242 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



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

 encourage 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, or 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 reason- 

 able freedom from worry. We need the training, the manual 

 dexterity, and industrial intelligence which can best be given 

 in a good agricultural, or building, or textile, or watchmaking, 

 or engraving, or mechanical school. It should be one of our 

 prime objects to put the mechanic, 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 craftsmen, or rather 

 journeymen 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 forethought and practical common-sense will be 



