Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/673

Rh of the melodramatic, but I can not walk the streets of our great cities, I can not turn north, or south, or east, or west, without confronting faces and figures that speak so hungrily of unappeased human need, that tell me plainer than any words could ever do that we are living in an age of low social ideals, that the social sensitiveness and the social conscience have yet to be aroused. I used to lay comfort to my heart by contemplating those great and glorious economic laws of supply and demand, production and consumption, the division of labor, and the other gods of wood and stone and brass that society has reared its altars to. I fancied that it was the function of the more fortunate classes to think for the rest and to lead. But it was an impious thought. One could as logically defend the most complete priestcraft. Why should men pray to God if this company of better-versed supplicants stand ready to pray for them?

It was this thought of what I myself might become, this picture of the complete man that might be aroused in me, that awakened me to the needs and the capabilities and the hunger of others. And I count it as one of the most precious of the actual results of manual training that in developing a most intense individuality in those who come under its influence, it fosters no less surely a sincere respect for the sacredness and individuality of others. I can not say that manual training has developed any specific social creed. But it has done this: it has created a profound and rational discontent with the present social régime, and has prompted a practical desire to set men free. It is not revolutionary. It sees in the present enginery of society a means for its liberation. In time this thought will flower into beneficent action.

The process of evolution is the rationalization of the world. With the passing of the centuries what is capricious, grotesque, impossible, slowly falls away, and there emerges a world of rationality and of order. The transforming power has been the continuous growth of the idea of causation. As this power lays firmer and firmer hold upon the minds of men, they become as gods, knowing good and evil, and pressing nearer and nearer to the life that is immortal. One can not live in such an unfolding world, revealed to him through the experiences of his own inner life, without feeling anew the sentiment of wonder and of worship, without possessing a sublime faith in the things that are and are to be. It is not a specific creed, but in it abides the essence of all religion, and in it one's relations to Nature and to the Supreme Intelligence are to be sought and found.

It has been the custom of many of the manual training schools to preserve a careful record of their graduates, and you will find in