Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/369

Rh  and Cambridge, and trained to professional or literary careers. Such a result does not react favorably upon the artisan class. The scholarship boys return no more to their homes, and the gulf is widened between the spheres from which they came and those to which they go. Says Magnus, "I very much doubt whether the nation gains much by sending these children into the already overcrowded paths that are open to the university students." This loss of the best minds and the lack of the results of a generous education do much to keep down the estimation in which the working-classes are held, and throw the elements of society out of their proper balance.

Here is where the influence of manual training will be most beneficial. It will bring into the manual occupations a new element, a fairly educated class, which will greatly increase their value, at the same time that it gives them new dignity.

8. —Finally, I claim that the manual-training school furnishes the solution of the problem of labor vs. capital. The new education will give more compete development, versatility, and adaptability to circumstance, No liberally trained workman can be a slave to a method, or depend upon the demand for a particular article or kind of labor. It is only the uneducated, unintelligent mechanic who suffers from the invention of a new tool. The thoroughly trained mechanic enjoys the extraordinary advantage of being able, like the well-taught mathematician, to apply his skill to every problem; with every new tool and new process he rises to new usefulness and worth.

The leaders of mobs are not illiterate, but they are narrow, the victims of a one-sided education, and their followers are the victims of a double one-sidedness. Give them a liberal training, and you emancipate them alike from the tyranny of unworthy leaders and the slavery of a vocation. The sense of hardship and wrong will never come and bloody riots will cease when working-men shall have such intellectual, mechanical, and moral culture that new tools, new processes, and new machines, will only furnish opportunities for more culture, and add new dignity and respect to their calling.



STORY is told of the poet Keats, that once after a dinner at Haydon's, the English painter, he raised his glass and proposed as a toast, "Confusion to the memory of Newton!" When asked his reason for offering this singular sentiment, the poet replied, "Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow with his prism."