MORE than ever before the world of today is a battle field. The battle is closer than any other ever fought. It is not for dynastic glory. It is not for a personal point of honor. The world's battle of today is against waste, the devourer of humanity. Either, in this land of the American people, as in other lands largely peopled, waste must stop, or the growth of population must stop. And when the population of a nation ceases to go forward, the next step is that it begins to go backward. This is national decay. Step by step with national decay goes individual decay. Where, and in what, is this devouring waste?—Everywhere and in everything. Twenty million families, the big consolidated family of the United States, each needlessly burning one single match a day, at the price of five cents a dozen boxes,—only one match wasted to a whole family,—is the equivalent of burning down every year a house worth half a million dollars. If so little a thing as a single match a day for each family of five persons can mean so much in the aggregate of national waste, is not all the rest of the possible and the actual waste as clear as sunshine? There is the light that is left burning when not needed. There is the fire flaming under the empty kettle. There is the good food swept neglected from the table. There are the farm implements, the artisan's tools, the household utensils, misused and damaged. In all varieties there is waste by nearly all the units; and the aggregate is immeasurable. Worse! There is the economic waste in the production of the necessaries of life. Two pairs of hands on the job for one pair. One pair fiddling for a day over what could be done in half a day. Rent paid for more space than would suffice. Water running over the dam without turning a wheel. In your own mind go down the list—this, that, and everything. Think of what a single match a day means, and then see if your imagination can grasp it all—all the waste. Scientific management is chiefly the stoppage of waste. In recent years the supreme efforts and the supreme triumphs of business management have been in the stoppage of waste—getting more than before out of the same material, the same physical energy, the same material activity. And now American governing bodies, like private corporations, are alive to the need of scientific management to promote efficiency and save waste. They are employing experts in business methods. They are hunting for good business managers as a private corporation would—a city business manager, a State business manager, a federal department business manager. This is the battle for efficiency, absorbing in our day the best brains of successful business management. But this isn't going far enough. It does not get to the biggest field of all—the public's waste. The scientific methods of the thousands saving against the waste of the happy-go-lucky millions have been a partial check on the rising price of the nation's bread and butter. But there is a limit to the attainment of the ideal of waste—saving by the scientific methods of the thousands organized into perfect business machines. To that ideal the successful ones are near enough, and the others must perish—to sound the warning of the dead line. Then it will be up to the individual units—the millions for the last chance! Can the millions on the farm, in the small place of business, at the workbench, in the household, learn that inexorable lesson to save waste? Well, they can, because they must. Germany has learned, or is learning; and France, and Holland. Theirs is the lesson we Americans must learn or be devoured by our waste. We must not suck the orange dry and then study the rejoicing of the shriveled skin. We must not be the last to learn. In the economic race, the devil takes, without fail and without mercy, the hindmost.—Munsey's Magazine.