EIGHTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X. 509 



to understand what a high place manual labor should take; and it 

 never can take this high place unless it offers scope for the best type of 

 man. We have tended to regard education as a matter of the head only, 

 and the result is that a great many of our people, themselves the sons 

 of men who worked with their hands, seem to think that they rise in the 

 world if they get into a position where they do no hard manual work 

 whatever; where their hands will grow soft, and their working clothes 

 will be kept clean. Such a conception is both false and mischievous. 

 There are, of course, kinds of labor where the work must be purely 

 mental, and there are other kinds of labor where, under existing con- 

 ditions, very little demand indeed is made upon the mind, though I am 

 glad to say that I think the proportion of men engaged in this kind of 

 work is diminishing. But in any healthy community, in any commu- 

 nity wit hthe great solid qualities which alone make a really great 

 nation, the bulk of the people should do work which makes demands 

 upon both the body and the mind. Progress can not permanently con- 

 sist in the abandonment of physical labor, but in the development of 

 physical labor so that it shall represent more and more the work of the 

 trained mind in the trained body. To provide such training, to encour- 

 age in every way the production of the men whom it alone can produce, 

 is to show that as a nation we have a true conception of the dignity and 

 importance of labor. The calling of the skilled tiller of the soil, the 

 calling of the skilled mechanic, should alike be recognized as professions, 

 just as emphatically as the callings of lawyer, of doctor, of banker, 

 merchant or clerk. The printer, the electrical worker, the house painter, 

 the foundry man, should be trained just as carefully as the stenographer 

 or the drug clerk. They should be trained alike in head and in hand. They 

 should get over the idea that to earn twelve dollars a week and call it 

 "salary" is better than to earn twenty-five dollars a week and call it 

 "wages." The young man who has the courage and the ability to refuse 

 to enter the crowded field of the so-called professions and to take to 

 constructive industry is almost sure of an ample reward in earnings, in 

 health, in opportunity to marry early, and to establish a home with rea- 

 sonable freedom from worry. We need the training, the manual dexter- 

 ity, and industrial intelligence which can be best given in a good agri- 

 cultural, or building, or textile, or watch-making, or engraving, or me- 

 chanical school. It should be one of our prime objects to put the me- 

 chanic, the wage-worker who works with his hands, and who ought to 

 work in a constantly larger degree with his head, on a higher plane of 

 efficiency and reward, so as to increase his effectiveness in the economic 

 world, and therefore the dignity, the remuneration and the power of his 

 position in the social world. To train boys and girls in merely literary 

 accomplishments to the total exclusion of industrial, manual, and technical 

 training tends to unfit them for industrial work; and in real life most 

 work is industrial. 



The problem of furnishing well-trained ci'aftsmen, or rather journey- 

 men fitted in the end to become such, is not simple — few problems are 

 simple in the actual process of their solution — and much care and fore- 

 thought and practical common sense will be needed, in order to work It 

 out in a fairly satisfactory manner. It should appeal to all our citizens. 



