in the nature of luxuries, how much more is it justified in training the powers by which self-support shall be won and wealth shall be added to society! * * *

That such efforts to encourage industrial education would pay our Government is best seen in the example of England.  The International Exhibition of 1851 revealed to England its complete inferiority to several continental countries in art-industries, and the cause of that inferiority in the absence of skilled workmen.  The Government at once began to study the problem, and out of this study arose the Kensington Museum, with its art-schools, and similar institutions throughout the country, which have already made quick and gratifying returns in the improvement of the national art-industries, and in the vast enrichment of the trade growing therefrom.

Concerning the uninterestedness of labor and its too common lack of any identification with capital, we must also look beyond labor itself to find the full responsibility of this evil.

The whole condition of industrial labor has changed in our century.  Contrast the state of such labor a century ago with what it is now.  Then the handicraftsman worked in his own home, surrounded by his family, upon a task all the processes of which he had mastered, giving him thus a sense of interest and pride in the work being well and thoroughly done.  Now he leaves his home early and returns to it late, working during the day in a huge factory with several hundred other men.  The subdivision of labor gives him now only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a piano.  He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a fragment of the craft.  He cannot have the pleasure or pride of the old-time workman, for he makes nothing.  He sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands.  What zest can there be in this bit of manhood?  Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler.  Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling and cleansing it.

Some few machines require a skill and judgment to guide them proportioned to their own astonishing capacities, and for the elect workmen who manage and guide them there is a new sense of the pleasure of power.

But, for the most part, mechanism takes the life out of labor as the handicraft becomes the manufacture—­or, more properly, the machino-facture; and the problem of to-day is, how to keep up the interest of labor in its daily task, from which the zest has been stolen.