642 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ing in any statistical sense — and it would be almost impossible to col- 

 lect such statistics — I am nevertbeless disposed to believe that an 

 essentially good workman is also a good man, for a love of good work- 

 manship must beget a love for all else that is good and true. But 

 without insisting on this view, it is enough to point out that manual 

 training teaches the adjustment of acts to distinctly ethical ends — ends 

 that involve the most complete self-realization, the full development 

 of all the powers and faculties, and consequently to that full measure 

 of life and happiness that is the goal of morality. And manual train- 

 ing leads to this result by a very direct path. All the manual work is 

 undertaken for the sake of its mental reactions, and these reactions 

 have a very definite character. The manual occupations are so 

 arranged physiologically as to strengthen the brain centers control- 

 ling the extremities, and thus secure general increase of brain power. 

 They are made as varied as possible in order to stimulate a many- 

 sided interest. A greater number of boys remain to graduate in 

 manual training schools than in the ordinary high schools. The 

 general interest in life awakened in these boys is somewhat akin to 

 the freshness and enthusiasm that you find in young children. The 

 schools stimulate curiosity, and I use the word as Arnold used it, 

 to mean intellectual interest. This result seems to me of large im- 

 portance. We all have this curiosity when we are young. If the 

 emotional life be strong, if desires grow apace with their gratification, 

 we retain it to the end. Life remains a beautiful laboratory in which 

 the invitation to investigate is forever strong. The drying up of the 

 emotions, the loss of this curiosity, is the tragedy of old age. You 

 have doubtless seen old men and women in whom the physical life is 

 still sufiiciently strong to keep them in motion, but in whom the 

 psychical life, the desires and feelings and interests are completely 

 dead. Do you know anything more tragic than this? I do not. It 

 is one of the saddest sights of Europe to see the elderly men and 

 women, many of them our compatriots, who are enduring Europe 

 rather than enjoying it, who are dragging themselves from place to 

 place in the vain thought that they are on the road to pleasure, men 

 who have given their strength and manhood to money-getting, and 

 who have let go, only to find that they have no interest and no 

 genuine capacity for pleasure left to fall back upon; and women 

 whose prime has been given to triviality, and who show in their faces 

 the bitterness and ennui of old age. If I did not hate commercialism 

 for its own sake as something quite unsocial and quite unworthy of 

 the human spirit, I should hate it for the sake of these, its pitiful 

 products. Who can not recall a succession of elderly men who have 

 given up their business pursuits at the solicitation of their friends, 

 and who have been rewarded in a very few years by death? You 



