Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/368

356 only muscular power. But to devise and build the light engine, which, under the direction of a single intelligent master-spirit, shall lift the burden of a hundred men, requires a high degree of intelligence and manual skill. So the hewers of wood and the drawers of water are in this age of invention replaced by saw and planing mills, and waterworks requiring some of the most elaborate embodiments of thought and skill. Can any one stand beside the modern drawers of water, the mighty engines that day and night draw from the Father of Waters the abundant supply of a hundred thousand St. Louis homes, and not bow before the evidence of "cultured minds and skillful hands," written in unmistakable characters all over the vast machinery?

In like manner every occupation becomes ennobled by the transforming influence of thought and skill. The farmer of old yoked his wife with his cow, and together they dragged the clumsy plow or transported the scanty harvest. Down to fifty years ago the life of a farmer was associated with unceasing, stupefying toil. What will it be when every farmer's boy is properly educated and trained? Farming is rapidly becoming a matter of horse-power, steam-power, and machinery. Who, then, shall follow the farm with honor, pleasure, and success? Evidently only he whose cultivated mind and trained hands make him a master of the tools he must use. With his bench and sharp-edged tools, with his forge and his lathe, he will "direct" and sustain his farm-machinery with unparalleled efficiency.

Some appear to think that the continued invention of tools and new machines will diminish the demand for men skilled in mechanical matters; but they are clearly wrong. True, they will diminish the demand for unintelligent labor—and some prominent educators, who take ground against manual training, have apparently no idea of labor except unintelligent labor. If there are more machines, there must be more makers, inventors, and directors. Not one useful invention in ten is made by a man who is not a skilled mechanic. But, as I have said, the mechanics have suffered from a one-sided education. They have paid too little attention to science and the graphic arts. Hence every manual pursuit will become elevated in the intellectual scale when mechanics are broadly, liberally trained.

Undoubtedly the common belief is, that it requires no great amount of brains or intelligence to be a mechanic; and those who go through the schools are not expected by their teachers to be mechanics. Every bright farmer's boy, every gifted son of a mechanic, if he but stay in school, is sure to be stolen away from the occupation of his father and led into the ranks of the "learned professions."

Professor Magnus calls attention to the fact that the promising pupils of the elementary public schools of London, who receive scholarships on account of unusual abilities, are, from a lack of secondary schools suited to improve directly the condition of the artisan classes, always sent on through the classical schools to the Universities of