Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/560

 business of the future calls for the manager and the administrator rather than the speculator or the promoter, for the steady, routinized, narrowly specialized worker rather than all-round men so familiar in the early industrial history of the United States. The traits of the pioneer, the backwoodsman and the hunter, those traits due to varied and changing experiences of the early settler, continue, however, and are transmitted from generation to generation long after the stimuli which produced them have ceased to act and have been overwhelmed by the rising tide of civilization. If modern life offers inadequate opportunity in the ordinary course of daily life for the expression of these inherited impulses, if they are inhibited from all beneficial or desirable expression, they will find expression in abnormal or undesirable ways. Gambling, sport of all kinds, drinking, carousing, are some of the many forms in which these inhibited traits find a vent. The assimilation of the recent immigration will dilute and diminish the strength of these characteristics; but they should not be smothered and cast aside, they should be utilized and turned into new and modern channels of activity.

Mr. John A. Hobson in a recent article touches upon this point. "The factory employee, the shop assistant, the office clerk, the most typical members of modern industrial society, find an oppressive burden of uninteresting order, of mechanism, in their working day. Their work affords no considerable scope for spontaneity, self-expression and the interest, achievement and surprise which are ordinary human qualities. It is easily admitted that an absolutely ordered (however well ordered) human life would be vacant of interest and intolerable; in other words it is a prime condition of humanity that the unexpected in the form of happening and achievement should be represented in every life. Art in its widest sense, as interested effort of production, and play as interested but unproductive effort, are essential." If modern industrial and commercial life is being placed upon a stable, sure, scientific, calculable basis, if chance and luck are being replaced by skill and efficiency, if routine and dead uniformity are replacing all-round effort and variety, if the home environment is becoming more monotonous and artificial; other social institutions must furnish pleasurable change and variety. If elevating institutions as the school or the church do not cope satisfactorily with the situation; other much less desirable ones will, and the spirit of gambling, of riotous living, of carousal, of living for the sake of sport, will enter society and take a firm hold. Old instincts are not easily eradicated; education must never overlook them. The recent additions and contemplated additions to our educational system are the concrete results of some of the