The Human Element
By Dr. LUTHER H. GULICK
Director of the Russell Sage Foundation Department of Child Hygiene
THE HUMAN

ELEMENT I N EFFICIENCY

The object of social work is to induce a greater number of people
to live more fully. The object of efficiency in business is to get more
and better returns from investments. These two objects, I believe,
if pursued far enough, are identical.
In endeavoring to secure the maximum of life, the greatest variety
and intensity of experiences, it is not our aim to act as social doctors,
primarily curing or preventing social disease. We are not primarily
engaged in the business of stopping evil, but in the business of bringing about more interesting communications and wholesome relations
between people.
A brick building is not the sum of the bricks which compose the
whole; it is the relationship which exists between those component
parts. It is our function to bring about such relations between individuals that compose society, that a convenient and wholesome social
structure may be erected in which we may more fully live.
You see that this conception is a wholly different one from that
which aims to make as many individuals as possible good. The individual is the perfectly shaped brick. That is of importance, although
its production is not the function of the social engineer.
Your literature with reference to efficiency is full of what^has
rightly been termed "the human element.,, Your discussions of
fatigue, with proper period of rests, are brilliant examples of how
the human element has been studied and standardized, and viewed as
a part of a machine. Your results have been splendid, but the prevention of fatigue or of evil is not our highest endeavor.
T H E N E E D O F VARIETY A N D PROGRESS I N L I F E

It is my function to-day to present the constructive side. I may
say, by way of illustration, that there are different elements to the
standardization of human life.
Read at the first meeting of the Efficiency Society, held in New York City, March 18
and 19, 1912.

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It was advanced some years ago that there was such a thing as a
best human food. It was claimed that certain food elements entered
into the circulation with less energy contribution from the nerves; a
knowledge was assumed of just what food elements should be combined to get them in their most perfectly digested protoplasm, form,
and quantity, fitted to the individual.
But one of the extraordinary things about human life is that the
very best foods we are able to select, prepare, and combine, after
being eaten repeatedly become no longer the best—quite often the
worst food for that individual. We are dealing here, evidently, with
something not capable of being standardized.
During the last few years I have been interested in the air we
breathe and the air in which our bodies are immersed. The thing
which has become clearest to me, and which is now appearing in the
form of a report, is that there is no such thing as best air, any more
than there is such a thing as best food. The thermostat which we
owe to you engineers is as deep a crime against human nature as
could well be devised, because it assumes, without discussion or evidence, that there is such a thing as a best temperature, and that if we
only get our bodies into the environments of that temperature, with
as slight a fluctuation as possible, we will have the best conditions.
Knowing anything about human temperature and environments
we know that this is not true. The strongest races come from those
places where it is cool by night and warm by day, where it is dark
by night and light by day, where the relative humidity is lower by
day than by night, and where the air moves more than three miles.
If in our rooms the air moves more than half a mile we say the draft
is terrible. Some of our largest hospitals, now under construction,
are seriously debating the question of installing no system of ventilation, because it appears that under certain conditions the very perfection of regulating devices have produced conditions more deleterious to life than non-regulation of ventilation. I cannot but believe
the trouble is not with the heating and ventilating engineers, but is
in the standards produced by the physicians.
A fundamental factor in human life is the need of variation. Nowhere does protoplasm reach perfection except where there are varying stimuli—varying in intensity, in time, and in duration. These
appear to be the three kinds of change needed. Under this fundamental changing, and I cannot name anything that changes more than
protoplasm, under the environmental conditions, and without environmental conditions there is very little life, how can we produce stan14—2

