278 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 315 



distaste, and even contempt, for manual labor. 

 " The boys make less trusty workmen, and the 

 girls worse cooks and housemaids and laundry- 

 women." They " are less handy and more con- 

 ceited than a former generation ; have less liking 

 for work, and more ' notions.' " As this language 

 is used in advocating a specific project, it is per- 

 haps too strong to be critical ; but there is no 

 doubt it expresses a feeling very general not only 

 with ' the classes,' but with employers of labor of 

 all degrees, and especially with employers in a 

 small way. Moreover, behind all these complaints, 

 some of which are justified, for the English have 

 as yet been too busy making up .leeway in the 

 battle with utter ignorance to attend sufficiently 

 to technical education, there rests an idea general 

 enough and broad enough to deserve attention, — 

 the idea that education is in itself inimical to con- 

 tmuous industry. A lad who expends some years 

 ia acquiring knowledge will not, it is fancied, be- 

 take himself willingly to the drudgery of manual 

 labor, will avoid it, even if he loses by the avoid- 

 ance, will crowd into the towns, and will go per- 

 ilously near starvation in any easy employment, 

 rather than work with his hands for fifty-four 

 hours a week. The old method of training lads 

 through apprenticeship to the necessary habit of 

 endurance is breaking up, and with it the mechan- 

 ical aptitude transmitted through generations 

 which made the acquisition of the necessary 

 knowledge almost unconscious. The working 

 lad's mind has expanded, however little ; and he 

 wiJl not, it is contended, work as he did. It is 

 quite right that the b^ubject should be stirred, for, 

 if the theory of the objectors is true, the look- 

 out for the world is but a poor one. Some of the 

 most necessary tasks are disagreeable tasks. Some- 

 body must cart the muck, dig the drains, unload 

 the ships, stack the coals, carry the bricks, or the 

 world will stop ; and a resort to slave-labor would 

 be criminal, or to exce-sive pay highly incon- 

 venient or impossible. Machinery will not do 

 every thing ; will not, for instance, before making 

 the bricks, excavate and damp the clay iot filling 

 the moulds. The human hand is still, in many 

 departments of labor, the only conceivable as well 

 as the only available machine. Education cannot 

 be stopped ; and if, therefore, education develops 

 an aversion to hard work, humanity will stand in 

 presence of a nearly insoluble problem. The 

 chance even is serious, and attracts the more at- 

 tention because there is some prma-/ac«e evidence 

 that the danger is real. One clever race, the Jew, 

 which, though often uneducated, has just the 

 kind of intellect that education by itself produces, 

 steadily and successfully avoids hard manual la- 

 bor. The Hebrews all over the earth will not 



plough, yet they contrive to live. Another, the 

 Yankee, which is educated, dislikes work so much 

 that it is said that its true destiny is to oversee 

 workers, and that a Yankee sitting on the gate to 

 drive other men to labor is worth five Yankees in 

 a field. The drift towards the towns, which in all 

 countries follows edu<"ation, and is now covering 

 Europe with huge centres of population, is be- 

 lieved to be in part caused by the hope of obtain- 

 ing ' light ' tasks ; and the excessive increase of 

 competitors for clerkships has been for years mat- 

 ter of constant observation. The clerks swarm 

 in ever-increasing numbers, till their wages are 

 driven down to starvation-point, and they declare 

 themselves incapable of living under a competition 

 which seems to have no bounds. There are trades, 

 we believe, now, in which the clerks pay the em- 

 ployers. Some of the peoples of the continent 

 are penetrated with the notion that instruction is 

 fatal to willing labor. Mr, Hamerton, in his wise 

 book on France, declares that the peasants think 

 a son who has gone to school outside the village 

 is lost to their work, and believes that in the main 

 they are right, the lads who have be?n instructed 

 revolting against the unbroken toil, the penury, 

 the calculating thrift, essential to the peasant life. 

 English dealers of the lower class say a lad 

 must be taken young, or he will never succeed ; 

 and in one trade at least, that of a sailor, the 

 rules in favor of beginning early are made im- 

 mutable, the old hands knowing from experience 

 that the life is intolerable to most of those who 

 have tried any other. 



On the other hand, no dislike of work, and es- 

 pecially no dislike of agricultural work, which is 

 at once the roughest, the most continuous, and 

 the worst paid, has appeared among two of the 

 best-educated races. The Scotch, who have been 

 taught for two hundred years, and are now far 

 more thoroughly trained than the English national- 

 school boys, show no disposition to avoid labor, 

 but are, on the contrary, remarkable for persistent 

 and fairly contented industry. Thei'e are thou- 

 sands of Hugh Millers among them, though with- 

 out his genius. The Prussian peasants, who are 

 as educated as the English will be twenty years 

 hence, work exceedingly hard, and in the country, 

 where their holdings are their own, show none of 

 the resentment at their fate which is no doubt 

 manifested in the towns in the form of socialist 

 aspirations. Gardeners, who all over Great Britain 

 are the best iristructed of manual laborers, work, 

 more especially when working for themselves, 

 with unusual diligence ; and it is matter of con- 

 stant observation that a laborer who happens by 

 any accident to be a ' bit of a scholar ' can 

 be depended upon when work presses and every 



