240 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



for the shop and the farm. This is a most serious lack, for no 

 one can look at the peoples of mankind as they stand at present 

 without realizing that industrial training is one of the most 

 potent factors in national development. We of the United States 

 must develop a system under which each individual citizen shall 

 be trained so as to be effective individually as an economic unit 

 and fit to be organized with his fellows, so that he and they can 

 work in efficient fashion together. This question is vital to our 

 future progress, and public attention should be focused upon it. 

 Surely it is eminently in accord with the principles of our demo- 

 cratic life that we should furnish the highest average industrial 

 training for the ordinary skilled workman. But it is a curious 

 thing that in industrial training we have tended to devote our 

 energies to producing high-grade men at the top rather than in 

 the ranks. Our engineering schools, for instance, compare 

 favorably with the best in Europe, whereas we have done almost 

 nothing to equip the private soldiers of the industrial army — the 

 mechanic, the metal-worker, the carpenter. Indeed, too often 

 our schools train away from the shop and the forge; and this 

 fact, together with the abandonment of the old apprentice system, 

 has resulted in such an absence of facilities for providing trained 

 journeymen that in many of our trades almost all the recruits 

 among the workmen are foreigners. Surely this means that 

 there must be some systematic method provided for training 

 young men in the trades, and that this must be co-ordinated 

 with the public-school system. No industrial school can turn 

 out a finished journeyman ; but it can furnish the material out 

 of which a finished journeyman can be made, just as an engineer- 

 ing school furnishes the training which enables its graduates 

 speedily to become engineers. 



We hear a great deal of the need of protecting our working- 

 men from competition with pauper labor. I have very little 

 fear of the competition of pauper labor. The nations with 

 pauper labor are not the formidable industrial competitors of 



