62 
We have now lost the old system of apprenticeships, and 
with it a large amount of much needed authority and dis- 
cipline, and I trust trades-unions, with which I great!y sympa- 
thise, will take up this question to ensure a competent know- 
ledge of his own industry on the part of every young person 
intending to enter that employment. 
IT turn now to those intellectual pursuits and general habits 
which enlarge, strengthen, and sweeten the mind, and increase 
our capacity not only for successful work, but for the highest, 
purest, and more lasting enjoyments of life. More men of 
business make shipwreck for want of a cultivated imagination 
than from any other cause—shipwreck of their success in 
business no less than of their personal habits, health, and 
capacity of enjoyment. The tendency of the mind to run 
into a deep, narrow, conventional rut, too often a very muddy 
one, and to lose all the joy and elasticity which attend the 
faculty of intellectual thought is a very subtle and dangerous 
tendency. Nothing apparently can be further removed from the 
work of manufacturing than the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
Milton, or Sir Walter Scott; but nothing in reality is more 
helpful, more refreshing, and more strengthening, helping a 
man to feel that his daily work is high and noble work, and 
enabling him to go about it in an elastic, joyful, and enthusiastic 
spirit. It is such writers as these that supply the sustaining 
element in man’s nature, especially as regards his power of 
thought and action, and of enabling him to see things steadily. 
There is just as much chivalry needed in the world now as 
ever there was, in helping the cause of the weak, the cause 
of justice, and protecting the honour and virtue of women, 
All these things depend on a never-failing succession of men of 
the same noble spirit as the writers 1 have named. 
Then we must look forward to the possibilities of future sanitary 
reform, the improvement of the industrial organisation. These 
are the victories to be pursued in this district waiting for 
the men who could accomplish them, for men who had the 
knowledge, character, spirit of resource, and delight in their 
own lives which would enable them to do it and do it 
joyfully. Then we have to deal with questions of social reforms 
of a more complicated and difficult order, and therefore more 
worthy the study. We are standing on the threshold of these 
things and sometimes our hearts are ready to fail us, not 
because they are outside the possibility of human solution, but 
because the harvest is so large and the labourers so few. Every 
man according to his ability should take his part in public work, 
either local or national ; he must take his own part, and not some 
part dictated to him by other people before he had exercised his 
own judgment upon it. It is doubtful whether participation in 
