138 WISCON'SIN' ACADEMY SCIENCES, ARTS, AND LETTERS. 



The possibility of making Wisconsin a^reat manufacturing State 

 gives peculiar importance to the immense results achieved in Eu- 

 rope by Industrial or asiti^ sometimes called, "Technical Educa- 

 tion." For instance the great iron works of Creuzat. France, which 

 in 1867 employed K'.OOO workmen and turned out ^3,000,000 worth 

 of products annually, rose from small beginnings through the sys- 

 tematic training of laborers in schools opened for this purpose more 

 than thirty years ago. 



When the first International Exposition was held in London, in 

 1851. English workmen excelled in ninety departments out of one 

 hundred; but. in the Paris Exposition of 1887, England 

 carried off 10 per cent, instead of 90 per cent, of the honors. 

 The introduction oT drawing into the public schools, with the 

 opening of special schools in all the great centres of industry in 

 France, Germany, Switzerland and /Austria, had made these coun- 

 tries equal to Great Britain where she had hitherto reigned su- 

 preme. The British Government took the alarm, and made gen- 

 eral inquiries, to which the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce 

 replied that everj' trade ia Birmingham suffered from lack of tech- 

 nical education. Similar answers came from Sheffield, Kendall 

 and Staffordshire, except that the potteries in the last district were 

 found to be kept up b}' the importation of properly educated for- 

 eigners. 



Active exertions have since been made in Great Britain to re- 

 cover the lost sceptre by imitating the course adopted on the conti- 

 nent, but the Swiss, French and German workman are still supe- 

 rior in training, not only to the British but to the American ones, 

 according to the report of the Massachusetts Commissioners of 

 Education for 1873. These Commissioners report that in Pennsyl- 

 vania the great body of skilled artisans are foreigners. Mr. Stetson, 

 in a work on Technical Education, published during the year 1874, 

 declares "it is not the pauper labor but the educated labor of En- 

 rope which America has good reason to fear." A country, nineteen 

 twentieths of whose artisans are unable to work from drawings, 

 has good reason to dread the rivalry of countries where a mechanic 

 who cannot draw is a rare exception. 



When we consider, further, that as good a judge as Mr. Russell, 

 the builder of the Great Eastern, declares that if in Great Britain, 

 one-half the laborers were as highly skilled as one-quarter of them 



