670 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or poor, ignorant, and callous, and nothing else. The student, 

 teacher, scholar, reformer, or philanthropist is only half a man. 

 He knows principles, but not what it means to pinch and starve, 

 to beg for work without finding it, to see his savings dwindle 

 while capital recoups itself. Piece the scholar or reformer and 

 the workingman together, and we get a complete and useful 

 entity, a being capable of attacking the world's woes without 

 aggravating them. Put yourself in the place of those you pro- 

 pose to aid, and then indeed your help becomes not charity, but 

 brotherhood. 



To the least observant it is plain that the manual workers who 

 to-day represent those factory operatives that led us to economic 

 freedom are far less skilled in many branches of industry than 

 were their primitive forbears or their ancestors under the domes- 

 tic system of trades. Steam-power inventions and appliances 

 tend to change the wage-earners who watch them into soulless, 

 almost brainless, machines. Labor is now so specialized that 

 one repeats endlessly the same process — feeding presses, turning 

 cranks, guiding seams. Reason is stultified, sensibility is deadened. 

 All-around perfected craftsmen exist no more. Who conserves 

 the artistic workmanship, the assthetic and industrial skill of the 

 primitive female ? It is not displayed by our proletariat, cer- 

 tainly, as Prof. Mason remarks; for when we take the exquisite 

 sewing of the Eskimo women, done with sinew thread and needle 

 of bone, or the wonderful basketry and pottery of our American 

 Indians, or the feather work of Polynesia, or the loom products of 

 Africa, and compare them with the tasteless, useless decorations 

 and clumsy needlework of the untrained daughters of our labor- 

 ers and mechanics, the comparison is all in favor of the wives 

 and daughters of the degraded savage. Household knowledge 

 and pursuits are at the lowest ebb among many of our industrial 

 population. The mothers and girls can neither cook nor sew, nor 

 wash and iron, nor care in the simplest way for the body. Igno- 

 rance causes the death of infants and the ill health and poverty 

 of adults, whom poor food robs of their only capital, the power 

 to earn. 



Not only over the homes of workers, but over the shops, found- 

 ries, mills, and factories, the curse of incompetence hangs. Un- 

 less the grade of labor improves, the pay of the skilled work- 

 man will be still further lowered by unskilled competition. Our 

 wealth, our greatness, depend on the mastery of industrial arts. It 

 helps us little to be the largest coal-consuming and most invent- 

 ive nation on earth, if the era of machinery is to be also the era 

 of blind force; if behind the machine we have not the trained 

 hand and eye, the taste of the designer, the skill of the architect 

 and wood carver, the science of the shipbuilder — in short, manual 



