BRAIN WORK AND MANUAL WORK. l8/ 



can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind 

 together the ends of two threads with the greatest 

 celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot ? 



" At the outset of modern industry, three genera- 

 tions of workers have invented ; now they cease to do 

 so. As to the inventions of the engineers, specially 

 trained for devising machines, they are either devoid 

 of genius or not practical enough. Those ' nearly to 

 nothings,' of which Sir Frederick Bramwell spoke once 

 at Bath, are missing in their inventions those nothings 

 which can be learned in the workshop only, and which 

 permitted a Murdoch and the Soho workers to make 

 a practical engine of Watt's schemes. None but he 

 who knows the machine not in its drawings and 

 models only, but in its breathing and throbbings who 

 unconsciously thinks of it while standing by it, can really 

 improve it. Smeaton and Newcomen surely were ex- 

 cellent engineers ; but in their engines a boy had to 

 open the steam valve at each stroke of the piston ; and 

 it was one of those boys who once managed to connect 

 the valve with the remainder of the machine, so as to 

 make it open automatically, while he ran away to play 

 with other boys. But in the modern machinery there 

 is no room left for naive improvements of that kind. 

 Scientific education on a wide scale has become neces- 

 sary for further inventions, and that education is refused 

 to the workers. So that there is no issue out of the 

 difficulty unless scientific education and handicraft are 

 combined together unless integration of knowledge 

 takes the place of the present divisions." Such is the 

 real substance of the present movement in favour of 

 technical education. But, instead of bringing to public 

 consciousness the, perhaps, unconscious motives of the 

 present discontent, instead of widening the views of the 

 discontented and discussing the problem to its full ex- 

 tent, the mouth-pieces of the movement do not mostly 

 rise above the shopkeeper's view of the question. Some 



