's work.

But that is only the beginning of the matter. In an ordinary factory the workers use the same shovel to shovel everything, from "rice-coal, three and a-half pounds to a shovel load," to "heavy wet ore, about thirty-eight pounds to the shovel-load." Mr. Taylor built a shovel room, in which were eight or ten different kinds of shovels,

made so that whatever a man was shovelling, from rice-coal to heavy ore, he could use a shovel which would give him an average shovel-load of twentyone pounds.

This example shows only the first principle of scientific management, namely, the development of a science for each element of a man's work. In every case it begins with an elaborate study of men, machinery, and material. The question to be settled is: "What is the best way of doing this, and if a man does it in that way, what ought his output to be? Every movement of workman and machine is timed, and the time required for such movement is known to the smallest fraction of a second.

In

The object of the other three principles of scientific management is to get the work done in accordance with the knowledge obtained under the first principle. The first is to select instruments and men and to train and teach the men; the second to co-operate with the men so that the work is done in accordance with the principles of the science; the third to redistribute the responsibility between the management and the men. practice this entails a complete reorganization of industry. The management takes over entirely the responsibility for arranging how the work is to be done. The daily task of each man in the factory is planned for him one day before in a central office. He receives written instructions as to what he has to do, where he has to do it. A "functional foreman" stands over him to show him exactly how he has to do the work, every movement in accordance with the knowledge, in the hands of the management, of the best way of doing it. The workman is on a "task wage"; that is, he knows that, if he completes the task set him, he will get the ordinary wage plus a bonus of from thirty to one hundred per cent.; if he