Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/662

642 in any statistical sense—and it would be almost impossible to collect such statistics—I am nevertheless disposed to believe that an essentially good workman is also a good man, for a love of good workmanship must beget a love for all else that is good and true. But without insisting on this view, it is enough to point out that manual training teaches the adjustment of acts to distinctly ethical ends—ends that involve the most complete self-realization, the full development of all the powers and faculties, and consequently to that full measure of life and happiness that is the goal of morality. And manual training leads to this result by a very direct path. All the manual work is undertaken for the sake of its mental reactions, and these reactions have a very definite character. The manual occupations are so arranged physiologically as to strengthen the brain centers controlling the extremities, and thus secure general increase of brain power. They are made as varied as possible in order to stimulate a many-sided interest. A greater number of boys remain to graduate in manual training schools than in the ordinary high schools. The general interest in life awakened in these boys is somewhat akin to the freshness and enthusiasm that you find in young children. The schools stimulate curiosity, and I use the word as Arnold used it, to mean intellectual interest. This result seems to me of large importance. We all have this curiosity when we are young. If the emotional life be strong, if desires grow apace with their gratification, we retain it to the end. Life remains a beautiful laboratory in which the invitation to investigate is forever strong. The drying up of the emotions, the loss of this curiosity, is the tragedy of old age. You have doubtless seen old men and women in whom the physical life is still sufficiently strong to keep them in motion, but in whom the psychical life, the desires and feelings and interests are completely dead. Do you know anything more tragic than this? I do not. It is one of the saddest sights of Europe to see the elderly men and women, many of them our compatriots, who are enduring Europe rather than enjoying it, who are dragging themselves from place to place in the vain thought that they are on the road to pleasure, men who have given their strength and manhood to money-getting, and who have let go, only to find that they have no interest and no genuine capacity for pleasure left to fall back upon; and women whose prime has been given to triviality, and who show in their faces the bitterness and ennui of old age. If I did not hate commercialism for its own sake as something quite unsocial and quite unworthy of the human spirit, I should hate it for the sake of these, its pitiful products. Who can not recall a succession of elderly men who have given up their business pursuits at the solicitation of their friends, and who have been rewarded in a very few years by death? You