Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/672

652 individualism, whichever you choose to call it, is somewhat different from the current ideal of sympathy. It is sympathy with joy and strength rather than with pain and defeat. In this it is somewhat stoical. I do not mean that individualism is indifferent to the woe of the world, or that it is insensible to the too real Weltschmerz, but it is more given to set to work to cure the woe than to drop a tear over it. A thoroughgoing individualist—and I detect in manual training a tendency to produce these—does not ask sympathy for himself in suffering. If it is preventable, as much of the suffering caused by illness is, he finds better consolation in the attempt to lead a saner life. If it is not preventable, if it is suffering that in the present order of things must be, such as the loss of a dear friend by death, the coming on of old age, the gradual decay of one's powers—and these are real tragedies—he would endure these things in silence, and ask rather that you rejoice with him over the good that is universal and eternal; and what he would ask for himself he would naturally give to others—comradeship and broad sympathy, but seldom tears.

There is another result of manual training which I may perhaps only hint at, but which I believe to be very real. It is the social conscience which springs out of individualism. Do you know that in this free land of ours we have millions of people who are only nominally free? The suffrage does not make one free, and the women, I am sorry to say, have not even the suffrage. There are millions of people, domestic servants, laborers of the field and mine, the factory and store, who are, as Helen Campbell has well called them, the prisoners of poverty. And these men and women, and too often children, are leading bare and stunted lives that no amount of well-being on the part of the upper classes and no amount of public achievement can socially defend or justify. A great blot upon the glorious civilization of Greece was that it was built up on human slavery. Our own civilization rests upon foundations too similar. We have a small privileged class, cultured, or pleasure-seeking, or both, living upon the Grecian foundation, upon the labor of others. Through interest, rent, taxes, royalties, land tenures, and monopolies of many names, these people are removed from productive labor. But they must all be fed and clothed and housed, and this luxuriously. Do you realize how this is done; what it signifies in human flesh and blood? It means, my friends, that some one else is doing it for them, that for each man and woman and child living in idleness, men and women and children, with needs as exigent, and capabilities ultimately as great, and hearts as hungry, are getting less than human allowance. I should be sorry to make this picture more pitiful than it is, or come anywhere near the