SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 241 



this country. What the American workingman has to fear is 

 the competition of the highly skilled workingman of the countries 

 of greatest industrial efficiency. By the tariff and by our immi- 

 gration laws we can always protect ourselves against the com- 

 petition 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 IMPORTANCE 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 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 edu- 

 cation 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 conditions, 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 community with the 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 cannot permanently consist in the 

 abandonment of physical labor, but in the development of physi- 

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



