Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/198

186 You will there see that Prussia alone gives industrial education in various branches to over 11,000 men. If you wish to see how public-spirited individuals have done this, visit the draughting-rooms of the Cooper Institute, and Worcester Institute, and Lafayette College.

Already the value of this is known to our manufacturers. Mr. Stebbins tells us that one silver-ware establishment in the city of New York pays a graduate of one of these foreign schools, for making designs and patterns, as high a salary as our Empire State gives its Governor.

But it may be said, "The French are naturally artistic; our people are not." But, look at history; see how it disposes of these short and easy excuses for doing nothing. The French are descended, on one side, from the most unartistic nation of antiquity, and on the other from painted barbarians. As to the former, one of their greatest poets boasted that his fellow-Romans could tyrannize over the world, but had no capacity for art. As to the latter, Guizot, one of the greatest of statesmen and historians, shows that the barbarian ancestors of the French had the same fundamental ideas as American savages.

When our ancestors were savages, their ancestors were savages. It is only a few generations since, if they wished for good artistic work, they had to send to Italy for it. The French are "naturally artistic" because Liancourt, and other patriots like him, began, a hundred years ago, to create those great systems of education—scientific, industrial, and artistic—which have given the French almost the monopoly in supplying products of skill and beauty to the markets of the whole world.

To complete the system provided by the great congressional act of 1862, it was declared that instruction in shall also be included.

Not least among the evidences of statesmanship in that bill was this last clause. The idea it embodies has been too long neglected. Of all fatal things for a republic, the most fatal is to have its educated men in various professions so educated that, in any civil commotion, they must cower in corners, and relinquish the control of armed force to communists and demagogues. The national colleges have carried out this part of the act, sometimes by giving advanced military instruction, but generally by careful drilling of the whole body of students. The system has been found to give health and manly dignity to the student; to the nation it is to give a great body of well-trained men, ready to organize and control the best elements of society against any outbreak of anarchy or treason.

And now a few words regarding the general education which goes with these various branches of industrial and scientific education. The student must be not only trained as a specialist, he must also be educated as a man and a citizen. Hence the necessity of blending into the various special courses certain general studies calculated to