Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/643

Rh, the drama, the professional hall-game, whose enterprising producers have taught us to love them for their own sake, and not because they make us stronger to dig, plow, buy, and sell. We do not ask whether these things increase the harvest or fill the net with fishes. They amplify our lives, and that is enough for us. We are willing to pay for the amplification, and that is enough for the specialists who render the service.

We recognize the resources that lie in human nature, as well as those that lie in the earth. Glancing at these, we see that humanity is as blind to the opportunities offered by its own expansible and multiplicable wants and satisfactions as to those offered by Nature's unexhausted capacity to supply old wants within old lines.

We can never safely predict just how much or little, nor exactly what, can be found by searching. We might be disappointed in our search for valuable and profitable new specialties. But if a great many tried it once, we might with good reason expect more benefit than has accrued from the associations of labor and capital that are seeking to control the old ones. For while the inventor of the specialty profits by his profession or business, the customers in whom he has excited a new want are thereby stimulated to greater efforts or greater efficiencies in their own old lines, since they must have means to gratify the new want. In this way the novelties that commerce offers to those it reaches tempts contented poverty and indolence into industry and civilization. It creates in the uncivilized the wants and thereby the efforts of the civilized, and hence the German philosopher was right who said that commerce is the great civilizer.

In conclusion, among the general principles of specialization we have discovered the following:

1. That it may arise either by division of old specialties or the creation of new ones.

2. That three fourths of the population, women and farmers, are denied its highest development.

3. That heredity in specialization may be excessive.

4. That multiplication of human wants, as truly as multiplication of drafts on Mother Earth, conduces to specialization.

5. So do density of population and facility of communication.

urges for industrial education in the public schools equal consideration with science and other branches, because it directs and strengthens the executive faculty, and gives scope to the creative or constructive passion; arouses interest in a larger proportion of pupils; forestalls snobbishness and dislike and contempt for manual labor; contributes to a much-needed improvement in the industrial quality of citizens; helps to quicken the sense of social decency which is manifested in keeping houses and yards neat and trim; supplies, from the girls' side, good cooks, housekeepers, and sewers; and, by the exhibition of practical results for good, makes the schools popular, and appeals to the whole community to be interested in them and maintain them.