652 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



individualism, whichever you choose to call it, is somewhat different 

 from the current ideal of sympathy. It is sympathy with joy and 

 strength rather than with pain and defeat. In this it is somewhat 

 stoical. I do not mean that individualism is indifferent to the woe of 

 the world, or that it is insensible to the too real Weltschmerz, but it is 

 more given to set to work to cure the woe than to drop a tear over it. 

 A thoroughgoing individualist — and I detect in manual training a 

 tendency to produce these — does not ask sympathy for himself in 

 suffering. If it is preventable, as much of the suffering caused by 

 illness is, he finds better consolation in the attempt to lead a saner 

 life. If it is not preventable, if it is suffering that in the present 

 order of things must be, such as the loss of a dear friend by death, 

 the coming on of old age, the gradual decay of one's powers — and 

 these are real tragedies — he would endure these things in silence, 

 and ask rather that you rejoice with him over the good that is uni- 

 versal and eternal; and what he would ask for himself he would 

 naturally give to others — comradeship and broad sympathy, but 

 seldom tears. 



There is another result of manual training which I may perhaps 

 only hint at, but which I believe to be very real. It is the social 

 conscience which springs out of individualism. Do you know that 

 in this free land of ours we have millions of people who are only 

 nominally free? The suffrage does not make one free, and the 

 women, I am sorry to say, have not even the suffrage. There are 

 millions of people, domestic servants, laborers of the field and mine, 

 the factory and store, who are, as Helen Campbell has well called 

 them, the prisoners of poverty. And these men and women, and 

 too often children, are leading bare and stunted lives that no amount 

 of well-being on the part of the upper classes and no amount of 

 public achievement can socially defend or justify. A great blot 

 upon the glorious civilization of Greece was that it was built up on 

 human slavery. Our own civilization rests upon foundations too 

 similar. We have a small privileged class, cultured, or pleasure- 

 seeking, or both, living upon the Grecian foundation, upon the 

 labor of others. Through interest, rent, taxes, royalties, land ten- 

 ures, and monopolies of many names, these people are removed 

 from productive labor. But they must all be fed and clothed and 

 housed, and this luxuriously. Do you realize how this is done ; what 

 it signifies in human flesh and blood? It means, my friends, that 

 some one else is doing it for them, that for each man and woman and 

 child living in idleness, men and women and children, with needs as 

 exigent, and capabilities ultimately as great, and hearts as hungry, are 

 getting less than human allowance. I should be sorry to make this 

 picture more pitiful than it is, or come anywhere near the bounda- 



