92 BOARD OF AGKICULTUKE. [Pub. Doc. 



humble. Consequently, the native-born American is not to 

 be found among industrial workers, except as a matter of 

 necessity ; he seeks no special training for such employ- 

 ment, because he does not expect to follow it, and will not 

 do so longer than circumstances compel him, but will man- 

 age, by hook or by crook, to rise to what he regards as 

 higher things, namely, a position of better social stand- 

 ing, if not one of really greater usefulness. The manual 

 work of most industries is left, therefore, to the ignorant 

 and weak or to the foreign immigrant, who is compelled to 

 accept the employment rejected by his more astute country- 

 man of one or two generations of Americanization. 



These conditions tend to a constant degradation of indus- 

 trial labor. It lacks esprit de corps. It is like an army 

 continually being recruited from the ignorant and unskilled ; 

 made up of men who wish to be not privates, but officers, 

 and who find in the ranks no abiding attraction. 



The only present check to this tendency lies in the re- 

 straint imposed by the law of supply and demand, which 

 compels men to enter the ranks, but accomplishes nothing 

 in the way of remedying the evil. The rational correction 

 should be an educational agency, which could train the in- 

 dustrial worker, and at the same time develop in him higher 

 ideas as to the value and importance of such a station in life, 

 and an abiding contentment in it. This is no violation of 

 democratic principles, no plea for class distinctions ; on the 

 contrary, it means a higher kind of democracy, in which no 

 class is stigmatized as ignorant or socially degraded. 



There should be, of course, no cleavage of the American 

 people into separate and impassable social strata, but each 

 pursuit should be regarded as an essential and necessary part 

 of the whole social fabric, and as an entirely worthy field 

 for the attention of American citizens whose abilities are 

 best adapted thereto. When we fully realize that every 

 pursuit, however humble and simple, will be ennobled and 

 dignified by the appropriate education and training of its 

 members, industrial workers will become, as they should, 

 an intelligent and substantial element in American citizen- 

 ship. 



