Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/188

182 situation as has been described, is the real danger. The problem is not primarily industrial but social. Unskill in the face of a demand for skill leads to degeneracy. In this fact lies its greatest menace. In his admirable study of "Misery and its Causes," Dr. Devine wisely suggests that the great cause of misery is maladjustment, and there is strong reason to think that his conclusion is correct. But just in so far as it is time that economic facts lie back of and condition the progress of civilization, to that extent failure to meet the fundamental economic facts involved in advancing stages of industry must constitute or lead to the greatest social maladjustment and consequent degradation and misery. It is maladjustment in respect to the most vital phase of life.

A great proportion of the young people of our country must enter an industrial calling. In what way does this unfitness for it affect their lives? The result is best shown by the often-quoted finding of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, for 1906. Out of 25,000 young people of from fourteen to sixteen years of age in that state not in school, it is reported that thirty-three per cent, were in absolutely unskilled trades and sixty-four per cent, in what are called low-grade industries, where the skill of the workers is very slight. Only less than two per cent, had found their way into really skilled industries. What does it mean, humanly speaking, to have a child employed in an unskilled industry? Simply that the child usually has come to the end of its development. On the side of industry it means a permanently small production and low earning power; on the side of the individual life, it means a stagnant mind and the consequences which flow from it. For it is not true that children remain in these low-grade occupations for a brief time, and from them pass to higher and more skilled employment. The nature of industrial and commercial technic is such that there is a chasm between unskilled and skilled employments. There is no passage from one to the other. The elevator boy or messenger boy is not being trained to be a mechanic or a telegrapher or any other more or less skilled worker. These and other low-paid juvenile employments represent a class of work of a special sort from which there is no exit and which rather unfit than fit one for better work. In the street trades, in candy-making, in cotton, woolen, knitting and other mill work, and in many other places such work is found. To a considerable extent it is work which should be done by machines and not by growing boys and girls. The child who leaves school to enter one of these positions, condemns himself in the majority of cases to an unskilled life. He passes from one unskilled position to another, becoming more and more discontented as he finds it impossible to advance in wages and responsibility. Discontent, hopelessness, shiftlessness, take the place of ambition and progressive force. The