Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/649

Rh are practical men and women, and you wish now to sit down and count the cost.

We set out in St. Louis to have the best of everything. We bought the best tools and put in the best furniture. We have plenty of room and light and pure air. We aim to have good teachers and all necessary appliances. Our capacity is about two hundred and forty boys, in three classes of one hundred, eighty, and sixty, in the first-year, second-year, and third-year class respectively.

Where land is cheap, and less or lighter machinery is used, less money would suffice, but let no one deceive himself by supposing that the reform proposed is to be at once a money-saving one. Such a school costs money, but it is a grand investment. Said one of our benefactors to me not ten days ago, "I feel better satisfied with the money I have put into the Manual Training-School than with any other money I have invested in St. Louis."

As to the cost of construction, the shop is about as expensive per hour as the recitation and drawing rooms. Good mechanics, fairly educated, who are at the same time endowed with the divine gift of teaching, are rare. We have a first-class machinist and an expert blacksmith, and pay each twelve hundred dollars per year. The size of our divisions is generally limited to twenty members in drawing we shall occasionally "double up."

Incidentals—wood, iron, paper, etc.—and the wear and tear of tools amounted last year to about ten dollars per head. The total cost of supplies and instructions and all incidentals, next year, is estimated to be seventy-five dollars per pupil.

How then, say you, can this costly reform be accomplished? The public schools have no funds to spare; salaries are still too low, and the demand for extensions outruns the supply. As Colonel Jacobson, of Chicago, has said: "The alternative before you is more and better education, at great expense, or a still greater amount of money wasted on soldiers and policemen, destruction of property, and stoppage of social machinery. The money which the training would cost will be spent in any event. It would have been money in the pocket of Pittsburg if she could have caught her rioters of July, 1877, at an early period of their career, and trained them, at any expense, just a little beyond the point at which men are likely to burn things promiscuously. It is wiser and better and cheaper to spend our money in training good citizens than in shooting bad ones."

—There are two ways of going to work:

1. Cut down somewhat, if necessary, the curriculum of higher