dard conditions not subject to change? It is like the thermostat.
One is applied to temperature, the other to human hopes, desires, and
yearnings. No scheme is perfect which does not apply to hope and
aspiration. Human life, savage or civilized man, is not satisfied with
mere attainment. The first splendid thing about our kind is that we
are unsatisfied and remain unsatisfied as long as we live. The goal
of human endeavor is progress, not attainment. When the goal ever
before us is achievement the attainment is forgotten. It vanishes the
moment we approach it.
I remember an ambition as a younger man to be able to earn five
thousand dollars a year. I thought I would be satisfied. But had I
earned that, I do not think it would have given the expected satisfaction. Attainment is satisfaction's death. Desire rather than fear is
the great driver of human energy and power. Any scheme which
omits the consideration of the fact that man must continually make
progress, in reputation, in finances, in the opinion of his friends, will
fall of its own weight. You will agree in your own lives that when
you have reached your attainment it is time to drop out. We demand
the possibility of going on and doing more. All human kind has a
fundamental right to this. Man will strike, work inefficiently, and
lose interest, unless desire has opportunities of achieving more and
more. Our scheme must permit of progress to a different degree, and
to a different extent, from any of those I have heard advocated by
your speakers. This fundamental, variable element, and the danger
of man specializing too long, have not been recognized. Every educational institution recognizes "intellectual staleness," and the need
for a man getting away from all connections for a rest. Sundays
and holidays are observed in all parts of the world. It makes little
difference how the holidays originated, or how observed, it is a response of the social organism to this demand for change and variation.
THE MEANS OF SUPPLYING THE NECESSARY ELEMENTS

How can a balance be maintained between those operations of life
which can, should, and must be machinized, and those demands of
the soul, which make for beauty, romance, which preserve the brilliant impressions of youth, without which life is dull and dead
throughout ? This is a fundamental question for those of us who are
concerned with social organization, and for all those affairs and institutions of society depending on the efficiency of human beings. We
have shortened the working day most unprecedentedly, to eight hours
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in the greatest fraction of cases. Gan the balance of one's life be so
adjusted as to give romance, adventure, achievement? I think somehow it can, and that this is a part of the solution.
I spoke in the beginning of the social structure. We must build
our communities so that there shall be a center for social integration.
Taking our school buildings, which belong to the community, and we,
as parents, go there, and have community relations with each other,
and vivid life of that nature in acknowledging each other, something
will be gained. There is a great movement in the country which is
looking to the use of school property for the purpose of integrating
high interests in the community about it. That is one of the things
which make for happiness, and happiness is as essential as bread.
It appears that our communities are not mainly built up from the
individuals who make the community. We voters fancy ourselves as
the source of power in our own community, but when we stop and
look about us we realize we are no more managers of affairs than
is one of a thousand unorganized men kicking a football about on
a great field, with three men banded together against them to get
possession of the ball. The individual vote is lost, as compared to an
organization, even of three men, whether commercial or political.
There is a reaction against welfare work, as carried on by owners
and managers of industrial concerns, owing to a feeling that this is
done in lieu of proper wages. We have granted corporate rights to
great business interests, and have given them protection. They are
recognized as individuals, in every center, but as individuals they
have not yet recognized their responsibility to the body which created
them. When such business organizations, merely for their own purposes, endeavor to promote welfare work among their own employees,
there are many to say they are doing that which they have no right
to do. Their true relation to education and recreation would be supporting what the community erects rather than solely among their
own employees. There are institutions which are criticized severely
because many hundred thousand dollars are invested in lands for golf
links and for other recreation purposes, thereby keeping the percentage below a certain necessary mark. It is said that this is one form
of preventing legitimate returns to the workers for their labor.
I have spoken of this because it is so frequently stated that the
answer to this need of human individuals for variation and excitement of a rational sort can be supplied by a fraternal administration
of the business in which they are engaged. Possibly the criticism is
not true, but it demands an investigation, of a kind, as to how human
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life can be arranged to be more Vivid, and along lines not heretofore
given. If we can make the social structure so adequate that young
people can see in the activities of daily life the chance to get the kind
of romance young men find in daring, the excitement to be gained in
the creating of things; when we can make our social organization
have these features, so that exploring will be possible in the social
world as it once was in the physical before we mastered it; then
young people, men and women alike, will not get so far away from
the things that are wholesome to find excitement. Excitement is a
fundamental need, which explains the tremendous appeal of the dance
hall, the moving picture show, and the saloon.
Haven't you worked, worked for six weeks, so steadily in the
same monotonous thing, for so long that you felt the only thing to
do was to get drunk? This latter doubtless never happens, but it
illustrates my point.
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