508 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



and our colleges have done their work well, and there is no class of our 

 citizens deserving of heartier praise than the men and women who teach 

 in them. 



Nevertheless, for at least a generation we have been waking to the 

 knowledge that there must be additional education beyond that provided 

 in the public school, as it is managed today. Our school system has 

 hitherto been well-nigh wholly lacking on the side of industrial training, 

 of the training which fits a man for the shop and the farm. This is a 

 most serious lack, for no one can look at the peoples of manldnd as 

 they stand at present without realizing that industrial training is one of 

 the most potent factors in national development. We of the United 

 States must develop a system under which each individual citizen shall 

 be trained so as to be effective individually as an economic unit, and 

 fit to be organized with his fellows so that he and they can work in 

 eflBcient fashion together. This question is vital to our future progress, 

 and public attention should be focused upon it. Surely it is eminently 

 in accord with the principles of our democratic life that we should fur- 

 nish the highest average industrial training for the ordinary skilled 

 workman. But it is a curious thing that in industrial training we have 

 tended to devote our energies to producing high-grade men at the top 

 rather than in the ranks. Our engineering schools, for instance, com- 

 pare favorably with the best in Europe, whereas we have done almost 

 nothing to equip the private soldiers of the industrial army — the me- 

 chanic, the metal-worker, the carpenter. Indeed, too often our schools 

 train away from the shop and the forge; and this fact, together with the 

 abandonment of the old apprentice system, has resulted in such an ab- 

 sence of facilities for providing trained journeymen that in many of our 

 trades almost all the recruits among the workmen are foreigners. Surely 

 this means that there must be some systematic method provided for 

 training young men in the trades, and that this must be co-ordinated 

 with the public school system. No industrial school can turn out a fin- 

 ished journeyman; but it can furnish the material out of which a finished 

 journeyman can be made, just as an engineering school furnishes the 

 training which eables its graduates speedily to become engineers. 



We hear a great deal of the need of protecting our workingmen from 

 competition with pauper labor. I have very little fear of the competi- 

 tion of pauper labor. The nations with pauper labor are not the for- 

 midable industrial competitors of this country. What the American 

 workingman has to fear is the competition of the highly skilled working- 

 man of the countries of greatest industrial efficiency. By the tariff and 

 by our immigration laws we can always protect ourselves against the 

 competition of pauper labor here at home; but when we contend for 

 the markets of the world we can get no protection, and we shall then 

 find that our most formidable competitors are the nations in which 

 there is the most highly developed business ability, the most highly 

 developed industrial skill; and these are the qualities which we must 

 ourselves develop. 



DIGNITY AND lilPORTANCE OF LABOR. 



We have been fond as a nation of speaking of the dignity of labor, 

 meaning thereby manual labor. Personally I don't think that we begin 



