376 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The first step in rectifying an error is to probe and analyze it, 

 so as to discover its real nature and dimensions, and the inquiry 

 at once arises, Were those six hundred men really educated, or 

 had part of their powers, and perhaps the powers best worthy of 

 cultivation in each individual case, been ignored, or neglected 

 through giving undue attention to the so-called purely " intellect- 

 ual faculties " ? 



It may be said that this great army of the unemployed ought 

 to disperse, and betake themselves to the abandoned farms that 

 are crying out for owners and cultivators ; but they would be just 

 as helpless and unadapted there, for the simple reason that the 

 taste and skill for farming need to be acquired in youth, and 

 these poor creatures are best described by a word used by a coun- 

 tryman in apologizing for his wife's shortcomings as a house- 

 keeper, " She means well, but she ain't noways f acidized." 



There has been a silent revolution going on for the last fifty 

 years through which a " college education " has been deposed 

 from its position of prime fetich among English-speaking people, 

 and a new set of men happily named captains of industry are 

 making their way to the front rank. Never was it truer than to- 

 day that " new times demand new measures and new men," while 

 it is being discovered that, even for the highest development of 

 what are termed the purely intellectual faculties, book-learning 

 and those studies that can be pursued in the isolated cloister or 

 seminary are not all-sufficient. We are standing in the dawn of 

 a new day, in which the term manual training is coming into uni- 

 versal use, and we are destined to hear much more of it and learn 

 much more of its relations to the well-being of individuals and 

 the body politic in the near future. 



Between the years 1800 and 1830 a spirit may be said to have 

 been moving upon the waters, in several countries at the same 

 time, to effect a revolution in men's ideas as to the capacities for 

 improvability in man, and the means by which these capacities 

 can be developed, till at length, what may be called the gospel of 

 culture was initiated. Twenty years before the French Revolu- 

 tion, Rousseau had put forth his Emile, a hand-book on educa- 

 tion, which was one of those germinal, potent books that, though 

 burned in France, was a seed that brought forth a hundred-fold 

 when it was dropped into the minds of Pestalozzi in Switzerland 

 and Goethe in Germany : it led them to study the human faculties 

 in a new way to take cognizance of the physical nature, as the 

 concomitant if not the basis of sane and profitable action in the 

 mind. Those men died nearly at the same time, and when Eng- 

 land was on the verge of a mighty industrial upheaval ; and as 

 the torch of wisdom fell from their relaxing hands, it was caught 

 up in England by men who were scourged to action through fear 



