Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/365

Rh studied them. There can never be again any such uncertainty as formerly obtained in this schedule which represents a domestic consumption of $500,000,000 per year. Much the same may be said of woolens, though the work there was much less thorough.

Incidentally, this tariff board was invaluable in the development of costs of production. The cost of maintaining the board was $250,000 per year. Its study of the cost of raising wool might be worth to a single state annually one or two millions of dollars were all the facts known.

It is as necessary that a tariff be reasonably low as that it be protective. Next to ours, the tariff of Germany is the highest of any great nation, and yet her tariff averages about one fifth of the Dingley rates. Her manufacturers are glad to have the tariff such as steadies their trade and conditions their success upon their extreme industry and development of progressive methods. Our nation can not afford to trifle with tariff figures. It can only afford to develop them with utmost judgment and study.

Trade Training.—As no man would enter a race with an untrained horse, so surely no nation can enter the international race for trade supremacy with untrained industrial workers. We must rival the best of European nations in the development of our working people. We must cease to draw from Europe the majority of our most skilled workers and foremen. We must share the profits and advantages of both domestic and foreign trade with our working people, not in ways that weaken the workers, for that end would only destroy itself; but in those respects which bring strength, initiative and the joy of superior accomplishment to the workers and to their employers. We must train for the occupations and through the occupations. We must link education with industry, with the day's work. We may well remember that for generations in Europe, and in several countries even now, trades are taught on Sunday as well as week days. For a trade—the day's work—rightly considered is only religion applied, and no day is too good for its right instruction. We gladly believe that our working people are the best in the world in initiative, in natural ability and energy. We are frightfully wasting all these virtues, however, by permitting substantially all of our industrial workers to leave the public and other schools by the end of the sixth grade with no connection between their meager schooling and the life they are to lead as industrial workers and citizens. We are all of us coming to see that the supreme value of education is in its application and use day by day in work and play.

There are some twenty million children in our common schools. More than half of them will get no further than the three E's when school will be foreclosed upon them forever under the present custom.