MANUAL TRAINING. 813 



activities the skill imparted by such schools. The boys are re- 

 garded, if I may so phrase it, as social tools in the making, and a 

 process which turns out useful, workaday tools commends itself 

 to the majority. In a word, the movement is looked at from the 

 point of view of the whole, and notably from that aspect of it 

 which has to do with social convenience. The graduates in man- 

 ual training are socially useful, because they can do something. 

 Economically they are good products. Now, for my own part, I 

 much deplore this view. I want the social welfare and the social 

 health quite as earnestly as those of my brothers who call them- 

 selves socialists, but this social good is a mere phantasmagoria, 

 unless it means the sum of individual good, and it is attained only 

 by attention to the factors in this sum that is to say, to the indi- 

 vidual. As I see life, individual good is the means and the end, 

 and social good but the sign and symbol that this has been ac- 

 complished. Looking at the matter in this way, I can not build 

 backward from the whole to the parts. I am forced to build in 

 the other direction. And so I want manual training to lead to 

 no such social illusion. I want it to lead in precisely the opposite 

 direction. I want it to lead to the one great reality in the drama 

 of life to the unfolding and perfecting of the individual human 

 spirit. I would have it intensely individualistic, leading never to 

 self-sacrifice which has for its necessary corollary other-sacri- 

 fice but leading always to self-realization, a self-realization so 

 glorious as to quicken neighboring dead souls into renewed life. 

 So I say in effect to each of my boys : " I recommend manual 

 training to you not to society, but to you, the individual soul 

 that your faculties may unfold and that you may come into the 

 full stature of a man. And I recommend it without reservation, 

 recommend it whatever the trend of your genius, for it means in- 

 creased power for every performance." 



The end, then, in manual training which commends itself to 

 me is not utilitarian or socialistic. It is human, personal, indi- 

 vidualistic. I would have it lead first and foremost to complete 

 manhood. There are many social necessities, so called, which 

 lead the other way. There are hundreds and thousands of activi- 

 ties which destroy manhood, but which are urged in the name of 

 society. What crimes are committed in this name ! There are 

 the grim fortresses of commercialism, twenty-three stories high, 

 whose dismal, sunless cells are to be filled with young life, and to 

 be its tomb. There are rows and rows of vulgar shops, with their 

 poor wares and bad air, where there can be no thought of human 

 perfection. There are industrial processes whose known cost is 

 human life. There are many-storied factories full of human mis- 

 ery. There are hideous aspects of life called into being, enlarged, 

 and, worst of all, justified by this same cry of social necessity. 



