1879*] England , France , and Germany. 791 
gist of these able contributions to our knowledge of the 
subject is that our present system of apprenticeship is utterly 
rotten, and must speedily be replaced, under the penalty of 
seeing the whole of our trade with foreign nations gradually 
drift away from us. During the last half century appren- 
ticeship, as it was understood by our forefathers, has ceased 
to exist except in name. The master of the present day, 
unlike his predecessors, seeks his own benefit instead of his 
apprentice’s, and looks more to what he can make out of 
him than what he can teach him. A boy of fourteen enters 
a workshop willing and anxious to learn his trade ; for the 
first year or so he finds himself in the position of a mere 
errand-boy, or at any rate the servant instead of the pupil 
of his superior. As soon as another apprentice can be found 
to do his drudgery he is set to some particular branch of 
work, and if the shop be a large one he will very probably 
be kept at it till the end of his term. He is placed under a 
workman from whom he learns but slowly, seeing that his 
teacher, being constantly employed on his own work, has 
but little time to teach him, — the evil reaching its highest 
point in places where piecework is the rule. It is no one’s 
duty to teach him, and, as it formed no part of the contract 
between employer and employed, the journeyman very justly 
refuses to expend any very great portion of his time in 
instructing his master’s apprentice in the secrets and mys- 
teries of his handicraft. As for the master, the boy receives 
no help from him, even supposing that he is competent to 
teach him. He consequently picks up his knowledge of one 
•small branch of his trade in an unintelligent and desultory 
manner, and leaves the workshop at the end of seven years 
capable of doing only one thing, and that by rule-of-thumb, 
just as his shopmates have done before him. How differ- 
ently things were managed in what may truly be called the 
good old days of apprenticeship ! In those times the master 
was also a workman, and laboured at his craft. He had 
learned every branch of it, and understood it so thoroughly 
as to be able to teach it to others. Capital and steam have 
together created gigantic factories, and the old domestic 
workshop — in which each worker formed part of a kind of 
family — gradually became the exception ; the master crafts- 
man became the mere employer, and the apprentice the boy 
worker. 
The connexion between the depression of trade in skilled 
industries and the question of proper technical education, as 
well as the hopelessness of attempting to galvanise the old 
system of apprenticeship into life, is well pointed out by Mr. 
