one man in eight who was able to do this work was in no sense superior
to the other men who were working on the gang. He merely happened to be
a man of the type of the ox,--no rare specimen of humanity, difficult to
find and therefore very highly prized. On the contrary, he was a man so
stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work, even. The
selection of the man, then, does not involve finding some extraordinary
individual, but merely picking out from among very ordinary men the few
who are especially suited to this type of work. Although in this
particular gang only one man in eight was suited to doing the work, we
had not the slightest difficulty in getting all the men who were
needed--some of them from inside of the works and others from the
neighboring country--who were exactly suited to the job.

Under the management of "initiative and incentive" the attitude of the
management is that of "putting the work up to the workmen." What
likelihood would there be, then, under the old type of management, of
these men properly selecting themselves for pig-iron handling? Would
they be likely to get rid of seven men out of eight from their own gang
and retain only the eighth man? No! And no expedient could be devised
which would make these men properly select themselves. Even if they
fully realized the necessity of doing so in order to obtain high wages
(and they are not sufficiently intelligent properly to grasp this
necessity), the fact that their friends or their brothers who were
working right alongside of them would temporarily be thrown out of a job
because they were not suited to this kind of work would entirely prevent
them from properly selecting themselves, that is, from removing the
seven out of eight men on the gang who were unsuited to pig-iron
handling.

As to the possibility, under the old type of management, of inducing