Music Trade Review

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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
Remove Obstacles to Business Advance.
B
USINESS men can base their plans with reasonable certainty
upon a fall trade of satisfactory proportions.
This condition would seem to be assured by reason of crop
conditions, which, if not quite up to last year, will certainly add
many billions to the material wealth of the country. The funda-
mentals are right, and there is no reason why a country like this
should be halted in its onward march by a lot of politicians and
calamity howlers.
It is not pleasing to see the business interests of the nation
held up temporarily by the tariff makers at Washington.
The
country is prepared for a change in the various departments of
trade, and while some industries may be hit heavily, no doubt,
American enterprise will adjust itself to the changed situation; but
for Heaven's sake let it come!
It is to be regretted that, while certain business interests are
halted in a degree until the proposed tariff legislation is enacted
into law, that there should be obtruded a lot of matter which has
no direct bearing upon the present situation. The main issue is
to get the tariff bill settled. After that, if the currency issue is
to be taken up, let it be handled as expeditiously as possible; then
if our legislators have time that they want to kill and know of no
better means to employ it than to go into the Mulhall investigation,
our people, presumably, will be willing that they should; but it
certainly does not increase the confidence of the nation in our
legislators at Washington to see them engaged in a discussion of
matters which are of minor importance, to say the least, when
compared with the great questions of tariff and finance which are
now up for consideration.
Scientific Management of Factories.
F
^ACTORY efficiency, and this includes, per se, capable super-'
vision and management, is a vital question in this era of
close competition in the piano field. As has been well said by an
editorial writer in the Iron Age: Give a thinking man an oppor-
tunity to get acquainted with the average industrial establishment
and he will find points susceptible of improvement. He makes his
inspection with a broad view of things and has not the long-time
intimacy which tends to bring the subject so close to the eyes that,
like the manager, he can see only one or two spots at a time, albeit
his view may be microscopic. Let the manager have mechanical
leanings and he magnifies production; let him be a salesman first
and a mechanic second and he becomes an executive who uncon-
sciously permits an unbalanced condition in his works.
Cases are not uncommon of the manufacturing department
turning out articles for which there is a poor market, though the
articles themselves are exemplary. Sales departments have been
known to oversell manufacturing capacity or to take orders for
articles difficult or unprofitable for the works to produce. Condi-
tions like these call for that application of scientific management
which aims not so much to uproot existing things throughout a plant
as to effect a perfect balance among departments.
The situations described are not new. Indeed they exist in
plants which are supposed to be run with some idea of good man-
agement. They are an outcome of a confusion between manage-
ment as an art and management as a science. Good ideas obtained
here and there are applied as the judgment dictates, but the process
is a hi't-or-miss or cut-and-try method of trying to reach scientific
bases. The management is constantly finding some phase of the
manufacturing, distributing or executive departments of the busi-
ness out of joint and in attempting to correct the trouble by con-
centrated attention to it perceives that some other part of the system
has buckled. Industry in general has been built up as an art, and
the head of it is to be excused if he does not apprehend the scientific
relation of all parts.
In fact, the purely scientific foundation of business appears to
be known to very few, but it remains for every manager to seek to
build upward or to deduce proper procedure from the fundamentals
rather than to reverse the order by applying palliatives without
locating the disease. A scientifically erected business ought to pos-
sess as many gauges as there are departments, and each should
show when things are not going well, and the cure of one depart-
ment should be effected without disturbing the gauges of the others.
Doctors Solve a Much Discussed Matter.
W
E are living in a rapid age, truly. Not merely in politics,
but in the terpsichorean and musical fields as well, innova-
tions are materializing that cause amazement and some degree of
uneasiness. For instance, in the sudden and widespread popularity
of eccentric and more or less violent dancing, the New York
Medical Times sees a phenomenon closely analogous to those danc-
ing manias of the Middle Ages which have been so often discussed
by psychiatrists, alienists and neurologists. . The impulse to "trot"
in ragtime it views as the symptom of a distinctly contagious dis-
ease to which the victims of a neurotic diathesis are susceptible,
and the diathesis itself it ascribes to the unrest of the age and the
various social conditions of a pathological character.
The influence of a peculiar music, combined with a naive deter-
mination to be amused, starts up the motor reactions seen in the
new dances to which a large and specially sensitized class in several
countries has suddenly devoted so much of its time and energy.
For the scientific observer they beautifully illustrated the psychology
of crowds as formulated by Le Bon and other investigators of
that subject.
It is a fact probably not without significance, too, that "trotting"
originated in or was highly congenial to the wild religious emotion-
alism of negro revival services. There, at any rate, the "trqtters"
found it, and dancing was an essential part of most of the ancient
religions, as well as of not a few new ones. It gives outlet and
expression to certain primordial and entirely normal emotions, but
it can be diverted into pathological lines, and that, the Medical
Times suspects, is what has happened now.
All of which should be carefully pondered by such votaries of
the new—or old—sport as have developed intelligence enough to
understand it.
Warn Manufacturers Against Giving Credit.
T
H E National Association of Credit Men has issued a warning
to manufacturers and jobbers against granting credit to
small incorporated retailers, many of whom incorporate to evade
individual responsibility. It was said this week at the offices of
the association that the practice is a menace, and has grown tre-
mendously during the past ten years. Officials of the organization
believe that it should be discouraged, as the risk in granting credit
is largely personal, both as to character and financial worth. The
association advises credit grantors in such instances to have the
officers and directors personally guaranteed, or else have them
indorse notes that may be given for the purchases of the corpora-
tion. x\n official said that no concerted action to fight the practice
is under way, and that none could be brought to bear on the situa-
tion, except by impressing upon credit men the necessity of making
the officers of these small retail corporations individually responsible
for credit extended to them.