EIGHTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART X. 731 



THE DIGNITY OF LABOR. 

 Mrs. Thos, Eain, Algona, Iowa, Before Kossuth County Farmers' Institute. 



We live in a day when the poet and the philosopher have combined to 

 sound the praise and dignity of labor. Idleness is no longer deemed 

 honorable; work is the new patent of nobility. 



We live in an age of industry. In an age that demands the union of 

 brain and muscle to supply the call for men of mechanical and con- 

 structive ability. 



The present tendency of nearly all school life is to fit the boy for a pro- 

 fessional career; we shrink from the rough edges of life, those things 

 that temper the will and purify the soul. 



For the average boy who becomes an average man great advantages are 

 now open to him. If we make the most of the period in which we live 

 we should absorb and apply the spirit of that age. We are in an age of 

 practical doings and expect practical results. 



Though most of you have performed manual labor, which ran some- 

 thing like this, trying to raise more corn to feed more hogs, to buy more 

 land and this same routine year after year, few of us have had the ad- 

 vantage of manual training, that developing of the combined efforts of 

 brain and hands. Manual training departments are being started in all 

 parts of the country, some of them on a very limited scale, but conveying 

 the right principle, and this would not be so were it not for the unsup- 

 plied demand for the tranaed brain and hands. The child interested in 

 manual training has a definite standard; that standard is his ideal. The 

 man interested in dairying has his standard, be it Jersey, Guernsey, 

 Alderney or Holstein. 



Train for practical work, but train for ideals as well. This training 

 gives us a people not only more practical for domestic life and better 

 skilled in trades, but also gives us citizens of an entirely different in- 

 tellectual fibre. It also cultivates a habit of observation, a knowledge of 

 the difference between accuracy and inaccuracy. 



We have big respect for the vigorous one in work. Energy is essential 

 to an active life. American manufacturers claim they cannot secure Ameri- 

 can skilled workmen to meet the development of American opportunities, 

 and many of their competent workmen are foreigners, skillful in their 

 work, but ignorant of our language and customs. 



While the professions are overcrowded the mining, the chemical and 

 the constructive fields are unsupplied with skilled labor, though the 

 salaries exceed many of the professions. 



Education is no longer just one narrow thing. True education de- 

 velops our usefulness, trains our mind to find the truth, trains our hands 

 to do the work. 



Why do we call Lincoln an educated man? Is it because he struck 

 the shackles from 4,000,000 slaves? No. Because his heart was right to 



