MANUAL OR INDUSTRIAL TRAINING. 391 



many more possibilities for diversified specialties, we want more 

 than schools of ornament, good as such may be. Unable to com- 

 pete with the low prices of European or Indian manual labor, we 

 leave it to our machinery, and expect our workingman to enable 

 us to enhance the value of our articles by the helping presence of 

 industrial brains and knowledge, so important and generally bet- 

 ter paid than manual labor alone, and for that result we look to 

 industrial training as a means. 



So much for the economical consideration, now as to pedagog- 

 ics proper : 



Education, the fitting for life. Life, unless your father is a 

 millionaire, and does not spend or lose his millions before he dies, 

 sums up practically in an activity in some profession, an activity 

 aiming at a decent self-sustenance ; professions outside of poetry 

 and art, the inspirations and special proclivities of which we will 

 not discuss. Professions may be summed up as clerical, legal, 

 and literary or scientific. We have unmistakably succeeded in 

 perfecting the training preparatory for some of them, and, as it 

 stands to-day, defy any European institution to supply accom- 

 plished clergymen or lawyers in a shorter time and at less ex- 

 pense. Literary men escape our arguments for the same reason 

 as artists and poets. 



Clergymen we want, in order to maintain the phase of culture 

 and the methods of thought which it is their function to care for. 

 Lawyers can do no harm, even if there should be too many of 

 them, as law well understood by the greatest number in the com- 

 munity is a safeguard against the thrilling and dramatic in 

 public life, an element not exactly in demand ; besides that, a 

 lawyer can always do good service in legislation ; but how is it 

 about our mainspring as a nation, our technical and scientific 

 men ? Gain, pleasure, or respectability, directly connected with a 

 special branch or pursuit, makes one or another profession more or 

 less desirable. Inductive knowledge has recently made gigantic 

 strides. Scientific knowledge has acted as the great lever of re- 

 spectabilities. The traditional liberal education is but a phantom 

 of the past, and the parlor accomplishments of the old, refined 

 type, lightly glancing over the poetical, the artistic, the ideal of 

 human nature, etc., is slowly but surely making way for the less 

 voluble but more serious and practical gifts of the thinking indi- 

 vidual of modern times. Scientific culture is already recognized 

 as an equivalent of the literary, if not its superior. Slowly but 

 surely, the sciences have gained their due places, and an ignoramus 

 alone would refuse to credit them with the motive power of our 

 advance in civilization. Scientific professions, therefore, would 

 be found desirable and respectable to-day as a specialty in the 

 liberal arts so called. This granted, let us approach the subject 



